Perspectives
The value of a brand promise
Executing a hotel branding strategy to improve business results
It’s clear that hotel loyalty is garnered through a strong, positive, impactful experience—but what helps differentiate that experience? Deloitte has explored the characteristics of hotel customer loyalty and found that, underlying the guest experience, a hotel’s brand promise can have a strong impact on business results.
Hotel branding: Beyond the guest experience
Recent findings show that a clearly defined and credible hotel brand promise can help generate rebooking, ancillary spending, and brand advocacy.
Hotels with year-over-year increases in guest satisfaction earn corresponding gains in both loyalty and market share. However, companies in all segments can improve their financial outcomes by ensuring their hotel branding promise is strong and central to their brand culture, and in making delivery on that promise their main focus. The essence of what drives customer experience—people, process, price, and product—should be shaped by an unshakable fidelity to the hotel brand’s promise.
The value of a brand promise
Executing on your brand promise: Measure, monitor, and train
Your hotel developed a brand promise that embodies your brand values and differentiates your brand from competitors—so what now?
Here are three important areas to consider when executing on your hotel brand promise:
- Measure - Measure how well your hotel brand promise resonates among both employees and customers. Do your employees understand the brand promise, are they committed to fulfilling it and, just as importantly, do they believe senior leadership shares this commitment? When presented with your hotel brand promise, do customers consider it appealing, unique, and believable? Based on their recent experiences, do they feel you are doing a good job of delivering on your promise?
- Monitor - Monitor how well you deliver on your hotel’s brand promise and create standards that operationalize the brand promise. Measure performance on those standards through regularly scheduled evaluations. For example, Hotel Brand X has made personalized guest experiences a part of their brand promise. To support this promise, they created standards that call for every guest to be greeted by name when they arrive and to receive a welcome amenity in their room that reflects their personal preferences (e.g. wine, fresh fruit, chocolates, etc.). An on-site evaluation would verify that these standards were met.
- Train - Ongoing training is important to help internal operations deliver on your brand promise consistently, reinforcing the message with customers and strengthening your hotel brand’s reputation.
Related resources for hospitality companies
- Take a comprehensive look at the M&A market with Deloitte’s M&A Trend Report 2015
- Understand the patterns in how different travelers view and use rewards with Winning the race for guest loyalty
- Learn how your hospitality company can fight fraud to preserve it’s loyalty program with Fraud detection and prevention for hotels
- Explore how hospitality companies can drive success by strengthening social media capabilities in Social? That’s for consumers. For travel companies, social media means business
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