CONSUMER MARKETING
CMOQ&A
Putting Heads in Beds
Value Place’s Kelly Poling on her new role
BY KERRY PIPES
T
his past September Value Place,
the largest economy, extended-stay
hotel brand in the U.S., named
Kelly Poling executive vice president and
chief marketing officer. As the leader of
Value Place’s brand, marketing, and distribution strategies, Poling says she is
focused on strengthening the positioning
of the brand and driving more guests to
its hotels across the country.
The veteran executive came to Value
Place from Rosetta Stone, where she led
consumer marketing strategy and operations, but her hospitality industry experience runs deep. She spent seven years at
Choice Hotels International, where she
ran corporate strategy, marketing, and
e-commerce. Other experience includes
managing brands at Johnson & Johnson
and developing IT and corporate strategies as a management consultant with
Arthur Andersen.
“I briefly left the hospitality industry to lead consumer marketing strategy
and operations at Rosetta Stone, but
then couldn’t stay away from hospitality
and joined Value Place as the CMO in
September,” she says. Poling has a BBA
from The George Washington University School of Business and an MBA from
the Wharton School of The University
of Pennsylvania. “I also have an amazing
and supportive family, including a brand
new baby girl,” she says.
Today, Value Place has 190 hotels open
in 32 states and has garnered national recognition for the success of its franchise
operations. The brand was recently
named by Forbes magazine as the
top hotel franchise in the U.S.,
was recognized as one of 2014’s
Top 500 Franchises by Entrepreneur magazine, and
has been one of Franchise
Business Review’s Top
50 Franchises for four
consecutive years.
Poling is still new
to the job, and we
40
wanted to know more about her—and her
plans for overseeing the brand’s marketing direction in 2015.
Describe your role as CMO. My role
as CMO is pretty inclusive. My team is
responsible for not only the traditional
marketing functions like creative development and media buying, but also brand
strategy, e-commerce, digital marketing,
social media, corporate communications,
the inbound and outbound contact centers, email marketing, and online thirdparty distribution.
What’s unique about the CMO position at Value Place? Given the inclusive
nature of the position, my team not only
has to optimize our marketing strategy,
but also our distribution strategy across
the various channels through which we
deliver reservations.
What’s the most challenging part of
being a CMO today? The marketing
function is much more analytical than it
has ever been before. Gone are the days
when a CMO can be successful relying
only on gut creative instinct. One of the
biggest challenges of being a CMO today
is having to balance both sides of your
brain—the creative and the quantitative.
What are the 3 most important keys to
being an effective CMO leader today?
To be an effective leader today, CMOs need
to: 1) run their business by the numbers—
there is more data available to marketers
than ever before and we need to leverage it; 2) stay committed to constantly
learning and staying on top of emerging
trends—the environment is changing
rapidly and we need to evolve with it; and
3) ensure brand authenticity—consumers
are savvier than ever before with almost
infinite access to information, so if you
are trying to be something you’re not, it’s
immediately transparent.
How do you prepare a marketing plan
and execute the strategies? We start
by gathering data about the customer,
the competition, and the contextual
environment. We then set marketing
objectives that align with corporate
goals and prioritize initiatives based
on projected impact. Finally, we set
clear KPIs, measure them regularly,
and use our findings to improve the
plan going forward.
How do you measure marketing results and effectiveness? There was a
time when the only way
to measure marketing performance was tracking
directly attributable revenue. However, today
we have at our disposal
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