Revive your Luxury Hotel’s Growth with a Brand Audit

If you’re looking to revive or increase the growth of your hotel, chances are that you’ve recently noticed a plateau or declining effect on your sales, revenue, or profit trends. With emerging market trends, change in consumer behavior, and other challenges, luxury hotel leaders find it increasingly difficult to anticipate what’s next.

Adapting to the change is requisite for business, and standing out is key for brands. Take Apple, for instance. The luxury goods brand saw a decline in iPhone sales in Q1 2019, which used to be the most popular and selling product of Apple earlier. But now they might have found a new core through their services business.

Firstly, you need to respond with an overall observance of your brand: observe your sales efforts, marketing plans, brand identity, digital engagement, customer experience, food and beverage quality, et al. Merely observing and putting out fires does not go far in solving your brand’s challenges. You and your team need an actionable plan to work upon.

Why You Should Audit your Luxury Hotel Brand

A brand audit shows how your business is performing according to your clients. It offers you these insights and enables you to:

• Decide your brand’s positioning and design remedial strategies
• Discover the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of your business.
• Align your services with more precision to the needs of your clients.

What is a Luxury Hotel Brand Audit

A luxury hotel brand audit is a comprehensive checkup of the brand assets and their individual plus overall performance. This is followed by implementing corrective strategies and measures.

How to Perform the Audit

Here’s how you can analyse your brand and take further actions through a well-done audit. Going through the following plan can help elevate your brand’s growth to new heights:

1. Plan your Audit

Before we begin with the process, you and your team should take note of the following:

Objective:

Inform your team what led you to think about doing the audit for your brand and get them on board with the idea.

Challenges:

List down all the challenges faced by you and your team.

Timeline:

Define a clear timeline with all the tasks that your team would be performing to conduct the audit.

Stakeholders:

Assign individual team members the tasks related to their respective fields of expertise.

2. Create a Checklist of Audit Elements

Based on the challenges noted in the previous step, list down the brand elements that need to be addressed in the audit.

For example, if your website is going through 85% bounce rate, you need to list down ‘website’ as an element and add attributes like speed, design, usability to your checklist.

3. Conduct Customer Interviews

Analytics help by giving you an overview with large amounts of data, but conducting one-on-one interviews can help one understand the motivation of your customers for choosing your brand and receive their direct feedback.

Pro Tip: Conduct your customer interviews in your luxury hotel to help them connect with the brand.

What should you ask in your interviews?

• What do you feel when you hear about the brand?
• Would you choose any other brands over our brand, and why?
• Do your expectations match the brand’s experience?
• How likely are you to promote our brand to your circle?

These being the ice breakers, you can ask more specific questions once you manage to connect with your customer.

4. Document your Observations

Note all of your customers’ responses, including their non-verbal responses through body language.

Along with customer feedback and responses, document your review on each brand element that you listed for the audit.

As it is the team that primarily takes care of your customers, their views on brand elements are crucial for a successful brand audit. If they remain satisfied, your customers will be in good hands.

5. Craft an Action Plan for your Team

This last step is the most important. The change that would lead to growth takes place here.

Form a strategic action plan on what to do next based on your observations, your team’s reviews, and your customer’s feedback.

Follow up on the implementation of your plans with monthly or weekly reviews. You can go for another brand audit where you will start by taking into account the success ratio of the previous audit. This will enable you to deliver continual improvement and boost growth.

The luxury market is rapidly evolving with innovations and disruptions. The key to sustained growth is your ability to reflect on your brand and take steps to evolve with the changing environment. With this actionable plan to a refreshed start, it becomes possible to track overall performance and take necessary actions.