SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND—Choice Hotels International’s Cambria Suites brand opened a hotel in November at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, but no guests ever stayed the night. And that’s just fine with Brand President William Edmundson.

The mall “hotel,” open for five weeks leading up to Christmas, was a 1-room working replica of a Cambria guest suite, designed to promote a full-size property opening in nearby Bloomington, Minnesota. That hotel has had its share of overnight guests—a number of them motivated to check out the new property thanks to the marketing model erected at the mall.

“In launching a new brand, you want to get the word out about what it is and where it is,” Edmundson says. “Our idea was really to take the hotel to the guest, so people could experience it firsthand and see what all the amenities and benefits are—the whole deal—and be able to experience it as if they were staying in it.”

The model, which has since been dismantled and reassembled elsewhere several more times to promote other Cambria openings, features an exterior façade that mimics actual properties and an exact clone of a Cambria king suite, right down to the standard 385-sq. ft. (36-sq. m) size. The suite is fully operational, with the exception of plumbing. And at each location, three brand ambassadors are on hand to answer questions about the brand and to register guests in the ChoicePrivileges loyalty program.

During the Mall of America installation, 60-second promotional ads ran on information monitors throughout the massive shopping center, and the Cambria logo appeared on mall banners and the mall’s Web site. Cambria also sponsored holiday orchestral and choral performances. All told, approximately 6 million people came through the mall during the Cambria campaign, with about a quarter of a million impressions generated by the model.

But Cambria aspires to be a brand for business travelers and leisure travelers alike. So to target the former, Cambria also made a major complementary marketing pitch at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Cambria installed a floor-to-ceiling mural of the hotel in a high-traffic area of the airport, along with a staffed virtual reality station that provided passersby with the opportunity to take a virtual tour of a Cambria property. About 700,000 people passed by the airport display during its month-long run.

Cambria Suites is Choice’s entry into the upscale lodging market. To date, the new-build brand has more than 60 executed franchise contracts in the United States and Canada, mostly in secondary and suburban markets. The design is nontraditional but not so edgy as to alienate older guests.

Cambria’s marketing strategy is meant to appeal to people in the Generation X psychographic who might enjoy staying at high-tech lifestyle boutiques but who do not have much experience doing so. “They are people who act like they are 30 that certainly are well beyond that,” Edmundson says. “It’s like my parents—they wouldn’t know what to do if they walked into a really hip and trendy place like a W.”

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Cambria Suites created a fully functioning model hotel, which it installed at Mall of America during the Christmas shopping season.