I'm no MBA candidate, but my view is that Marriott purchased a greatly expanded footprint - the bricks and mortar kind, not the loyalty kind. They never intended to live up to SPGers expectations, and as far as I can tell, they never attempted to telegraph any kind of serious deception on that front (naturally they engaged in the typical sort of platitudes expected of any large corporate marketing department, but really just the stock variety pulled from a shelf in the back of the marketing warehouse of "ideas").