Premier Inn is part of Whitbread PLC and is the UK's leading hotel brand in the midscale segment according to Business Traveller Magazine. The brand has nearly 700 hotels in the UK and is forecast to grow by 45% to 75,000 rooms in the UK by 2018. But how do you take the experience to the next level and sustain it when you are adding a new hotel every ten days? That was the question that occupied Managing Director Patrick Dempsey's mind in 2012. He approached Smith+co with the request to help "Codify what makes Premier Inn great, to articulate what our pixie dust is"

The brand purpose of Premier Inn is to ' Make guests feel brilliant through a great night's sleep' and the objective of the campaign was to align the organisation and all of its 17,000 employees with this purpose

Smith + Co created the Bigger, Bolder, Better campaign to communicate the brand purpose to employees and ensure delivery of the 5 year business plan. The brand promises a great night sleep, great rooms and great value, all delivered through a great customer experience, all underpinned by brilliant people. We believe that there are three conditions to success when engaging employees; 'the head, the heart and the hands'. The 'head' is helping people understand the purpose, the 'heart' is in motivating them to do so and the 'hands' are giving them the tools to deliver.

Premier Inn has seen great results and high levels of employee engagement and customer advocacy. The Bigger, Bolder, Better campaign was launched three years ago and is a current today as it was then. Premier Inn was awarded Best Midscale hotel brand by Business Traveller, and recently won the Employee Engagement Category by the Marketing Society. Premier Inn has also contributed to parent Whitbread's impressive earnings and share price increase over the past two years.

The campaign has been successful as the initiative was seen as a customer experience initiative rather than a training programme, holistic, linked to its purpose and owned by every executive and every level. At the same time as 'Bigger, Better, Bolder' was being designed, the HR team was designing a parallel initiative for the employee proposition called 'Premier Inn - a place made by you'. This changed the way that employees are recruited, inducted, and remunerated to ensure that the culture is reinforced.