Case: Scandic

“Do Scandic’s guests care about environment?”

Yes, absolutely! Space and location is of greatest importance when booking, but environmental questions are coming more and more in focus, says Johan Michelson, Market Director at Scandic Hotels. He has just gotten the results from four online focus groups that Zapera has completed in Denmark and Sweden.

Did Scandic gain more interesting insight? Yes, the online focus groups gave many interesting perspectives, which not only involve our communication but also influences our product. There is a lot, which we will dig into deeper.

Johan tells that Scandic is now in the middle of working on a new communication platform. That is where the focus groups are important. Our communication has been missing a thread and has been altogether too incoherent, he thinks. Now we will more clearly bring out what Scandic stands for in comparison to the competitors, he says. The results from the focus groups will become an important part of the briefing of the new advertising agency.

The next step is that Zapera in the spring will do a “point of origin measuring” in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. The strength in Scandic’s brand will be compared in different dimensions to other hotel chains. Subsequently there will be a follow up with a Nordic brand tracking twice a year to check and see if the brand is developing in the desired direction.

We have naturally used conventional focus groups previously many times, but I see great advantages with focus groups online. It is first of all the quickness and the recruiting. Now we can include opinions from all over the country. Not only from the big cities as before. We can also easier segment the sample and include interesting sub groups. In the groups we have had both business travelers and ordinary families who had stayed at a hotel in Scandinavia within the past year. In total around 40 people in four different groups participated.

What we save on making online surveys we use to expand our surveys in all the Scandinavian countries, which we have not been able to afford previously.

Scandic Hotels is the largest hotel chain in the Nordic region with 140 hotels in nine countries. Scandic is owned by the risk capital company EQT since 2007 and is considered world leader on environment.

Source: Zapera News, Issue 29, May 2008