Leaders In London

The core brand proposition of the Crowne Plaza hotel chain is ‘the place to meet’. A while ago, I received a press release from IHG, Crowne Plaza’s owners, announcing the launch of newly-designed luxurious meeting rooms, with gadgets and tools to boost productivity in the meetings, and a meeting facilitator to ensure you have everything you need to make your business meeting go smoothly.

At the end of the press release was the kicker: these particular meeting rooms don’t exist in real life (though their specifications did mirror new real-life meeting rooms Crowne Plaza had just launched). The new rooms mentioned in the press release only exist in the virtual, online world, Second Life.

IHG had been watching where people were meeting, since that is Crowne Plaza’s core proposition. Large organizations had started organizing virtual meetings in Second Life.

So, instead of being blinkered by their existing offer – ‘We are a hotel chain operating in the real world, and that’s what we do’ – IHG extended Crowne Plaza’s proposition into a completely new world. Because that’s where its customers were starting to meet.

If you have a crystal clear understanding of your brand proposition and aren’t locked into ‘the way we’ve always done things’ – a prisoner of your corporate past – then you can take advantage of unexpected opportunities in tough trading environments that your competitors miss.

Andy Cosslett, Chief Executive of IHG, the biggest hotels group in the world by number of rooms, is coming to Leaders in London in a few weeks to share how to lead and grow through your corporate brands – and the people who deliver them.

And a nice dose of serendipity: Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life is also coming to talk to us, to help you capture emerging opportunities and increase market share at no or low cost – which is the smart way to lead in a downturn.

And if you want to market your way to survival in the downturn, who better to learn from than Philip Kotler, the founder of modern marketing, who is also presenting at Leaders in London.

Use this link to reserve your place if you haven’t already: Leaders in London

Martin Sorrell, CEO of the advertising and marketing group giant WPP, has been in the news recently , pouring resources into China. His reasoning is that if you are leading for growth, then you have to look to be where the growth will be. And it won’t be America. Sorrell spoke at Leaders in London for us last year and a clip is below, in which he talks about this strategy.

Of our 2008 speakers, Andy Cosslett, CEO of IHG, the hotels giant whose brands include Holiday Inn, is also expanding the company’s presence in China - spectacularly so. IHG already employs 32,000 people in China. It needed to recruit 20,000 more before the end of this year to keep up with its expansion plans.

Like all of us, IHG faces a war for talent in moving into new regions. So, they grow their own. They are building 22 IHG Academy sites in China to train local people and then recruit them. Twelve of the sites have been built already and thousands of local Chinese are trained to IHG standards in how to run a hotel and then employed each year. IHG’s future leaders within China will emerge from these new cohorts they are developing themselves.

So, to lead for growth in tough trading conditions, it seems you need to look East, not West. Are you facing the right way? And are you putting the resources in to get the results you will need? More from Martin Sorrell in the clip, below.