Equipping Thon Hotels to revamp its marketing operations across Northern Europe
Find out how Papirfly revolutionised the efficiency, accuracy and quality of Thon Hotels’ brand communications, unlocking a whole new way of working for their teams.
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Thon Hotels’s challenge
With over 90 hotels operating across Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, Thon Hotels aims to deliver a quality, professional experience for guests, staff and potential customers. Its branding is a significant part of this, requiring a consistent identity on all collateral, tailored to each audience’s language and culture.
However, with a small brand marketing team overseeing all 90+ sites, achieving a consistent identity and coordinating all creative assets was a huge challenge. Thon Hotels required a solution that empowered local teams to create high-quality content without disrupting day-to-day operations, freeing up capacity their marketers could devote to promoting and developing the brand.
Coordinating collateral in a dynamic, far-reaching hotel chain
Across their numerous locations, Thon Hotels’ regional teams regularly needed to produce branded materials for their clientele and local markets. From seasonally-driven campaigns to signs for out-of-order lifts, these were often on-the-fly materials that needed to be created swiftly without compromising on the integrity or quality of their brand.
Yet, this often proved problematic in practice. The central marketing had recently updated their brand manual, but struggled to see these updates at point-of-delivery. They were frequently caught up in case-by-case requests for assets and checking the output of individual hotels to ensure their guidelines were followed. This was more than a stretch on their limited resources – it took time away from maturing the brand.
Coupled with department-wide communication problems – vague asset requests from regional hotels, back-and-forth emails to finalise assets – waiting times rose, campaigns became delayed and internal frustrations grew. In this fractured environment, several hotels began to rely on word processors to create their own amateur collateral, tarnishing their brand identity.
Restricted by bottlenecks, inconsistencies and a lack of ongoing development, Thon Hotels’ brand marketing faced a significant challenge – an approach they sought to fix across all locations.
“ Before Papirfly, our people didn’t really think about the brand and our brand manual. Now we have Papirfly, people are seeing the effects of working with it.
All the team feel empowered now, as they are doing things that were not possible before Papirfly.”
Pernilla Eidslott
Marketing Advisor
Identifying the right brand platform; embracing a new way of working
Establishing and consistently implementing their new, improved brand manual was the top priority for Thon Hotels. Inefficient inter-departmental communication, ad hoc asset creation and long waiting times stood in the way of this goal, which is why they sought a platform that would:
- Streamline and structure its marketing operations, allowing for seamless communication and minimal bottlenecks
- Consolidate its brand identity, ensuring every asset produced meets the specifications of its latest brand guidelines
- Reduce the workload for its central marketing team, so they can devote more time and effort to brand development
- Empower regional teams to produce consistent, high-quality assets for their needs without back-and-forth emails with the central marketing team
These goals led them to Papirfly. Thon Hotels’ marketing leaders recognised that this intuitive, easy-to-use brand management platform could boost creativity, improve communication and add structure to their new branding. It could also unlock the flexibility their international teams demanded, and introduce controls and tools to produce elegant brand assets confidently.
“Since we integrated Papirfly, I believe we have a much more professional look, and we can be sure that the look is maintained across the brand and in all the different hotels.”
Torje Thoresen
Hotel Manager
Allowing Thon Hotels’ updated brand to flourish
It did not take long for the Papirfly platform to become the beating heart of Thon Hotels’ marketing ecosystem. Providing a truly end-to-end solution, both their central marketing team and individual hoteliers immediately felt a difference in the speed, ease and quality of their work, transforming their greatest barriers into distant memories.
Joining up the dots for better brand management
At the core of this new future was a cloud-based brand portal, where anyone in the Thon Hotels team could access its brand guidebook instantly. Before Papirfly, their marketing team had to send the brand manual to anyone seeking to create collateral, and would regularly push back on inconsistencies in a lengthy, frustrating process.
With this easy-to-access hub containing all elements of their brand identity, inconsistencies and errors dropped significantly. Employees no longer had to check and approve assets against company standards manually, and the marketing unit didn’t need to micromanage every detail – tedious tasks nobody missed.
This brand hub was complemented with a dedicated home for all marketing images, documents, assets and templates. Papirfly’s highly-rated Digital Asset Management (DAM) system gave Thon Hotels a single source of truth for its branded materials that could be shared with its teams across the globe.
No more back-and-forth requests with missing information. Anyone who required assets could find and download them in moments, shrinking request timelines from hours and days to just minutes.
Intuitive asset creation at hotel staff’s fingertips
It was critical to the Thon Hotels team that their regional hotels could create on-the-fly assets for campaigns, announcements and internal comms with no drop in consistency or quality. Low-grade collateral crafted on word processors had to stop. Papirfly’s platform achieved this goal, equipping each hotel with smart, intuitive and on-brand design templates.
Individual hotel staff, regardless of their design experience, could develop studio-standard materials in minutes, from printed signs, menus and posters, to digital banners and social media content. Consistency was locked down, and teams could hyper-localise content in a couple of clicks, changing languages and imagery to align with their local markets.
“ You know exactly where to go if you want to make a poster or if you want to put something online – you go to Papirfly. It’s just simpler to use that structure and you don’t have to think about the details, it’s pretty much preset.
As someone with no background in graphic design, I find it’s very easy to create something that looks good in Papirfly. You don’t need experience, it’s that easy to follow.”
Torje Thoresen
Hotel Manager
Enterprise-grade analytics to base their brand’s future
As the Thon Hotels marketing team gained time to focus on brand development and day-to-day operations, the marketing data and analytics captured by Papirfly’s platform have proven invaluable in this ongoing process.
Providing real-time brand stats and asset performance metrics, Thon Hotels can see how assets are doing and identify any teams struggling with the platform. From here, they can arrange training and awareness sessions, tweak underperforming assets and refine their long-term brand strategy through tangible, robust data.
“We can see that the consistency in the brand has greatly improved. Actually, my manager was told at a convention by a competitor that they also noticed the change – that it’s now very easy to see that it’s Thon Hotels because it always looks the same!”
Pernilla Eidslott
Marketing Advisor, Thon Hotels
Elevating hotel experiences now and in the future
The introduction of Papirfly has enabled Thon Hotels to streamline internal communications, empower their design processes, and unlock substantial time and cost savings. With a strong, stable and high-quality brand at the core of their exceptional hotel experiences, their team is perfectly placed to expand their presence across Europe and beyond.
In fact, the Thon Hotels leadership team have been so impressed with the platform’s ease of use and capabilities that they cannot imagine a future without it. With universally positive feedback across their regional teams, Papirfly is the firm foundation for the future of this growing brand.
