Context
ITC Hotels is a premium hospitality brand operating in the luxury segment of the Indian market. The launch of ITC Kohenur in Hyderabad presented a specific commercial challenge: establishing awareness and consideration for a new property in a city with an established premium hotel market, targeting both business travellers and leisure guests with the speed required to drive early bookings.
Hotel launches have a narrow window in which first-impression awareness translates to early revenue. The period between announcement and opening, and the first months of operation, determine whether a property establishes its positioning in the market or spends years correcting initial perception.
What Changed
The brief was launch-specific: build brand awareness and drive website traffic to support the new property’s commercial performance from opening. Existing Hertz brand equity could not be relied upon at the local level in Hyderabad, where ITC Kohenur was entering as a new product competing with established properties.
Envigo’s Responsibility
Envigo was responsible for designing and executing the launch campaign across paid platforms, managing media buying, and coordinating influencer marketing activity. Envigo owned the channel strategy, audience targeting approach, and budget allocation across platforms. The brand positioning and property-level content remained with ITC Hotels’ internal team.
Strategic Decisions
Decision 1: Prioritise video platforms to communicate the product
Luxury hospitality sells primarily through visual impression and aspiration. Envigo chose YouTube as a primary paid channel because it allowed for high-quality video content to reach targeted audiences at scale in a format suited to the product. Text-heavy or static ad formats were deprioritised because they underperform at communicating the experiential dimensions of a luxury hotel to an audience that has not visited.
Decision 2: Use TripAdvisor to reach travellers at the point of intent
TripAdvisor users are active in a research or booking mindset rather than a passive browsing mindset. Envigo chose to invest in TripAdvisor placements to reach users already in the process of evaluating hotels, rather than relying exclusively on awareness channels that required a longer consideration journey. This decision was based on the observation that luxury hotel buyers conduct significant research before booking, and TripAdvisor sits at a high-intent stage of that journey.
Decision 3: Use influencer marketing to generate credibility signals in Hyderabad specifically
National brand awareness for ITC Hotels existed. Local credibility and excitement in Hyderabad for a new property did not. Envigo chose influencer marketing as the mechanism to create localised word of mouth, particularly through Hyderabad-based and relevant lifestyle influencers who could signal the property’s relevance to a local and regional audience in a way that paid media alone could not replicate.
System Design
The three channels were designed to operate at different stages of the awareness and consideration journey. YouTube built a broad reach among the target demographic. TripAdvisor captured intent at the research stage. Influencer marketing generated organic social proof at the local level. The combination addressed awareness, consideration, and local credibility simultaneously rather than concentrating the budget on a single channel.
Outcomes
Brand searches for ITC Kohenur increased by 302%. Website visitors increased by hundreds of thousands over the campaign period.
Closing Reflection
Launching a luxury property requires a media strategy that matches the length and complexity of the buyer’s consideration journey. A single channel optimised for awareness produces different results than a multi-channel system, in which each platform handles a different stage of how a traveller moves from discovery to booking.
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