Pauline E. Ranger A friend recently asked if his company could leverage its corporate branding across a number of brands in its portfolio.
It was a question of scale. How could his company compete in the market if its brands were not as well-known and popular? Isn’t the brand of a company a good way to show scale?
It seems like the answer is obvious: leverage that corporate brand as much as possible to gain the scale and leverage needed to compete.
Not necessarily.
Ignoring the corporate brand is not an alternative, as a wide range of audiences already form associations and draw conclusions based on that brand. The business section of the newspaper is a daily source for the financial and investor community. Business professionals can see how the American Consumer Satisfaction Index rates the corporate brand. Most importantly, employees of companies look to their corporate office for guidance and leadership not only in understanding business strategy but also in understanding how a portfolio of brands is meant to work together. Every day, employees are expected to live and understand the corporate brand.
It is important to consider how you will leverage your corporate branding carefully. Not doing so can have a negative impact on your business. Corporate brands can be a powerful tool for enhancing the hotel business and elevating the status of each property if they are used in a creative and sophisticated way.
Consider the following:
* The corporate brand and the individual hotel brands. Each hotel brand has its target market, unique selling point, and mission statement. To be successful, a corporate branding strategy must have a synergy between the business objectives and brand goals. The corporation also has a plan and aims to achieve superior financial results. The corporate brand should reflect the company’s business strategy. This will help you decide on corporate branding.
* The current corporate branding equity. Many audiences have already perceived your brand, and this impression is based on a variety of different sources. What are these associations? What are the associations? Are these associations things that could potentially harm, enhance, or reinforce the hotel brands within your portfolio? Hyatt and Marriott were originally hotels, and they still have strong functional links to this category. Corporate brands that are less focused on hotels may also offer powerful emotional and self-expression benefits. You force your customers to draw parallels between the corporate and hotel brands by attempting to create a direct connection. You run the risk of developing confusion and losing out on valuable opportunities if you don’t understand potential conflicts and synergies.
* The diversity of target audiences that the corporate brand can reach. There are many other audiences that you should consider. While the obvious target audience for your brand is business and leisure travelers, travel agents, and corporate planners, there are also others to think about. Consider the financial community that lends money to build hotels, the investors who own your company’s stock, or, most importantly, the employees who live the brand every day. Cendant, a company with a diverse portfolio of holdings, may not think about targeting consumers directly with its corporate branding. However, the financial community or Cendant employees are looking for a reason to trust the company. Hoteliers can use corporate brand development to reach out to their target audiences.
* The relationship between all brands within the corporate portfolio. Are there any associations between two or more hotel brands that you can think of when you look at the entire portfolio of Choice Hotels and Starwood? Exist loyalty programs, alliances, or sponsorships that explicitly link the brands? Your target customers might have drawn links between the individual hotel brands, whether they did so consciously or not. Identify and understand these links, whether they’re functional, emotional, or organizational. This may reveal hidden synergies and potential obstacles in leveraging your brand.
After analyzing these factors, you will need to choose the audience(s) that your brand is aimed at. Do not underestimate the importance of your employees in attracting customers to your brand.
No matter what hotel brand they work for, it is important to ensure that the corporate values, promises, and goals are aligned with their own. Consider the options that are available to leverage your brand. The possibilities are varied, ranging from the obvious to the subtle. There is a wide range of considerations between.
Marriott has had great success in leveraging its corporate brand power to transfer quality and consistency throughout hotels like Courtyard.
Other interesting options are available outside the hotel industry. Conde Nast uses a networked approach, transferring equity to a variety of magazines while maintaining a strong relationship with any particular book. Kellogg’s, Nabisco, and other companies use their corporate name as a symbol of “approval” for all their products to show the consistency and quality of their products. This allows individual brands to target specific consumer segments.
Branded benefits or ingredient brands, such as Coolmax (the high-performance synthetic fabric used in athletic clothing), are operated by a wide range of clothing brands. The Westin Heavenly Bed is an analogy from the hotel industry. It would be great if a corporate brand were able to lend credibility to the benefits of these ingredients. This could create a link between your entire portfolio.
When considering your options, keep in mind that you can choose a strategy with a lot of flexibility. Sony uses nearly all possibilities in this spectrum to target customers and create lifetime loyalty. Sony uses a range of designs, from Sony Walkman to Sony Pictures to Metreon to Pro Audio and PlayStation. Each company uses the Sony name explicitly or impliedly while taking into consideration the factors mentioned above.
Corporate and hotel brand relationships should be flexible yet systematic. This will allow the corporate brand to become greater than its parts.
When you make this decision, be sure to document your persuasive yet objective arguments, as you’ll need to convince the most difficult audience – your employees.
To ensure consistency, all employees must be on board with any brand name changes, including adding co-brands, master brands, or endorsements. Employees are emotionally attached to their brands. Changing the name would make them feel like they were working for a new company. It is important to get internal buy-in, and nothing says it better than linking your decision with business results. Explain how this change will allow cross-selling of brands, increase customer lifetime value, and increase return on investment for the entire company. Making a fact-based, objective, and financially motivated argument will help ease the acceptance of your change and eventually facilitate the transition.
