Hotel-land is awash with labels: ‘boutique’, ‘design’ and ‘lifestyle’ are still floating around on top of the pond.
I attended a ‘Boutique & Lifestyle’ hotel conference in Sydney a couple of months ago and at the end of the conference organizer admitted that still no one had a clue what those terms meant.
Label-dom emerged from various new evolutions that have benefited the hotel industry and its guests over time: smaller hotels, less stuffy, more contemporary, cheaper, often more social, sometimes more fun. However, before the ideas were even out of their nappies, some marketer slapped a cool descriptor on them and – boom – we suddenly had the hotel industry’s next great leap forward. But we didn’t, because they weren’t. What we actually had were some interesting new developments and that’s what we should have remained focused on: continuing to enhance what we offered and how it would benefit the guest. Instead, many ended up chasing the cliché (‘we’re a stylish urban boutique lifestyle hub’); at the best of times a dangerously reactive way of behaving, but when you don’t know what the label actually means it’s commercial farce.
The terms regularly used by some in our midst to describe ‘emerging’ consumer segments are equally hard to fathom. Let’s take The Millennial. If one views over a quarter of the world’s population as a tightly defined segment then that’s all well and good. But, a segment of 2 billion is hardly a crisp and handy guide to developing anything unique.
Then there have been Hipsters (beards, tattoos and all), who are now making way for Young Urban Creatives (Yuccies). Such consumer group definitions are an improvement on ‘the discerning guest,’ but they are almost as broad and vague as the terminology we apply to our brands in response to them. There were hundreds of millions of Hs worldwide and there are likely already are a similar amount of Ys.
This love-in with consumer generalization is further exacerbated by brands that simply emerge as a mirror image of the traits displayed by their desired guests, which is not a path to differentiation. That must come from your brand’s own unique response to a consumer’s tastes and aspirations. Otherwise, you’ll end up in a long line of brands that exude the same vague Yuccie-isms.
Another issue with fad following is that by the time a hotel brand is shaped around a transient set of styles the concept is likely to be a thing of the past. Hipsters came and went in a five-year period; not much more than the time it takes to conceive, develop, launch and execute a brand centered around H-related traits.
So, does that mean an industry built around broad generalities must continue to be accepted? I think not. The great brands of the world have established themselves both through a unique spirit and an enhanced set of functional enablers. They focus on making things easier, faster, more practical and providing better value for money, delivered with an attitude all of their own.
Way of life: Innovation
At the heart of sustained attitudinal and functional differentiation is innovation: “the significant and ongoing positive change that adds incremental value to the end user.” That requires innovation to be front-and-center in the mind-set of an organization. It starts not with what you do, but with something you are. It has to be a way of life.
The hotel business is dominated by large, publicly listed groups. A recent article in Harvard Business Review about the lack of innovation in sizeable corporations asserted that their CEOs “hear about the advantage of ‘disruptive’ or ‘step-out’ innovation and decide that their organization should do ‘some of that.’ But their organizations are designed to do something else very well. Namely, what they are already doing’.
To innovate is to take risk, and that is all too scary when the next quarterly earnings reports are just around the corner.
Yes, some of the large groups have brands with contemporary traits, yet, I don’t see Edition, or Canopy, or Indigo, or Moxy, or Aloft as rule-breakers. They surely have done varyingly good jobs of reflecting the changing world we live in outside the boundaries of hospitality, but they are not cheese movers. Some conservatives herald them as pioneers because they seem different, but that means little in a sea of acquiescence.
Like many other industries, the engine room of innovation is more often found in small, entrepreneurial groups who have less to risk. They have to be rule-breakers simply to survive and grow.
So, where are the nut-cases and dreamers who will sometimes make gob-smacking mistakes and occasionally fall flat on their faces, but will often provide the startling breakthroughs that shape and sustain the industry of tomorrow?
Airbnb, Qbic, Yotel, The Student Hotel, Snoozebox, The Pop-up Hotel and others have deconstructed the hotel experience and inventively rebuilt it to give sharply-defined customer groups (motor-racing enthusiasts, music festival goers, university undergraduates) what they want (and sometimes what they didn’t know they wanted), doing so in ways that are often more cost-effective than the mainstream hospitality model.
They’re not just about being ‘cool.’ They look at things in an entirely sensible and common sense way, adding splashes of invention to turn what works into what works better and surprises. This isn’t about ‘guest satisfaction;” what a limp distraction of a term that has become for customer delight and genuine loyalty.
I wouldn’t want my guests saying, “I’m satisfied.” That’s just a polite way of saying it was all rather tedious. No, I would want my guests to fall in passionate love with my brand because of its uniquely captivating mix of both attitude and delivery (which, by the way, is not going to emerge from hoteliers who have had their adventure genes removed down on Satisfaction Farm).
In a nutshell: adventure leads to originality, which shapes differentiation, which is the cornerstone of a powerful brand, which is the engine of an outperforming business.
And anyway, being different is a whole lot more fun.
Contributed by James Stuart, managing partner, The Brand Company, Hong Kong