London Fashion Weekend - The May Fair Hotel shies away from the spotlight

London Fashion Weekend (LFWend) bills itself as Fashion’s biggest pop-up. Along with the DMA Brand Activation Council, I wanted to see what this meant for the brands sponsoring the event and how effective they were at engaging people to drive participation and sales through brand partnerships.

I chose to look at the partnership with The May Fair Hotel, now in its seventh year as the official hotel of London Fashion Week (LFW), and what this means for its activity during the consumer-facing LFWend.

There hasn’t been much pre-event activity. As expected, the clear driving message was the partnership of LFW, with LFWend just given a cursory acknowledgement. We see LFW featured on the hotel blog and Twitter feed, along with the hashtag #hoteloffashion. Slightly hidden on the hotel’s website, under partnerships there is a page dedicated to LFW encouraging room and restaurant bookings and promoting specialist LFW Cocktails in the hotel bar.

But for the consumer, all is not lost, a quick visit to the Facebook page reveals the first mention of LFWend and a simple competition to win a night at the hotel, if fans liked the post and tagged the person they would like to take. This was also featured in an email update and on the hotel website.

Fast-forward to my visit last week to LFWend and there was limited visibility of the brand, it was mostly limited to the logo or name displayed alongside other sponsors on wall displays and in the catwalk guide.

Rather too late in the day for me, I found that the hotel was also featured towards the back of The Show Guide highlighting the fact that their Fashion Week cocktail was available in the restaurant.

So it seems the partnership is focused on the association with LFW, logo placement and the benefits that brings. LFWend is such a fun consumer event that it would have been interesting to see greater acknowledgement of the partnership and a stronger link to engaging the consumer. With Scavi & Ray hosting an entire Prosecco bar (see here), the May Fair Hotel had a hard act to follow by offering a cocktail and no real activation on the day. Moving forwards, lots of opportunities could be within their grasp to engage attendees and offer fun and engaging participation with future customers.