The Ultimate Luxury Hotel Brand Audit Checklist 2/5 — Brand Strategy & Story

Auditing your own brand can be a daunting task. Generally, we fall short of the desired efficiency in critiquing our own work. We identified this problem with leaders in the hospitality space. Keeping this in mind, we have created a set of actionable checklists which give a clear path to analyse each area of the brand.

This post covers the elements to be inspected for ‘Brand Strategy and Story’ of a luxury hotel brand. Following these steps thoroughly, you’ll begin to notice significant improvements in the respective areas of your brand. Needless to say, this will lead to your overall growth.

Given below are the detailed checklist elements for your brand:

1. Brand Architecture

Top leaders building, running, and managing multiple companies should start their brand audits by considering the brand architecture. Keiretsu, for instance, a conglomerate of businesses with cross-shareholdings, is one such architecture.

Corporate, Umbrella, and Family brands
When users are connected to a single node of the brand hierarchy, they must be able to form opinions about the entire family of brands. (Example: Alphabet and Google)

Endorsed and Sub-brands
Whether a sub-brand is the brand’s own offspring (daughter brand) or an adopted one (acquired/merged brand), there’ll always be a need to connect it with the larger purpose of the brand’s vision. (Example: Virgin Branded Companies)

Product Brands
Products launched by the parent brand can be seen as independently functioning products while still being a part of the overall brand ecosystem. (Example: Atlassian)

2. Research & Insights

How a company organises and utilises its research, insights, and industry trends to the customer’s benefit speaks volumes about its services, hospitality, and management.

Audits
Audits are the timely checks of your brand’s performance.

Persona
Customers personas help you understand your audience better, since they define real attributes of your ideal customer based on market research.

Segmentation
Customer segments are different sets of similar customers your brand wants to identify and associate with.

Customer Segmentation (Image Source: Florie Thielin)

Workshops
The workshops organized for your teams enhance your team’s learning curve, with sessions being organized for specific topics that require industry expertise.

Research, Trends & Insights
Market trends and latest industry research of the hospitality sector give you insights that are instrumental in designing your luxury services and products. They also help create a unique experience for your customers.

Testing
When launching a new luxury product or service, the prototype is tested with a set of customers to receive feedback and improvise.

2. Communication Strategy

The following points are crucial to effectively communicate your brand values to your customers.

Marketing Strategy
This defines your approach for growing your brand through various channels and touch points.

Sustainability Strategy
With the world moving towards sustainable development, every hotel should measure their ecological footprint. The objective should be to work towards the goals that are stated by the UN as a world vision of 2030.

Personal Branding Strategy
An essential part of your visibility is you, an individual, as yourself. Top leaders leverage their personal brands to leave a mark.

Communications Strategy
Your plan to achieve communication objectives for your hotel, which includes networking goals, target audience, and handling your communication channels.

Content Marketing Strategy
Today, customers look for value in your content. This makes it crucial to not just create content, but to provide value while doing so.

Brand Launch Strategy
Having invested a lot of time in building your hotel and your brand, you will gain a significant amount of traction once you invest time in planning an exciting launch day. This helps create a powerful first impression.

Brand Ambassador Strategy
People promoting your brand outside your hotel act as advocates of your brand, spreading the word. These can be your customers, employees, or even volunteers who appreciate your brand.

Customer Engagement Strategy
The main value proposition of luxury hotels is your hospitality. How you engage with your customers makes or breaks your offerings.

Brand Awareness Strategy
As long as you’re creating strategies and not merely using short-term tactics, your niche audience will get to know your brand.

3. Brand Definition

This section is foundational work. During an audit, you need to match your current activities to your core beliefs and brand promise.

Mission Statements
A mission statement encompasses the why, how, and what you do as a brand.

Vision Statements
Your take on the future and how you plan to achieve it.

Value Proposition
Reflects how well you understand your customers’ pains and wishes, to give a value proposition which resolves issues and creates gains for them.

Positioning Statement
The single most important statement for your brand. It’s how your customers think and feel about your brand.

4. Messaging + Story

As humans, it’s the stories that people remember. When brands have their own story to tell, these impressions work to form attachments with their customers while drawing in more people towards themselves.

Tagline
A very short-length message that deeply impacts the target audience, working along psychology and culture.

Key Messaging
Delivering messages which you want your brand’s target audience to hear and remember.

Service Definitions
What your brand does to serve its customers should be accurately defined, to clearly state your value proposition bundles.

Customer Pledges
A set of pledges that acknowledge customers of service standards and how they will take care of their needs. Here’s an example of a pledge.

Vocabulary
A brand’s vocabulary comprises of customer-friendly words that connect with them rather than high-end and heavy words.

History
An integral part of storytelling is the history of the brand: where it originated from, what led it till the present, and what could the future hold. Connecting history with the present and future brand offerings sends out a powerful message about the brand.

Boilerplate
An essential part of any PR campaign, this standardized chunk of text is featured towards the end of an article, giving an outline of the company’s products, services, clients, awards, its purpose, and positioning. Often this also features its size, presence, key locations as well as its website and social media profile links.

Elevator Speech
A short pitch of 30 seconds generally, highlighting the main idea behind your product/service/offering in a unique and memorable way.

Brand Voice
Your brand, personified. The tone, style, and mood of your brand language tells a lot about your brand.

Headline Style
Writing headlines that matter to your customers and stay relevant to your brand.

Call to Action
The final touch and sign up with your brand is the result of an effective Call to Action.

Next Up: Brand Identity Checklist

For complete category-wise checklists, refer to our posts on this series:

1. Brand Strategy and Story Checklist

2. Brand Identity Checklist

3. Experience Checklist

4. Team Advisory and Guidelines Checklist

As a luxury hotel leader, these sets of checklists will be instrumental in conducting your own brand audit with your teams.