Asian hospitality brand management consultancy, The Brand Company, has launched a hospitality brand management book: a compilation of 24 ‘Living Brands’ articles that were written by Managing Partner James Stuart, creator of many of Asia’s top hotel brands.
Blending challenging assertions and humorous anecdotes about his experiences in 15 years of hotel brand development in Asia, the book contains observations about why the hospitality industry and other service businesses are often failing to create sustainably successful brands, and what needs to be done to turn the tide. Hotel Brand Bites is available in paperback on www.amazon.com.
HOTELS has obtained multiple chapter excerpts. Here is the third installment:
Our little drama opens in the office of Head of Everything at Hugepropertyco, Ivor Bigego. He’s pacing to and fro, looking down from his 120th floor office at the wasteland below. He wants to do something special with this vast expanse of mud: something that he will feel proud of. But what? He’s had enough of retail and offices and residential stuff. It’s made him a lot of money, but he’s not feeling the love from commercial skyscrapers. He needs a hotel! Yes! A place he can take his friends, invite celebrity chefs, parade in front of the rich and famous and name a ballroom after his wife.
But first he needs an architect and interior designer. In a recent edition of Überfunk Interiors he read a piece on Danish architectural Wunderkid, Magnus Nextbigtingsen. Magnus was spouting on about the interplay between human evolution and sustainable plastic piping. Chairman Bigego didn’t really get it, but thought Magnus looked a bit of a player and he had – after all – designed the world’s first perfectly spherical hotel made of egg cartons.
“Magnus, this is Ivor Bigego, I want a hotel designed and you’re the man! I want a modern Asian palace. I want something bold! I want this to be my legacy!”
Magnus is excited: money no object and an open-ended (yet entirely indecipherable) design brief.
A month later Magnus arrives at Hugepropertyco HQ for the presentation. It doesn’t go well. The Chairman doesn’t like those who wear shoes without socks (Magnus doesn’t own a pair of socks). Magnus has designed a hotel that’s adorned in a burnt orange hue. It turns out the Chairman thinks anything remotely orange will cast an eternal shadow over his family. Magnus has interpreted ‘Asian’ as ‘the innate tension of the struggle between Daoism and Imperialism’. The Chairman had been thinking more gold, red, bamboo and a huge statue of himself alongside a mythical dragon. And Magnus’s take on ‘palace’ is shaped by an improbable blend of Wizard of Oz meets Confucius. The Chairman had been thinking more Forbidden City meets Florentine Castello.
And so before our play gets to the end of its first act we close on a scene of confusion and disappointment. Magnus goes back to designing the Museum of Virtual Space in Ølstykke-Stenløse while the Chairman gets his in-house design team to copy the Palace of Versailles.
I convey this interplay as a work of fiction because the manner in which clients interact with architects and designers often seems so utterly impractical and fanciful. The client has a vague notion of what he likes and often throws in a couple of ‘hotels I’ve stayed in’ from far flung corners of our planet that act as some kind of dubious inspiration for the project. The architect remains almost entirely in the dark about what’s required and disappears down some self-indulgent furrow, finally emerging with designs that relate to the ‘brief’ only after a great deal of frantic post rationalisation. And so the dance between clients and architects is shaped, habitually flavoured by ambiguity and uncertainty: not the most comfortable playmates for cost efficiency.
My bewilderment at the ineffectiveness of such processes is heightened by the subsequent fixation many clients have with imposing a set of draconian cost control measures to make up for the overspend on ill-conceived architectural and interior design concepts. What is the point in hiring the Magnus’s of this world if you don’t know what you want, assume Magnus does, realise he doesn’t, replace the mahogany furniture with IKEA veneers and still call it a palace.
What a monumental waste of time and money for all involved.
The key to turning confusion and doubt into clarity and cost efficiency is simple. It’s called a Brand DNA. It defines the desired function, promise, benefit and spirit to be delivered through the architecture and all the other elements of the guest experience. It is a very simple frame of reference. It allows for more confident and appropriate decisions to be made faster.
There’s one other significant advantage of using the Brand DNA as the basis for design briefs: it is a tool that has its origins in a clear understanding and interpretation of consumer attitudes and desires, in changing trends, in competitive offerings, and – yes – even in the aspirations of expansive-thinking Chairmen. In other words, it is an objectively crafted focus rather than a set of impulsive personal whims.
It’s a touch ironic that the solution to the ills of the architectural and interior design development process can be found in the world of marketing – a world I have often castigated for inappropriately claiming to be the sole driver of all things brand. Any self-respecting marketing manager, identity consultant or communications agency won’t lift a pen or a brush without the aid of a brief that clarifies the promise and attitude of the brand.
And so should be the case with hotel design, particularly as the interiors of a hotel have a more powerful impact on shaping perceptions of the brand than any logo ever will. Effective hotel design will seldom be realised if it’s created in a brand vacuum.
If the marketing and communications community can relinquish its obsessive sense of ownership of all things ‘brand’, while architects and client project managers can realise that they are key players in the brand game, then we would not only have more powerful design, we’d also have a greater level of integration between marketing promises and the guest experience.
All that’s needed is a little brand glue.