How to build your hotel brand
A hotel brand is what distinguishes it from its competitors and gives guests a reason to choose your brand over others.
For this purpose you have is to establish trust and authenticity among its customers.
As per the American Marketing Association, 1995 defined the brand as “a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”
Thus, we can say that branding is not just about designing and creative logo, but also about business philosophy and ethics.
It creates and shapes an ‘image’ in the minds of your guests.
What is a Brand?
A brand is a name, word, style, emblem or some other attribute that distinguishes the product or service of one seller from that of other sellers.
To connect to your guests a brand must be consistent, easily distinguishable, unique and special.
An image or idea must build in the mind of customers while thinking about your brand.
Example-Hilton’s brand idea is to “fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality,”.
Brands use in business, marketing, and advertising for-:
- identification,
- to create and store value as brand equity for the branded product,
- to the advantage of the consumers, owners and shareholders of the company.
How can you build a strong hotel brand?
A hotel brand distinguishes it from any other lodging option. It determines what makes the hotel attractive and desirable.
Below are the few things what you have to consider-:
Identify your target market
A target market is a group of people or potential customers whom you want to sell your product or services.
Hence, understanding your target market from inside and out you’ll have the details you need to meet your brand marketing objectives.
Hotel brand positioning
After identifying your target market, you have to position your brand.
Subsequently, you have to position your brand in such a manner that it occupies a distinctive place and importance in the mind of your customer.
Vision and mission statement to build a hotel brand
A statement articulating your business purpose is key to building brands.
Besides, it helps everyone in the company share the same values.
Brand personality
Brand personality is a structure that helps influence the way people feel about the hotel’s service and mission.
Every business has its unique characteristic, which defines it in the minds of customers.
Logo of your hotel brand
What does the first thing comes in mind of people when they think about your hotel? The answer is its logo.
A logo says a lot of things about a brand based on its colour, shape.
In short, it helps to identify your brand.
The tagline of your brand
Many businesses complete the branding process with an interesting tagline.
Eventually, it has to be short and catchy.
For instance, “Hilton Hotels & Resorts” tagline is “Take me to the Hilton”.
Brand messaging
It encourages guests to respond to your brand, convince them, encourage them and eventually make them continue to book a room from your hotel.
Certainly, it makes buyers relate to your brand by inspiring them.
For Example- Nike: Just do it.
Integration of brand
Brand Integration allows a company to reach out to audiences.
Hence, your brand needs to deliver a consistent experience through your customer’s journey.
Development of a good Brand Strategy for your hotel brand
Your brand won’t have a foundation without a strategy.
With the right strategy, you’ll be able to achieve amazing results on both your business growth and your bottom line.
Here are the few steps that you have to create an effective branding strategy that emphasizes the consumer’s quality guest experience.
Get to know the customers and competitors
To come up with countermeasures that boost revenue, it’s important to look at what the competition is doing at an industry and regional level.
You also need to understand your target audience you are trying to market to.
Your guests at your hotel can range from couples and newlyweds to senior citizens, business travellers, families, and more.
Brand message strategy
This strategy is successfully implemented when you connect your brand with audiences.
In this, you have to engage people on terms that they can easily understand and helps to build your brand strategy.
Challenge of brand message is to avoid being repetitive.
Brand Design
Brand designing includes logo, tagline, the uniform of staff, social media pages, etc.
The overall Brand Design needs to be well aligned and complement the brand ethics, values and standard of the hotel.
And must communicate the same to its audience.
Strategic brand communications
A strategic communication plan for the brand is an integral part of any branding effort.
First, you have to identify your audience, secondly know the reason why you want to communicate.
Further, develop key messages that you want to communicate and at last create an outline of your communication.
Website design
The gateway to your Hotel brand is its website. It successfully sells and informs its visitors.
Effective promotion of the brand and increasing online presence can be done with website design.
Rebranding
The concept behind rebranding is to establish another identity of a brand, from its rivals in the market.
Aiming to make a brand image more attractive to its customers and potential customers.
One of the main reason for rebranding is to attract new customers.
Conclusion
On the above, I have given a glimpse of how you can build your hotel brand.
Building a brand is not a one day deal.
In fact, it is a long term process which involves a lot of thinking, planning and efforts.
It helps your business to get a unique identity from its competitors.
When you are making strategies to build your hotel brand.
The time it takes can be more than a few weeks depending upon the research that needs to be done.
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