Connect. Explore. Recharge.
A brand and advertising campaign for Edinburgh's Haymarket Hub Hotel
Connect. Explore. Recharge.
The Haymarket Hub was bought in 2018 by The Edinburgh Collection, a business already well known for luxury hotels in the capital.
The Hub didn't fit the rest of the portfolio. It sat in a different part of the city, served a different kind of guest and traded on convenience rather than luxury. Presenting it in the same voice as the group's other hotels would have flattered nobody.
It needed a completely fresh approach — its own brand profile, and a campaign that gave people a specific reason to book it rather than something else nearby.
A distinct brand profile for the Hub, separate from the group's luxury properties.
How the new positioning would carry through to the digital experience.
Creative built around Connect. Explore. Recharge. — a proposition rather than a slogan.
Three days on site and around the area, building a library rather than a handful of shots.
Images made specifically for the campaign, not adapted from the general shoot.
Ongoing content and paid activity, fed by the material we had captured.
The thinking
Three words did the work. Connect. Explore. Recharge. — arrive easily, see the city, sleep well. It named what the hotel was actually for, rather than what its owners wished it was.
Haymarket's advantage was never going to be luxury. It was location — a few minutes from the station, walking distance from the west end. So the campaign was built around the guest's day rather than the room, and every advert made the same promise in a different way.
We established the core brand profile, then handled all the creative for a campaign that ran across both traditional and digital media.
Social media needs feeding, and it can't be fed on six photographs.
Given who the Hub was trying to reach, it was clear a great deal of original content would be needed — not a handful of hero shots but a working library. We spent three days at the hotel and around the area building one, shot so it would hold up in paid campaigns as well as on a feed.
That material carried the social activity for the following year, which is the cheapest content any client ever buys.
The result
[ To be added — what happened afterwards. Occupancy, direct bookings, campaign reach, or simply what the client said about it. This is the section that turns a portfolio piece into a case study, and it is the one most agencies leave out. ]
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