The concept of Narrow Branding featured in this article was first presented by the author at the Annual Meeting of the Hotel Association of Canada, Toronto, February 2006
Customization rules! In the online marketing environment of the 21st century, a more customized, personalized and individually-optimized customer experience is more likely than not to be a better one.
The same notion can be applied to your hotel’s brand. Your corporate brand is one of your most valuable business assets. Yet, it can become still more valuable to you when you develop online branding approaches that more clearly and powerfully address the unique circumstances of your individual hotel.
Individualized, customized branding approaches are needed because your hotel is unique. No two hotels within the same hotel brand are exactly alike. A high-rise business hotel in a busy downtown area and a historic resort hotel in the Rocky Mountains may be part of the same corporate brand, yet each has a set of unique circumstances that combine to make each hotel distinct and different.
Your Unique Hotel
Your individual hotel is a unique entity. It features a unique building with its own distinctive style of architecture and interior design. It offers a distinct set of services and amenities. Your hotel is also located within a unique local or regional business environment containing a distinct set of business and economic conditions, competitor hotels, and allied organizations such as CVBs.
Your individual hotel possesses a unique set of hotel associates, your employees. It also has a unique set of customers who are a distinct subset of the total chain-wide customer base. These customers have distinct travel preferences and requirements. Finally, your hotel is located in a unique destination. That destination itself is a significant part of your hotel’s unique value proposition and a key element that differentiates it from competitor hotels as well as from other hotels within the corporate chain.
Think of your hotel as a sub-brand within your corporate brand. It is the corporate brand plus all of the things that make your hotel different, special and unique. Making the most of your individual hotel’s uniqueness, in a brand-aligned manner, can help you to develop a more powerful and potentially profitable online presence on the Internet and Web.
Broad versus Narrow Focus
Corporate branding approaches look at all of the hotels in your chain. They consider all that these hotels have to offer in terms of services, amenities, destinations and more as part of the overall corporate brand value proposition. Corporate efforts often focus on developing branding campaigns designed to enhance consumer awareness and recognition of the hotel chain on a national or even international level. They focus on the evolution of the brand in more general and non-hotel-specific ways.
These general, widely-focused, broad-based corporate approaches to branding can be referred to as “BroadBrand” approaches. All hotels in the chain benefit from these approaches.
In contrast to corporate BroadBrand approaches, your hotel can benefit from more narrowly-focused, hotel-specific branding approaches. These customized, individualized hotel-oriented branding efforts, because they focus on one specific hotel within a chain, can be thought of as “NarrowBrand” approaches.
The NarrowBrand formula takes the essential characteristics of your corporate brand and factors in the unique circumstances of your individual hotel to create more effective, localized ways of expressing the nature of your brand, more strongly, more powerfully, more creatively, across all customer touch points and via all local branding media. By better expressing the qualities of your brand via all of your hotel’s actions, you can gain opportunities to better differentiate your hotel from its local competitors and to be more successful.
What can you, as an individual hotelier, do to create a more effective, customized and optimized 360-degree brand experience of your hotel in the online environment of the Internet and Web? The next section looks at some issues and approaches to help guide you in your efforts.
NarrowBranding and Your Home Page
Your website is your hotel’s primary address for online branding. Your corporate home page provides information covering all of the hotels within the chain, the destinations where these hotels are located, online reservations features, corporate level programs such as frequent guest and permission e-mail programs, and others.
In contrast, your individual hotel’s home page focuses more narrowly on what your individual hotel has to offer. These elements, unique to your individual hotel, constitute your hotel’s distinctive online NarrowBrand focus.
Your hotel’s home page should reflect the essential nature of your corporate brand by means of the general look and feel of the page and via the information and links it contains. Just as significantly, it should also reflect all of the elements that make your hotel unique – the elements that make it special within your hotel chain and which help to differentiate it from local competitor hotels.
NarrowBranding & Design
Great design builds great brands! The visual design theme of your website should be a clear and powerful expression of your brand. This means that your brand’s visual identity elements including your logotype, typography, color schemes and other key elements, are clearly expressed in your Web pages.
If your hotel’s website is created and formatted by your corporate parent, the overall design theme is already established. Your NarrowBranding opportunity is to make certain that design is used to communicate strongly, clearly and positively the unique features, services, amenities and circumstances of your individual hotel.
NarrowBranding with Multimedia
Web-based multimedia builds strong brands by creating more compelling and multifaceted online branding environments. Popular multimedia effects include slide shows, virtual reality images, video segments, audio features including music or other sound effects, interactive navigational features, and motion graphics that can animate images and branding messages.
The NarrowBrand approach encourages you to effectively customize and leverage multimedia effects to benefit your hotel. No one knows your hotel better than you. Take a positive role in determining precisely what aspects of your unique individual hotel — including its architecture, its interior spaces, and its local environs — are displayed on your Web pages and how these elements can be displayed within appropriate multimedia formats. By doing this, you help to better communicate your hotel’s local, NarrowBrand value proposition.
NarrowBranding & Your Destination
Your corporate home page enhances the value of the corporate brand by highlighting the locations of all of the hotels within the chain, regionally, nationally or internationally. In contrast, your hotel’s Web pages within the corporate website offer you NarrowBranding opportunities to more powerfully focus your online branding efforts on your hotel’s unique destination.
Your hotel’s destination is an important component in your hotel’s value proposition. Your destination has unique attributes including geography, climate, weather, local attractions, cultural institutions, business organizations, conference and meeting facilities, transportation, and sightseeing opportunities and more. Make certain that your hotel’s web pages promote these elements in a complete and compelling manner to make your destination-related value proposition clearer and more attractive.
NarrowBranding & Online Sales
Direct online sales via your website are not only profitable; they are also valuable from a branding perspective as well. When customers make their reservations via your hotel’s Web pages, they have a unique branded experience through their interactions with your online content and features.
This NarrowBrand, hotel-focused online experience communicates to them the essence of your hotel, its unique features, services, amenities, location and more – the components that, combined, constitute your hotel’s unique local brand proposition. This does not happen if your customers make their travel plans via the Web sites of third party intermediary organizations.
Encourage direct online sales by offering lowest rate guarantees, by personalizing the customer experience and by making the process quick and easy to perform. Displaying online reservations features or links appropriately on your hotel’s home page and throughout your hotel’s Web pages helps to encourage online reservations.
NarrowBranding & E-mail
E-mail initiatives are generally developed by the brand’s corporate parent. Yet, these chain-wide, BroadBrand, efforts can also become valuable components in a local, hotel-focused NarrowBrand strategy.