Where it began

WebBeds is one of the biggest names in B2B travel distribution, the quiet machinery that connects hotels to more than 50,000 travel-trade buyers around the world. They had the reach, the technology and the ambition. What they wanted was a story that did justice to all three, and a proposition that could carry it into Europe and beyond.

To find that story, we started where these things should always start. We talked to hoteliers.

The deliverable

The project's first ask was for a story that sales teams could easily deliver to both new and existing customers. They needed a human story that would get them beyond the normal claims and features.

What the hoteliers told us

Those conversations surfaced something that had little to do with reach or technology. It was a feeling, and it wasn't a good one.

Hoteliers were tired of distribution partners. Not angry, exactly. Just quietly disillusioned. The sense that came through, again and again, was that these partners didn't really understand them, and weren't much interested in the problems that actually filled their days. They had one promise, repeated on a loop: we'll help you sell more rooms.

For a hotelier worrying about margins, about their brand, about a tangle of systems that refused to talk to each other, “more rooms” landed as noise. It answered a question nobody was asking.

The feeling underneath the feeling

Beneath the disillusionment sat one emotion that connected every kind of hotel. Hoteliers felt out of control of their own distribution. That was the thread. But the fascinating part, and the part that made the work, was how differently that loss of control showed up depending on who you were.

For the family-run and the independents, it felt like being overwhelmed: too many clunky systems, commissions they couldn't quite see, admin quietly eating the hours they'd rather spend with guests. For the boutique and luxury players, it was the fear of brand dilution: their carefully guarded exclusivity slipping away on the wrong channels, their rates leaking onto third-party sites. For the business chains and resorts, it was a squeeze on margin and data: leaning too hard on the OTAs, never quite getting a clear view of what was working. And for the global chains, it was the daily wrestle of holding it all together across regions, balancing one global standard against a hundred local realities.

One emotion. Completely different stories about it.

That insight became the spine of everything we built next. But it also handed us a problem.

How do you write one story for audiences this different?

The hoteliers we'd spoken to were so unalike that no single message could ever sit comfortably across all of them. Getting the positioning right would mean testing it, again and again, against every kind of hotel, listening for where it landed and where it fell flat. With real interviews alone, that conversation would take months we didn't have, and access we couldn't guarantee.

So we built ourselves a faster way to keep listening. Using AI, we created a cast of virtual personas drawn from everything the real hoteliers had told us, spanning the full spectrum of hotels from a boutique in Florence to a global chain headquartered in Paris. Eight characters in all, each defined by mindset and behaviour rather than job title, each able to react to our thinking on demand. It let us hold the ongoing conversation the work needed, in hours rather than weeks.

Eight hoteliers who weren't afraid to say no

This is where the personas earned their keep. We put our emerging brand story in front of them and let them answer in their own voices. Sabine, the luxury boutique visionary in Zurich. Giulia, the budget family operator in Florence. Jean-Pierre, the global chain integrator in Paris. Each one told us what moved them and what left them cold. They warmed to the idea of taking back control, which clearly struck a nerve. But they also pushed back, and that was the gift: don't overpromise, they warned; don't slip into language so broad it could belong to anyone; and whatever you claim, prove it. It was the honesty of a focus group, without the wait, and we could return to it as often as the work demanded.

The story we landed on

The most powerful part was that we didn't have to invent this. It was already true of WebBeds. Plenty of distribution partners will shift rooms wherever and however they can, with little regard for the hotel behind them. WebBeds sells rooms too, of course, but its people and its business were built to do it differently: to listen to a hotel first, understand its strategy, and sell in a way that actually serves it. The brand had been quietly living the answer to the market's biggest frustration. It just hadn't said so out loud.

So the positioning we landed on turned the category's habit on its head, and rang true at the same time. Where every other partner sold volume, WebBeds would hand power back to the hotelier. We framed the brand as a Creator: inventive, restless, the type to solve an old problem in a way no one else had thought of. And we gave it a line to rally around: “We put the world in your hands.”

The promise beneath it was simple and human. A partner that opens up the world's markets and new opportunities, while leaving you firmly in charge of your brand, your strategy and your pricing. From there we built a messaging house: four pillars, each one answering a real hotelier worry with real proof rather than warm words.

Why it mattered

The virtual personas gave us two things that usually pull against each other: speed and depth. They let us understand the audience before a single live conversation, lent us a breadth that fieldwork alone couldn't have reached in the time, and then doubled as a safe, low-cost way to test the proposition and take the risk out of it before it ever reached a real customer.

What WebBeds ended up with wasn't a story we'd polished in a room and hoped would resonate. It was a story shaped, challenged and earned, grounded in what hoteliers genuinely need rather than what's easiest to sell. Which is, when you get down to it, what humanizing B2B has always meant.

"Working with Rooster Punk was a great experience. The process was robust, thoughtful and collaborative, helping us move from complex market insights to a proposition that tapped into a fundamental truth yet felt genuinely human. What set them apart was their unique ability to find the emotional truth underpinning the commercial challenge and turn it into a story that resonated with our hotel partners (and staff). The strategy and account team brought real intellectual rigour throughout, challenging our thinking, pressure-testing every idea and ensuring the final proposition was not just distinctive, but credible and deeply rooted in a core customer need."

Arran Whitney, Marketing Director, Europe