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Sayaji Hotels Limited
Successful Corporate Reputation building and Investor Relations
The Background
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Sayaji Hotels Limited (BSE Code: 523710), an Indore based three star category hotel, has been with Prana since November 2007. They also have a hotel in Baroda and are coming up with another four star category hotel in Pune. The company has recorded an annual turnover of Rs. 64 crore in FY 07-08 and plans to cross the Rs 100 crore milestone by 2009-2010. Under the umbrella of Sayaji Hotels, the company has also launched the specialty restaurant chain called Barbeque Nation, under a special purpose vehicle, Barbeque Nation Hospitality India Private Limited. Already, 11 Barbeque Nation outlets have been launched in India; with plans to have a total of 100 outlets in the next two years.
While, there are many big players in they hospitality market, Sayaji’s growth strategy was a little different from the rest. They concentrated in expanding and earning profits from their F&B business rather than expanding the current capacity in their existing hotels, which would give them slow returns.
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Key Communication Challenges
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- With many bigger brand names in the Indian hospitality industry, Sayaji Hotels contribution to this industry was lost.
- Sayaji Hotels evinced interest primarily from smaller names among the key institutional investors. There was a need to get it into the radar of larger firms
- It was essential that the impact of fast expanding Barbeque Nation chain on the overall corporate performance was explained to the entire stakeholder community.
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Prana’s PR Strategy and Plan Recommendations
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As a strategy, we recommended that we initiate discussion with the media and analysts communities. And position Sayaji as a thought leader with a clear vision and willingness to shoulder all responsibilities of an important market participant.
We segmented our entire communication strategy into four phases. The first phase was to create awareness about Barbeque Nation and its expansion plans. This bit of information set the ball rolling. The next phase was to conduct relationship building exercises where Sayaji was projected as an emerging player in the restaurant and the F&B businesses. Since, with lack of industry stories written about the Indian hospitality industry, we created story opportunities for Sayaji in the mainstream media. Further, every story/article was shared with the analyst community, thereby, also updating them about Sayaji and also ensured the good momentum of the stock.
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Key Achievements in Plan Implementation
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Our campaign not only increased Sayaji’s visibility in the media, but also made it very popular amongst the stock market analysts. One of our biggest challenges we faced when we got the client was its nearly stagnant stock prices despite extremely bullish market conditions. In a conscious effort, we helped open a dialogue between the Company and the market opinion leaders. This resulted in a series of favorable research reports and stock recommendations. In less than four months, Sayaji’s stock prices soared by nearly 150 % from the levels when we began work.
The campaign saw dozens of editorials comments, guest articles, spokesperson interviews etc in India’s most important business dailies and magazines. These included profiling of the Managing Director and the hotel in India’s largest selling weekly magazine and one of leading business magazines.
Simultaneously, the enhanced media visibility on the Barbecue Nation restaurants was helping Sayaji’s corporate profile being repositioned as a multi-faceted revenue model and ‘retail’ as an important aspect of its future growth.
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Overall Impact
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The stock of the company was very well accepted even when the depressed and investor sentiment was low across all other asset classes. Not only did the campaign create awareness about Sayaji in the mainstream media as well as the analyst community, but it also created hype around the launch of Barbeque Nations across the different parts of the country.
The fact that a investor confidence has been restored is evident from the fact that the stock prices stabilized at a much higher level when compared to the same when we won the account. |
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