The Merchant

I have the great privilege to work with one of the worlds leading boutique hotels; The Merchant Hotel in Belfast. When creating their new online marketing strategy we discussed the power of using stories to help in stimulating interest and how a story spreads much better than a low room rate or an interesting menu.

When the highly ornate and modernised Victorian building opened, it could have been marketed for its high impact visual features and quirky historic artifices but that wasn’t how the marketing/conversations started. It started around it serving the worlds most expensive cocktail.

This is marketing genius at work. The story of opulence or history is harder to pass on and not quite as interesting. The worlds most expensive cocktail however lets us know exactly what sort of hotel you’re talking about and of course, we’re likely to tell someone else about it.