CASE HISTORY – SANDOS – Mango Interactive

CASE HISTORY – SANDOS

CUSTOMER:Sandos
YEAR:2015
Mango and Sandos: leveraging the digital transformation to enhance positioning
With the technical and creative support of Mango Interactive, the Spanish-Mexican hotels & resorts chain turned the development of a new website into an opportunity to boost its communication strategy with content marketing.

Sandos is a privately owned, Spanish-Mexican Hotels & Resorts chain with a crystal-clear, special mission and vision: being the leaders in all-inclusive resorts that are differentiated, innovative and sustainable and offer unique experiences to their guests.

Respect, responsibility and honesty, together with creativity and an always positive attitude, are the values through which Sandos aims at achieving these goals. A particularly strict environmental policy ensures the impact of activities is reduced and both employees and guests are informed and can contribute to safeguard our planet.

At Sandos, each resort has its own character and soul: active, romantic, trendy or beach fun. This diversity is the competitive edge Sandos intended to leverage to differentiate its sales proposition from mainstream resort chains, which tend to offer a more standardized experience. The improvement area was the relatively low awareness of the Sandos brand compared with some larger competitors.
“We wanted to differentiate from mainstream competitors”

The need

Sandos requested to create a new website whose strategy would respond to the needs of different stakeholders. “The more ‘visionary’ managers among us wanted a site that strongly differentiated ourselves from our competitors – says Sandos CTO Michele Ruberl – by engaging visitors who landed on the site mostly through keywords or after they’ve already chosen a club. Therefore, our aim was reinforcing a purchase decision already made, rather than push sales”.

Moreover, Ruberl adds, Sandos wanted to engage existing and prospect customers with something more than the ‘photo-price-photo-price’ paradigm existing in the industry. “The idea was to create an almost completely visual homepage, an inspirational image that could position Sandos as ‘the’ reference player for experiential holidays in the destinations where we are present. On the other hand, we had to deal with the sales department caveats and with the need to encourage direct booking to increase margins”.

The answer

With the aim of providing Sandos with a comprehensive, holistic and more strategic solution, Mango gathered a team of professionals with specific competencies in corporate branding, contents strategy and contents creation, web design, UX and UI design.

A ‘War Room’ was set up at the Sandos headquarters in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where the team brainstormed on-site in day-long sessions while, at the same time, having the opportunity to interact with the Sandos top management, the communication managers and team, and the other corporate decision makers.

The result was a solution addressing the need for a new website into a more strategic standpoint, transforming the online visibility in an advanced marketing content tool that positioned Sandos as a recognized knowledge centre for news and insights on the environment, history, culture and experience opportunities in the reference destinations.

The centrepiece of the project was a mosaic homepage with a ‘hero area’ that allowed Sandos to emphasize alternate contents ranging from special offers and events to insights into the offer and services of individual clubs. A funnelling system was also designed, to increase conversion through direct booking. The scalable nature of the project allows future implementations of even more content-oriented solutions and, in perspective, allows to transform the home page and the hero area into a real ‘magazine’.

“The final result – Ruberl concludes – was the best possible compromise between the communications needs, our innovative content strategy and the commercial bottom lines. The new content-oriented website also provided the base to enhance and develop the loyalty program through more engagement with the experiences. More levels of customization by markets and targets was possible, improving the effectiveness of our marketing strategies and campaigns. Mago’s contribution was pivotal into turning our ideas into design and projects and the on-site workshop was very effective and even enjoyable”.

The relatively low brand awareness of Sandos was now compensated with am attractive storytelling-based website that ‘captured’ visitors and funnelled them to booking, while enhancing the Sandos sales proposition of uniqueness difference.
“The final result is the best possible compromise between commercial bottom lines and inspirational contents”

Who is Mango Interactive
Mango Interactive is a network of professionals from the worlds of digital transformation, corporate communication and media relation to offer its clients more comprehensive, holistic and strategic solutions to their communication needs. Mango usable, creative visual and interaction design solutions for desktop and mobile digital channels, complemented by an expertise in contents strategy and creation, content marketing and media relations.

www.mangointeractive.it