Josiah: This week, our new co-host and innovation correspondent, Matthias Huettebraeuker kicks off a special series with Hans Meyer, the initial creator and founding partner of citizenM. In today’s episode, they explore what we can learn from citizenM’s groundbreaking approach to hospitality, with future conversations in the days ahead, diving into his work with Zoku, and much more on innovation and creativity in hospitality today. So without further ado, I’ll hand the mic over to Matthias.
Matthias: My guest today is one of the smartest people in hospitality. He’s a thought leader. He’s a daring entrepreneur. He’s a serial innovator. He’s one of the people who brought us citizenM and after that, he founded a hybrid hospitality brand that blends living, working and social spaces and a transformative new concept. That brand of course is Zoku and that man of course is Hans Meyer. Welcome to the podcast, Hans.
Hans: Thank you so much, Matthias, for having me.
Matthias: Thank you so much for taking the time. Let us maybe start by going a little bit back in time. One thing I found interesting or encouraging about you is that you’re actually contrary to most disruptors. You’re actually not from outside of the industry, right? So as an encouraging note at the beginning, innovation from within still seems possible. Which is good. But seriously, what I find so interesting about your invention of One Star is Born, which later became citizenM, is how you went about it, right? Because I always think you can’t really start from black canvas, right? No matter how hard you try or insist that you’re starting from something completely empty, There’s always the hotel before the hotel. There’s always your history of doing stuff, right? There’s all the cliches out there of how traditional hotels work, contemporary hotels work. And there’s this rich repertoire of cultural movements and motifs and stuff. So what you can do traditionally is you can start adding stuff to that notion or, and I believe that’s what you did at citizenM, you can leave a lot out. Explain how you created the idea that then became citizenM.
Hans: So I think the interesting thing is at that time, and we’re talking already about 2003, so that’s quite a long ago, you basically saw that hotels were carbon copies from each other at that time already. So, I mean, the room was always the same, just the only thing which was different was the brand name and basically key color. So they can also could compete on location and price. And they said, we should be a place for everybody. And that’s a fundamental thing that I actually don’t believe, because everybody doesn’t exist, and especially not anymore. So the entire idea from citizenM was, look to how the hotel industry is basically working. You had one-star hotels and five-star hotels. But there’s one fundamental issue that people don’t think about, is that whether you stay in a five-star hotel or a one-star hotel, in any case, you would love to have a great night’s sleep. and a great shower and you don’t want to have a kind of an air conditioning which makes a lot of noise or doesn’t work or you want to have at that time free internet which was pretty exceptional. So basically I said what do people feel is very much important? and put it on a kind of a five star level and what they don’t need. So you don’t need a room of 30 square meters in the middle of a center, an expensive city center, if you’re using that room between a late night dinner and an early flight the next morning, which was obviously the case. And I deliberately took the freedom of just starting with a white sheet of paper, because I also feel if you’re too stuck in your thinking about the existing things, then you change some smaller items, but you fundamentally don’t change the entire concept. And what was interesting is to look also to other industries and adapt those models to the hotel industry. And that was basically the start of citizenM.
Matthias: In actually doing that, you, what I find interesting is that you created something that at the beginning looked and sounded very zeitgeisty, but as you said, it’s like almost 25 years ago and it still feels so relevant and so resonant. Is that because you actually were not looking at what other people were doing, but you were looking at actually what people want and need at the core of their motivational set or their need set. Is that also a learning that you really should look at, at the people and not at competition, at the market, at trends and all those things?
Hans: I came from a more traditional background, like you said in the beginning, and there I often got floor plans and buildings and schematic designs. And at that time, I mean, there was a floor plan from an architect who took a building as a kind of a starting point. I truly believe that you need to take people as a kind of a starting point and then you get a kind of a different and maybe also reversed approach because normally you start with a building and you end up with people and this is you start with people and basically you end up with a building which is geared towards the specific desires and wishes of a specific target audience. So fundamentally it’s to step out of your own shoes and step into the shoes of your target audience. And also, what I said earlier, make deliberate choices. Don’t try to be a product for everybody, but listen to a certain segment of the market where you feel there’s a huge growth potential over there and I can make a fantastic product for this specific target audience. And if you do that well, the financials will come by itself. It’s not the other way around. You cannot start with an Excel sheet to make fundamentally changes, I think.
