Kristie Goshow’s title, SVP of commercial for Viceroy Hotel Group, might sound unique, but once you get to know her, it makes perfect sense. From the get-go, she’s gone against the grain. Growing up in Reading, England, just outside London (the town sometimes described as England’s “Silicon Valley”), she was always fascinated by travel and claims to be one of the first students in the UK to study travel and tourism. “It was a new direction at that time,” Goshow, who joined Viceroy last November, said. “People called it a fluffy qualification. They couldn’t understand why someone wanted to try that.”
It’s all worked out for Goshow. After getting her start in the freight forwarding business, she moved onto airlines, before her eventual arrival into hospitality. One of her early jobs was with Scandinavian Airlines, where she credits then CEO Jan Carlzon as an inspiration, in particular due to his book, “Moments of Truth”, which, among other things, puts square focus on the needs of the customer and eliminating vertical levels of hierarchy, thoughts that might sound hackneyed now, but the book came out in 1989. This was seminal thought. “He understood the importance of designing touch-point experiences years before we all knew what CRM meant,” Goshow said of Carlzon.
After six years living and working in Dubai for Jumeirah Group, Goshow joined Viceroy, where she picked up that peculiar, if not arresting, title.
What does it mean? In its most simple form: sales & marketing 2.0. “We decided to rethink the role, because we believe that the consumer and how they engage with brands has changed,” Goshow said. “They move from channel to channel, on and offline, using multiple sources for research and to buy. We don’t think in silos, so took those traditional assumptions—marketing, revenue management, e-commerce, etc.—and brought them all together as a commercial entity. The intent is to drive commercial success for our owners and the management company.”