Developing a new Vision for an iconic brand
The Savoy
"We wanted to go through a robust and inclusive process to reach a strong new vision for the Savoy which would endure and safe-guard the hotel's future legacy. The process and the facilitated leadership team sessions dragonfish have taken us through have got us to a powerful Vision that our whole team can connect with and believe in"
Philip Barnes
Managing Director (until April 2020)
Developing a new Vision for an iconic brand
Using the Vision to align leaders and colleagues ready for The Savoy’s reopening
The iconic Savoy Hotel faces increasing competition across the luxury hospitality sector. In order to retain its marketing leading position and achieve its ambitions the hotel partnered with dragonfish to develop its new vision and supporting roadmap. This would shape their focus for the next 3-5 years and create a vision that would transform the colleague and guest experience.
With the vision defined, the launch was delayed due to restrictions and impact of the Covid pandemic. Despite this delay, the vision provided the ideal platform to align leaders, adapt ways of working and manage a successful reopening.
Defining the Vision
Dragonfish worked alongside The Savoy’s exec and senior leadership team to understand strategy, goals, luxury market trends and customer expectations. We captured perceptions from management and analysed insights from guests and colleagues to form a holistic picture of The Savoy’s defining strengths, future ambitions and stakeholder aims.
With this understanding we brought together the newly formed leadership team for an experiential workshop exploring opportunities and identifying priorities. Alongside the Vision, an important outcome was the alignment of the team. A shift from day-to-day department focus to a one team approach. This transition was captured through core principles that were strengthened and evolved throughout the journey to ensure it supported the team to deliver it’s proposition.
Insight from this first workshop was distilled into four distinctive Vision territories, each poses a unique focus and opportunity. These were explored and developed with the leadership team, a lead territory was define and a statement create that was felt to be as iconic as The Savoy itself. Balancing heritage with innovation, experience with traditional luxury, a Vision that should apply to both colleagues and guests.
The Vision:
“Placing extraordinary people at the heart of memories made and stories told.”
Celebrating the new Vision
With the vision defined, the following series of sessions challenged and inspired leaders to define what the vision meant to them personally. They explored how they could bring it to life for guests in the everyday, and what it meant to colleagues to live the Vision. These sessions also defined how The Savoy would measure, launch, and communicate the Vision with impact, alongside the development of their leadership principles.
The roadmap to the Vision
With The Savoy’s new vision and supporting goals defined. We shaped with the team a 24-month strategic roadmap that enabled leaders to see for the first time how their Vision connected with their goals and ambitions in the hotel strategy. It identified existing strategic programmes, key investments and new initiatives and how they supported the Vision, with quantitative and qualitative measures.
Reopening The Savoy: Putting the Vision at the heart
With the launch of the new Vision delayed (due to government restrictions around the pandemic), this forced The Savoy to restructure its operations. dragonfish supported The Savoy, strategically by facilitating a digital session with their Exec that used the vision as a platform for reopening. This included a full review on the impact of Covid on the Vision roadmap to ensure readiness to reopen within government guidelines at the end of September 2020, and have since then coped with further lockdowns and are gearing up for full re-opening in summer 2021.
"dragonfish have been highly adaptable and considered in their approach to working with us. Getting an iconic brand like Savoy to agree a new Vision has not been easy but they have facilitated us through the process in a superb way providing excellent on-going relationship and project support. Even despite the recent disruption to our business with Covid they have gone above and beyond to help us to rethink how our Vision will enable us as a leadership team and hotel to re-open successfully."
Sally Webster
Director of Talent & Culture
If you'd like to understand this project or our approach in more detail,
email hello@dragonfishuk.com or call 023 8082 8505
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