The Peninsula Hotels’ New Brand Campaign: Focus on Staff Stories, Not Luxury Cliches

For ultra-luxury hotel brands, marketing often relies on close-ups of infinity pools and champagne flutes. Carson Glover, who leads marketing at The Peninsula Hotels, jokingly sums up the traditional approach this way: “Women looking out at things.”

But for its first major brand campaign in a decade, the Hong Kong-based luxury hotel group puts the focus on its front-line staff.

“Peninsula Perspectives” spotlights baggage handlers, drivers, designers, and chefs who craft the guest experience across a dozen properties worldwide.

Personal narratives may resonate more with today’s travelers who “want brands that speak to them in a genuine and real manner,” said Glover, senior vice president, brand marketing and communications.

The Peninsula’s New Ads

One mini-movie features Kam Tsui, a longtime page at the group’s flagship Hong Kong hotel, in an uplifting mini-film that follows his journey. In his crisp uniform, he goes from the bustling streets of Hong Kong to the refined elegance of their newest hotel in London.

In another ad, Connie, a chauffeur at The Peninsula Hong Kong, tells her story of dreaming as a child of traveling the world someday and then growing up and defying stereotypes and other challenges.

Where’s the Hotel?

In some of the early two- and three-minute ads and print and out-of-office visuals, the hotels aren’t even shown at all. One ad simply features a sommelier at the Tokyo property describing his favorite aspects of the city.

“We wanted the campaign to be destination-centric and people-centric,” Glover said. “Our brief was to inspire people to talk about their love of exploration while showing our product and experience implicitly.”

If you’re steeped in how advertising has always been done, it can be jarring. “It continues to be a topic of conversation within our organization,” said Glover.

Working with Hong Kong-based agency Carbon Moves, the spots feel like mini-documentaries about the intersection of place, personality, and hospitality.

Carbon Moves hadn’t done hotel advertising before, and Glover said that’s why his team turned to the agency — for its fresh eyes.

Positive Early Results

The campaign appears to be working. The videos are “significantly outperforming industry benchmarks for engagement,” Glover said.

Glover shared the anecdote of spotting a fellow passenger on a Cathay Pacific flight attempting to skip past one of their ads on the seatback entertainment system, only to become absorbed in watching it until the end.

The campaign has also generated organic social sharing, with guests sending screenshots of out-of-home executions. The brand had never gone big with digital signage and other out-of-home placements until now.

A side benefit of the campaign has been boosting front-line staff morale after the pandemic. Employees who have starred in the clips enjoy recognition by many guests. Glover said staff members who have spent decades quietly crafting exceptional experiences for others are “loving it.”

Looking Ahead

The campaign’s launch coincides with a significant period of expansion for parent company The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, which opened its newest property in London this year. It’s the first hotel in London to exceed a cost of £1 billion, and the property underscores the company’s commitment to owning and operating its properties rather than just lending its name to them.

Glover sees the potential to expand the storytelling approach to include guest perspectives and long-term brand partners.

The strategy reflects a broader shift in luxury marketing toward authenticity and personal connection.

“My team and I often laughed about how much easier it would have been to do this campaign had we just made everything up,” Glover said.

Glover said the campaign is “achieving cut-through” with a notoriously difficult audience: travel industry professionals.

“When we showed the campaign to some of our travel partners, many came up to us afterward to just really say how moved they were,” Glover noted. “They complimented us because they hadn’t seen anything like it from us or the industry.”

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