Josiah:
What goes into developing a strong brand in hospitality. Today we’re learning from Philippe Zrihen, head of Americas for Ennismore, the parent company of 15 of the strongest brands in lifestyle hospitality today, including Hoxton and 21C Museum Hotels.
You mentioned 15 brands within the portfolio of Ennismore. I’d love to keep your thoughts on branding because to me, as an outsider, it feels these brands have distinct personalities. It feels different as a guest and I’m curious how you think about overseeing all of those brands, maintaining the spirit of the brands, cultivating the brands.
Philippe:
It’s a really good question because we try to learn from some of the mistakes that have been made in the past, and some of the mistakes that I think were made in the past is so focused on. We’re putting entities together. Therefore, we’re gonna make things more efficient. Let’s look at it financially and the brands will follow, and that’s not the way it works. The customer is very, very discerning and can understand when things are different from day one to day two. So right from the beginning, our mantra was even if it’s more painful, even if it costs more, even if it’s more rigorous in terms of what we’re going through, we have to honor each individual brand and we have to put people in charge that they’re responsible for that brand, and maintaining the integrity of that brand and friction between what they’re doing and what others who are more call it efficiency-minded is natural and welcome because we’re gonna find a healthy balance. The second piece of that is to ensure, to the extent we could, that the founders were still involved in some way, shape or form, with the brands to make sure that they perpetuate what they’re trying to accomplish and we keep that authenticity. So if there’s one theme that we have not wavered from is to maintain the brand individuality and to say this is not gonna be compromised, even if other components may come into question. So that’s been our driving force and still is our driving force.
Josiah:
So I mean just to follow up on this. You spoke to a few elements of this, but is there anything else that comes to mind in terms of what makes a strong brand?
Philippe:
One thing I would say to this as an aside. I think super interesting is that people tend to believe that, okay, you have one customer for this brand, one customer for that brand, and what we found especially in lifestyle in this day and age is that there’s a customer and that customer may have a different perspective on what they want at different times. So you may choose to go to Miami for a quiet weekend and stay at the Faina, which is a super high-end luxury hotel, and then you may choose to go to Oklahoma City or to Cincinnati to have a 21C kind of experience at a different level that is much more kind of immersive in terms of what I wanna do and see in that city. And then you can go to Europe the next month and experience one of our Mama Shelter brands, which is a much more simplistic but fully activated type of offering super, super local. And that doesn’t say anything about you good or bad, it just says that you have different tastes and needs. So when we think about our brands, we focus less on this is a customer we’re targeting and more on what is the story we are telling that can resonate with whoever wants to hear it at that time. Second piece, in terms of branding, as I said earlier, what I think is super, super important is how do you, as a hotel operator, appeal to the local community? Don’t bend over backwards for the tourist. They will come if the locals feel that you are a place they wanna be at, that you’re authentic and that you’re giving them that experience and the commonality of the space that worked for them. There’s a whole bunch of other things that we think about on branding, but I would say that those two components are very important. One thing that I find very interesting is that historically, commoditized experiences, especially internationally, were welcome Before the advent of the internet and social media and the ability to get information real time. If I was traveling overseas to an unknown location, I would take comfort from having a name or a product that I knew was going to be exactly like what I had at home. Then that all changed, because now we have the ability to effectively experience from a distance what we’re going to find, and that’s exciting. So that means that now, as hotel operators, we have the ability to be a little more adventurous in what we create around the world, because the customer is willing to take that chance because of a perspective from TripAdvisor, social media as to what has happened and they feel comfortable. So we have to really take this time to say let’s not just continue to replicate, replicate, let’s innovate. And it’s a different model than what a lot of the larger groups do, because that’s their model and for them it’s all about mass and numbers and growing and huge kind of inventory, but for us it’s about individuality, uniqueness within a growing platform, but responsible growth. So I think that is a differentiator that we can afford to play on because of the factors that I just mentioned.
