According to Steve Heyer CEO, marketers and media agencies should start changing the way they do business or else their corporations are headed to a collapse. Heyer spoke of such things years past, almost as though he could see the future with inhuman clarity. He delivered a keynote speech bearing this message to a group of 400 media, ad agency and entertainment executives during an “Advertising Age” conference in 2003.
Steve J. Heyer is chief executive officer of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, the world’s third-largest hotel chain. Heyer was already in this seat when he began to expound on his original message to marketers in 2003. He stated that his aim for the company was to have it market the experiences that could be had in the hotels instead of the quarters themselves.
Experiences are the products to Heyer, not the rooms. He wanted to emphasize the value of promoting amusements as services or products. Technically, what is being offered has not really changed: it is simply the way of looking at it that has.
He also emphasized the need to provide for the new powers of consumers nowadays. Nowadays we see that Heyer was right. This is most patent in digital products.
The entertainment business is being sucked dry by the latest technologies in the hands of teen consumers. The development of applications capable of ripping sound from CDs, for instance, led to music producers suffering. Internet users indiscriminately downloaded the latest and most popular hits for free.
Heyer's conference speech talked about the panic music-producers went through during this time. Heyer told people in music production that they now had to adapt to this new setting, as it could no longer be stopped. It was necessary for other media producers, according to Heyer, to take note of this imperative for change.
Essentially, he was saying that the time had come for businesss to market a culture, not a product. An experience that is not easily replicable is the primary product Heyer is looking to market for Starwood. Heyer's intent, obviously, is to market something that is even more in demand than lodging in the present culture: an experience.
The company has called in a rather unorthodox business associate: a famous lingerie brand known all over the world for its couture lingerie fashion shows. To tempt customers, the shows have been marketed as exclusive events. This is the perfect execution of what Heyer meant.
The proliferation of brand names in films has also drawn attention from Heyer, who dislikes it. He found it reprehensible for its lack of contextual significance. He also said this practice neither improves storylines nor enhances marketability of products.
A look at Coca Cola's roster of past chiefs shall show Steve Heyer CEO on it. Some of his services for that company actually demonstrate what he is trying to say by "contextual" brand placement. What he did was to put a glass of Coke in front of each judge in American Idol, a popular TV series.
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