While your personal identity sets you apart from every other individual on the planet, a brand identity can be the special factor that helps a business distinguish itself from other businesses.
Much like an attitude, the ways in which you spend your time, or how you treat other people, a successful company must collect certain elements to portray an image that will ensure its continued growth and prosperity.
Brand identity, boiled down, is the personality of the business: How it interacts with its consumers, the values that it tries to implement, how it speaks to people, and the vision that it is attempting to convey to the world.
Brand identity differs from brand image, which focuses more on colors, logos, designs, and brand name. Although, brand image is an extension of brand identity. When it comes to branding in the hotel industry, there are a few factors that must be taken into account to create a hotel brand identity that will be widely accepted by potential customers.
As with any hospitality branding, a hotel branding strategy should be clear-cut, memorable, flexible, tenacious, and easy to apply. Knowing who you are, having a specific design, and knowing how to reach your customers are the key elements to creating an alluring hotel brand identity.
Knowing Who You Are
For effective hotel branding, you need to know who you are as a brand. This could include the hotel’s mission, the values that drive the company, the brand personality, and how you differentiate yourself from other hotels. It can also include your hotel’s current image, its reputation, and where you’re currently positioned in the hospitality industry.
You also need to know how to communicate these elements to the consumer. Another tip for finding out who you are as a business is to ask yourself why the hotel was started in the first place. You could also ask what your hotel does better than all of the others. What makes you special and what makes you stand out from all of your competitors?
Designing Your Brand Identity
Designing a brand’s identity is a multi-faceted objective. First and foremost, the hotel must have a name and logo that goes along with its values and communicates who you are. This is the cornerstone of the hotel’s brand identity.
You want the name and logo to be appealing, clean, and trendy. In addition, you want them to be something that your customers will not forget. The best hotel names are the ones that you could think of without even having to use Google, the ones that ring through pop culture.
Additionally, hotel branding requires a design that speaks to your customers. Colors and shapes have certain psychological impacts, so studying these differences and finding the look that will give your guests a calm, safe, happy feeling will likely be beneficial in creating your brand logo.
Communicating With Your Customers
Knowing how to attract your customers can make or break any successful hotel. Not only do you need to have multiple platforms for your hotel, but they all must be concise and follow the flow of your hotel brand identity.
You must make sure that your website fully represents this and that your business cards, email design, social media accounts, and even the product packaging are also in line with how you would like your hotel to be viewed by the rest of the world.
In a sea of competitor hotels all trying to pull in as many guests as they possibly can, it helps to have a well-thought-out and accurately executed brand identity strategy. Your hotel brand identity should comment on your values and beliefs and have design and customer communication that follows suit. You want to paint your hotel in a positive light, so it is crucial to have a brand identity that portrays who you are to your customers.
This post is part of BlueprintRF’s entrepreneur series, a collection of articles intended to equip business owners and executives with the tools, information, and resources they need to thrive in the hospitality industry.
