ShareWith the ever-changing landscape of hotels and the changes in distribution with evolving mergers, branding has become a concept that is increasingly important in marketing. Hotels that don’t recognize the importance of their own branding could be lost in a wide collection of hotels. Customers want to connect with a brand for a variety of reasons. With hotels, guests want to feel like they are in a home away from home…a home that welcomes them with services that consistently make them feel like a welcomed part of a family.
Tiffany Braun, Regional Director of Sales & Marketing for Two Roads Hospitality, and member of HSMAI’s Marketing Advisory Board talked with Jeff Tomczek, Director of Branding for Two Roads Hospitality about the aspects of branding that have become increasingly important for hoteliers in today’s environment.
Tiffany Braun: What are the most important aspects of branding as it relates to hotel companies today?
Jeff Tomczek: Regardless of industry or product, a brand is a sum of parts: the cumulative customer experience across the guest journey that shapes a collective perception of you in the market. While we can attempt to control our brands and dictate what they mean with our choices on items like FF&E (furniture, fixtures, & equipment), uniforms, or messaging campaigns, the guest really determines a hotel brand’s value and reputation based on their satisfaction with the interactions they have with us. It’s about the human element, not all the noise we create in our offices or at conferences.
Therefore, we must: 1) create perceived value from the moment a new potential guest becomes aware of us 2) always impress them with even more than that perceived value in their first stay and 3) wow them with follow-up engagement to keep them coming back. The tools and tactics we use to achieve this are what we debate. Regardless of your toolkit, it is important to remember that the human-centered travel business is what we are all still in.
Good branding is first about setting an expectation and delivering on it. Then it’s essential that we keep improving upon it to keep it fresh, interesting, and relevant in an ever-changing marketplace. That all sounds like a mouthful; however, it’s simply about meeting guests at an emotional level where they personally wish to be met. We know our customers now more than ever and can deliver that degree of thoughtfulness and care to individual travelers like never before.
Great branding provides the framework for delivering on those emotional moments that keep your guests returning and transform them into your strongest advocates for growth.
Who you hire and how you train to execute on the promise you’ve made to your guests can be the difference between a lasting brand and a fleeting one.
Tiffany: As there are more mergers across the hospitality landscape, how does branding play a more important role?
Jeff: It is more of the same. You have to tell a story that resonates and deliver on the expectations that your story creates. You must be differentiated and stay ready to evolve, especially as travel changes. That requires flexibility rather than rigidity as well as a deeply personal connection to guest desires. Hospitality brands need to be aware of the shifting landscapes outside of the industry: economic, cultural, and otherwise. They can’t be so concerned with one another. Hotels should understand who they are, who their guest is, and build that relationship into something invincible to all the new brand noise we’re seeing today. Regardless of the size of the crowd, there is always an opportunity to stand out. It really starts with a culture of belief in what you are doing as a company and translating that belief to your guests via the brand.
Tiffany: With these mergers, there are larger brands spinning off with more lifestyle, ‘boutique’ properties and soft branding methods. How do you feel this will affect larger boutique chains like your own?
Jeff: Adding more brands to the lifestyle set will also add fuel to our passion for delivering on true boutique hospitality. As the largest operator of independent hotels in North America, we pride ourselves in offering an alternative to the cookie-cutter hotel or resort stays. Over time, with our unique collections, we have come to see that an increasing percentage of the population is looking for that degree of specialization and individuality that we offer.
I believe that many of these large chain attempts at boutique will fall short on with how truly local and original their experiences feel. In fact, as larger brands attempt to replicate and stamp-out what we have been doing for decades, we might actually see some positive halo from the awareness they create as guests investigate what a genuine boutique hotel stay is like and find us. When they do, we’ll be ready and excited to share our brands with them.
For us, this is about emotion and our core guests already know the feeling they have at a Thompson or a Joie de Vivre for example. Each hotel is different, yet expectations are met consistently and then exceeded. It will be amazing to see this next group of guests develop a taste for boutique. We believe the feelings they share with us will cause them to shift away from larger offerings. Travelers in this era want to be a part of something special, and that is what we offer across our portfolio at Two Roads.
Tiffany: Are loyalty programs still important?
Jeff: Yes, however they are not the same as they once were. Loyalty in hospitality has traditionally been treated as transactional. We know now, with modern tech and data systems, that loyalty programs should be focused on relationship management. Utilizing the information the guests share with us to create personalized engagement and moments of appreciation goes beyond anything points or redemption programs could ever create. I see point-based loyalty programs as outdated and missing the opportunity. Currently, we are focused on building personal relationships with our guests that allow us to touch them with thoughtfulness, offers and incentives that speak to them. We truly want to know our guests and reward them for who they are and what they are looking for versus rewarding everyone the same way and only when they spend with us first.
Tiffany: In your opinion, who has been the most innovative company over the past decade in terms of branding?
Jeff: That’s a tough question. Apple, Starbucks, Nike—those are low-hanging fruit answers that we see over and over again. I’ll mention a company I love: Burton. They own their category as their founder quite literally put the sport of snowboarding on the map. And despite that, they keep innovating to ensure they stay ahead. Being the category leader is extremely difficult. You have to both listen to your customers and think beyond what they are even imagining for themselves. Burton is still independent, but huge in that landscape. And yet, they aren’t perceived as sellouts or too mainstream because they have amazing products and a focus on customer service. They also have a voice and they loudly share it – a voice that is theirs and theirs alone and not being molded just to appease the masses. For example, recently their CEO Donna Carpenter paid for their employees to attend the Women’s March on Washington if they couldn’t afford it because it is a cause in which the company believes strongly.
That entire world of action sports continues to be interesting to me because these brands also understand the power of working together. For example, you often see Burton, GoPro, and Red Bull collaborate on content together…content that then might show up in-flight on Virgin America or somewhere else unexpected – somewhere that their next customers already are. These brands get that they are about a lifestyle and they are crafting together what that looks like along with the participation of their shared customer. It creates a sense of community and belonging that is larger than the commercial aspect of the business.
With hotels, we often think too much about the real estate or the design or the visual identity. We forget we are trying to meet a specific, unique individual on their travel journey and host them in an environment that fits their current or aspirational lifestyle. As marketers, we would be better served spending more time studying how and why we travel than trying so hard to compete with one another.
Tiffany: How have they been successful in differentiating themselves from their competition?
Jeff: They own who they are. Stay innovative regardless of what the competition is doing. Participate in the community they helped create and engage with their audience openly.
Tiffany: How do you think the emergence of social media has affected the role of branding?
Jeff: It’s provided a new mouthpiece that has to be on 24/7 and in real-time. This is both good and bad because the relationship with the customer is out in the open for everyone to see. Now communications strategies require timely responsiveness, active participation, and a point-of-view that people actually want to hear. To me this is amazing because it forces brands to actually have a backstory versus something created just for commercial reasons. It forces values and emotions back into the picture because, by being on social media, brands are now living entities that can have conversations versus the one-way megaphones that they just used to shout at their customers. It keeps the guest always connected to us and vice versa. We learn about one another, grow together and find ways to improve. In that environment everyone can win. If you miss-manage social however, you can quickly cause damage to your brand.
Tiffany: With customers (and competitors) now having access to more information in regards to pricing between brands via the internet and industry-specific search engines, have the goals or importance of branding changed in any way?
Jeff: Yes. Brands must have a strong enough relationship with their customer that the customer comes to them directly. There are far too many channels taking customers outside of a brand’s control and engaging with them for their own interests as well as confusing customers with choices that end up being made strictly on price or location versus quality. As a brand leader, you have to own that relationship with the customer and help them understand the value they receive by coming to you first.
To me, that starts with the details that come from offering fluid navigation during the purchase experience, amazing interactions with staff during the product/service experience, and a personal touch that third parties will never be able to provide. And you can charge a premium for that…but only if you deliver on it every time. People will pay more when you give them more, return more when you are consistent, and sing your praises when you alleviate stress or issues that others can’t.