Brand hospitality
& franchise

How did Starbucks take over the world of coffee? How did Mc Donald’s become the reference for every fast-food chain? More than the intrinsic quality of their products, it’s the consistent brand identity and the carefully defined ritual of every consumer’s journey that carry the strength of those brands. Not only does everybody know exactly what to expect when pushing the door of one of their venues, anywhere around the globe, but both companies have also become references in their fields, even for people who are not their clients.

These positions of strength create what Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, calls ‘mental availability’. An operative concept developed in his 2010 reference book ‘How Brands Grow’ and widely adopted since by marketeers around the world. Mental availability encompasses the shortcuts that help consumers to choose brands, in that it refers to the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations. It should of course not be confused with a mere visual identity. Reaching mental availability can only be achieved through a global approach.

Companies often tend to focus on sales goals – because they are tangible and measurable in a shorter run – rather than on targeting mental availability. Focusing on strengthening the brand culture and letting it shine through can nevertheless generate much more value in the long-term game. To achieve a consistency that contributes to a 360, bulletproof brand experience, you will need to embrace a holistic model, and to involve different profiles of strategic and design experts who will contribute to that final, seamless effect. This branding process follows a three-layers pattern: strategy, identity, experience.

It all begins with the core, the definition of who you are: your promise, your values, your mission, your personality, your vision… Those ‘stories’, aggregated and consolidated in a clear strategy, will form the creative matrix leading to your identity – an integrated system expressed through spatial, visual, sonic and verbal modes. Finally, your strategic core and identity will translate into interaction touchpoints with your customers – from physical spaces, to websites, to printed materials or merchandising etc – creating the actual brand experience. To sum it up, the more integrated the process is, the stronger the experience will be. By creating enough push from the core, one multiplies the possible connections with the buyers, strengthening brand awareness and offering even more space for mental availability.

This theoretical model finds very concrete applications in the hospitality sector. Nowadays, a restaurant experience goes way beyond the perfection of the food and drinks, and a hotel experience is much more than comfortable rooms and fresh towels. It is not even about the excellence of service but about consistency, at every level, from the moment of the booking to the check-out. Amenities, entertainment, communal spaces, personalization, all those elements have become part of the customer’s expectation and need to be thought of and designed as an organic intricate ecosystem.

The complete transformation of Ostend’s former Royal Astor Hotel into the new trendy New York inspired boutique Upstairs Hotel offers a perfect example of how those principles can be set in action. Following a strict strategic and design process, SKINN rewrote a completely new story in phase with the new concept, permeating every square meter of the hotel.

Because they empower recognizability and facilitate the implementation of repetitive scenarios, holistic strategic designs can also greatly benefit franchise concepts. Following the three-layered core-to-experience approach will allow the establishment of clear brand guidelines and consequently lead to the achievement of real brand consistency. This is, of course, also true outside the hospitality business.

For the growing real-estate company Immo François and its 29 offices across Belgium, SKINN set up a brand system that forms a solid foundation for the franchise, starting with distinctive and recognizable visual elements easily noticed both online and offline, but also a complete brand behaviour routine, namely the service and mindset, that makes the experience with Immo François consistent across all offices. When clients see the green logo, they immediately know what to expect: an energetic, highly professional and modern real estate office that has set new communication standards within its own industry.

When it comes to franchise, it is also essential to create values and principles that define the final experience in a simple and understandable way. Every employee, on any level, should be able to carry that experience, to share the vision and to bring it to life. Brand training and ongoing monitoring will of course be essential to maintain the consistency of the storytelling, but they must be seen as a result of a clear core strategy.

The importance of image and reputation management – based on the initial branding frame – is of the essence. Coming back to Starbucks, it is not the visual identity or the interior decoration that made the brand successful, it’s the emotion, the shared romantic ideal and the complete ritual of the coffee: the smell perceived from outside, the ordering moment with the first-name basis, the wait for the cup – and in the end, a simple latte becoming a real object of desire.