How owners view brands

Brands are important, but ultimately the owner's path will be guided by their gut feelings about your company

Brand essence
Brands in themselves are in essence a collection of emotional associations that are manipulated by companies to encourage customers to purchase goods or services.

The comparative value of one watch, car or perfume compared to another may have something to do with quality, but is much more related to the hype associated with a brand and how much we ‘buy’ into it. The same is basically true of hotel brands.

To put it another way: regardless of the brand, the price level, or any technical or operational standards associated with it, at the end of the day, the guest experience depends primarily on the true quality of the service, and that in turn depends on individual human beings delivering real guest satisfaction.

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The possibility or probability of this happening is largely independent of the names and manufactured emotional associations of the brands.

It’s not that I am knocking hotel brands. The art and science of hotel branding has reached impressive levels of sophistication and is arguably the most important factor in the success of all branded properties — more so than the three L’s (location, location, location) and even to the extent that a disappointing guest experience may still fail to break a guest’s faith in the brand promise.

What I am saying is that the use of brands as a convenient single label for certain types of hotel, naturally encourages us to assume we know at a glance what we are dealing with, even though in reality it hides a complex matrix of product or service traits that may be extremely difficult to reproduce in its entirety across a geographically widespread brand stable.

This brings me back to my original premise, that the operator or brand selection process is highly subjective.

Even dissecting brands into their component parts as we consultants do, brings us only a little closer to having a solid basis for choosing one chain or brand over another.

Owners must take all these factors into account and at the end of the day, rely on that often remarkably sound indicator, business or simple gut instinct.