Designing for Brand Identity and Guest Experience
Written By Cristina Villalón
ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Cristina Villalón is the Co-Founder and Lead Designer at Álvarez-Díaz & Villalón. She directs both the Interior Design and Visual Merchandising divisions while overseeing all decisions made on a day-to-day basis at the firm.
Interior design is the key to strengthening your brand and your hotel guest's experience
A physical space is an excellent place to create unique customer experiences, make a memorable impression and spark an emotional connection with customers that will elevate your brand and influence their behavior and guest experience.
Good interior design may seem like a luxury, yet without it, hotels, restaurants, and others in the hospitality industry are handicapped. Strategic interior design can accomplish the following and more:
Increase brand awareness
Communicate brand identity
Improve company image
Differentiate it from the competition
Appeal to target markets
Create unique and memorable experiences
Develop customer loyalty
Your Brand
Your brand is the essence of your company's identity and your promise to customers. By expressing the characteristics and values of your company, products and services, branding tells customers who you are and what they can expect, or not, from your products and services.
A strong brand encourages customers to buy a product or service not through marketing tactics but by sending a consistent brand message, meeting their expectations and nurturing their loyalty.
Interior Branding
Interior branding is interior design that integrates brand strategy to convey company identity through tangible and intangible design elements such as colors, materials, decor, FF&E, lighting and ambiance, and to deliver that brand's experience to customers.
Interior branding is more than a logo, color and sign. To be effective, design elements must work together to create a unique and engaging physical and sensory experience with customers. By aligning every design decision with its brand identity, a business can strengthen and increase the value of its brand.
Brand Personality
Why travel to a faraway land to stay at a cookie-cutter, plain-vanilla hotel lacking a sense of place and unique, memorable experiences? Today's guests want to escape their everyday lives in spaces that inspire them and compel them to take selfies and post them online. They want to experience and explore.
In addition to service, what customers notice most about a hotel, restaurant or store is its look and feel. Is the personality of that space casual or elegant, modern or classic, simple or sophisticated, conservative or hip? The brand defines; interior branding expresses it.
Consider the Standard High Line Hotel in New York City. Despite its standard name, the hotel greets you with an upside down sign above a huge yellow revolving door. Right away, guests expect the hotel to be unusual and exciting, an experience the hotel delivers with surprising design elements at every turn—from pitch dark elevators where high-definition screens show fantastic art to a biergarten featuring communal seating and staff in traditional German costumes. The design elements tell customers the Standard is a fun, eccentric and innovative brand that appeals to young hipsters.
The W New York is another hotel that knows how to use interior branding. It pushes the envelope by using new materials, novel textures, and a shiny, provocative look and feel that tells guests the W is edgy, current and bold.
All the Right Reasons
Strategic, well-executed interior branding sends the right message to the right customer at the right time. It offers companies the opportunity to showcase what makes them special and better than the competition, to attract and engage customers, and to turn them into promoters of their brand.
In today's hospitality industry, the focus is shifting from customer service to customer experience. Smart hoteliers are combining great interior design with technology to provide extraordinary experiences the guests will love and share in social media.
A Shortcut to Superior Guest Experience
To learn how technology is transforming the hospitality industry and how to use it to reinforce your brand and improve the coveted guest experience, download our free e-book:
Innovation-Driven Technology Revolutionizes the Hotel Guest Experience
Customer Experience