curriculum.naf.orgcurriculum.naf.org/packaged/assets/downloads/hospitali… · Web viewAt its simplest, a brand is the name, sign, symbol, design, or any combination of these that

AOHT Hospitality Marketing

Lesson 6The Significance of Brands

Student Resources

Resource Description

Student Resource 6.1 Notes: Introduction to Branding

Student Resource 6.2 Reading: Hospitality Branding

Student Resource 6.3 Reading: Brand Decisions

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AOHT Hospitality MarketingLesson 6 The Significance of Brands

Student Resource 6.1

Notes: Introduction to BrandingStudent Name: Date:

Directions: Complete this note-taking resource as you view the presentation Hospitality Branding. Use it to help you prepare for your quiz later in this lesson.

1. What is a brand? Why is a brand important?

2. What are the five elements of an effective brand?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

3. What is the difference between a brand name and a brand mark? Give an example of a famous brand name and its brand mark.

4. Which is the best possible scenario for a brand: low awareness, positive image; high awareness, negative image; or high awareness, positive image? Explain your answer.



5. How can a brand be used to target a specific market segment?

6. What is family branding?

7. Complete this phrase: % of the customers will provide % of the business. What does this phrase mean?

8. What is a brand loyalty program? Why is it a good idea for some businesses?




Reading: Hospitality Branding

Today, we are going to learn more about branding. The main topics we will cover are:

• What is a brand?

• Why is it important?

• How can it be used as part of a marketing strategy?

• What role can a brand loyalty program play in a marketing strategy?



At its simplest, a brand is the name, sign, symbol, design, or any combination of these that is used to identify the product and establish a separate and unique identity from the competition. A brand defines a set of qualities about a company or a product. A brand can function as an unwritten guarantee—you know what you are going to get. Many marketers today think of a brand as an experience.

Think about a brand you use—snack food or sports drinks or makeup or computers or clothes or cell phones. Now think about the last commercial you saw for that brand. Many commercials are selling the “experience” of the brand. How good the snacks will taste. How much better you’ll play after drinking the sports drink. How attractive you’ll feel wearing that makeup or those clothes. How much fun you’ll have with that computer or that phone.

“I stayed at the Ritz” means something special, because the Ritz-Carlton is not only a very expensive hotel but also a very famous one that provides top-quality service. Brands can also serve as shorthand to identify or describe the experience; driving a VW is different from driving a Jaguar. In fact, some brands become so well known that we use the brand name as the name of the product—like a Xerox machine instead of a copy machine, a Kleenex instead of tissue, or an iPod.



Ranchers used branding irons to burn their mark onto the animal’s hide. That way, if a cowboy found a cow wandering around in the middle of nowhere, he would know which farm the animal belonged to.

In marketing, a brand serves as mental shorthand for letting people know what they are going to get. You can make assumptions about a product with a certain brand. For example, you know you can expect excellent service if you stay at a Ritz-Carlton hotel. You know exactly what a Coke tastes like. And if you hear the words “Mercedes,” “BMW,” or “Porsche,” you instantly think of expensive, high-quality cars.

If one of these brands develops a new product, you are more confident about trying it because you trust those brands.



A brand should be memorable—but not too unusual. As a symbol for the company, it should be easy to pronounce, recognize, and remember. If people don’t know how to pronounce the name, or if the name is so ordinary that a hundred other companies might use the same one, that won’t work. For example, Red Lobster is a brand of restaurant. The name is easy to pronounce, easy to recognize, and easy to remember, since the restaurants serve seafood.

Another key element of an effective brand is that the name may describe the benefits of the product or service. There’s a reason so many hotel and motel chains have a name that says something about comfort or home. There’s the Comfort Inn, the Residence Inn, the Homewood Suites, and many more. Their names convey the idea that they provide all the comforts of home. The companies have positioned themselves just by the brand name they chose.

If the company intends to expand, its brand name needs to work in foreign countries, too. McDonald’s is all over the world, but its “Quarter Pounder with Cheese” does not translate well in Europe, where countries use the metric system. The Chevy Nova car did fine in the United States but not in Spanish-speaking countries. No va means “don’t go” in Spanish. Who wants to buy a car with that name?



The brand name should be distinctive enough that it can be trademarked. What if you saw an ad for “American Company, Inc.”? Is that an airline, a hotel, a restaurant, an investment firm? Who knows? The name is too generic. So the name has to be normal enough that people know what it means and how to say it but unique enough that it stands for something specific. That is one reason why many companies use their founder’s name: Disney, McDonald’s, and Hilton all did so. Other hospitality brand names that are unique enough include Wyndham Hotels, Avis Rental Car, and Delta Airlines.

Since a brand needs to stand for something unique, its meaning cannot be diluted (watered down) or confused by being overused or misused. Pizza Hut sells pizza. If you go to a Pizza Hut restaurant and it offers to sell you a hamburger, that’s confusing. And if you were to go to the grocery store and find Pizza Hut bottled water, that would be even more confusing. It is possible to extend a brand to many different products—Disney has theme parks, hotels, a movie studio, and television channels, all using the Disney name. But all those pieces have some things in common—for example, they are family friendly and focused on entertainment. They also tend to include Mickey Mouse and the other familiar Disney characters.



A brand mark is the symbol, logo, or design used to identify the brand. For example, McDonald’s has the Golden Arches. McDonald’s is the brand name, and the Golden Arches is the brand mark. Many brand marks are trademarked, meaning that it has been given a legal designation and no one can use it except the owner.

A brand mark should meet the same criteria as the brand name. Based on that:

• Logo #1 would not be a good brand mark for a restaurant. It is distinctive and unusual, but it’s hard to tell what the image is supposed to be.

• Logo #2 would probably not be a good brand mark for a restaurant because snails are fancy gourmet food that not a lot of Americans eat, and it might suggest that the restaurant has really slow service. However, it all depends on where the restaurant is located. University of California, Santa Cruz, has a slug as its mascot, so several businesses in Santa Cruz use snails or slugs as their logo as a tribute to the university.

• Logo #3 might be an acceptable brand mark if the restaurant were called “The Apple Tree” or something similar.



To be successful, a brand needs high awareness (i.e., it’s well known in the marketplace) and a positive image.

• If a company has high awareness and a negative image—like a well-known hotel chain that has a bedbug infestation—the company needs to quickly improve its image or risk permanent damage to its brand.

• If the brand has low awareness and a negative image, the company needs to improve both.

• If the brand has low awareness but a positive image, the company needs to increase awareness in the marketplace in order to be successful. After all, if your restaurant serves terrific food but no one eats there except your family and friends, you aren’t really getting anywhere with your business.



A successful brand can be used in many different ways within a marketing strategy. The brand can be used to build brand recognition and brand loyalty, so customers are more likely to choose that brand for future purchases.

Brands can be used to help launch new products. For example, Marriott Hotels launched “Courtyard by Marriott”—a new approach to hotels aimed at a specific market segment. The success of Courtyard by Marriott is partially because of the Marriott name, which already has substantial brand loyalty within the hotel industry.

Brands can be used to segment markets. Courtyard by Marriott was aimed at the market segment of business travelers. Other Marriott hotels are aimed at other market segments, such as people on vacation.

As you might guess, Budget Rent-a-Car targets the market segment of people who are watching their money when they travel. The Hertz brand of car rental used to be targeted at business travelers, but it is now positioning itself to attract local residents who need to rent cars as well. When one well-known brand enters the same market territory as another, the marketing strategy of both will change in order to handle increased competition.



Brands can be expanded in many ways. If the original brand is a successful one, its strength can help the expansion brands succeed as well.

Cobranding (also called colocation) is when two different brands share a location (i.e., Taco Bell/KFC combinations, a brand-name restaurant such as T.G.I. Friday’s in a Country Inns and Suites hotel).

In addition, brands can be developed into umbrella brands (McDonald’s) and subbrands (Big Mac, Quarter Pounder, Chicken McNuggets, Happy Meal). Ingredients can also be branded—for example, a jelly doughnut filled with Smuckers Jelly.

Family branding is when a brand name is used on several products; in the hospitality industry, the products are usually targeting different market segments. For example, in the chart above, each of those Holiday Inn products targets a different market segment, but they all use the Holiday Inn name.



A brand loyalty program (also called frequency marketing, relationship marketing, or loyalty marketing) rewards customers for continuing to support a specific brand (e.g., frequent flyer/diner/guest programs). For example, if you order pizza from the same place every time, they might give you a frequent diner card that entitles you to one free pizza for every 10 pizzas you order. Hotel chains may reward loyalty customers by offering free upgrades, customizing their room (putting in special pillows, for example), and giving access to rooms at sold-out times.

These programs are an effective way to build repeat business and brand loyalty. However they are expensive to run and maintain, and they require a great deal of time to plan. Companies who run loyalty programs feel that they’re worth it, though, because keeping a customer is much less expensive than getting a new one, and loyal members wind up spending more money compared with nonloyal members.



Brand loyalty programs help a company differentiate itself (help it stand out from other companies).

Think about it this way: if there are a few hot dog stands nearby, and the hot dogs all taste about the same, would you choose the one that gives you a free side of fries on the fifth visit? If so, you have participated in a loyalty program. Similarly, if you have to travel for business, you could take an American Airlines flight or a United Airlines flight. Both go to the same location at around the same time for about the same price. But if you earn free miles by traveling on United, and possibly other benefits like being able to board first or get better seats, and you won’t earn these benefits traveling on American, which one would you pick?




Reading: Brand DecisionsDirections: Choose two of the products listed below. Read the description and answer the following questions about them in your notebook:

Is the company making a good decision? Why or why not?

Make a prediction. Will this product succeed or fail? Why?

1. New CokeCoca-Cola has been around for over 100 years. It has history and tradition. Until the mid-1980s, Coke had always dominated the soft drink market—even the early astronauts drank Coca-Cola in space! Then Pepsi started to catch up. They offered the Pepsi Challenge—a blind taste test—and people seemed to prefer the sweeter taste of Pepsi over the traditional flavor of Coke. So the Coca-Cola Company created New Coke, which tasted more like Pepsi, and decided to take the old flavor of Coke off the shelves.

2. Blue Ribbon Sports’ Moon ShoesIn the late 1960s, a running coach named Bill Bowerman teamed up with a distance runner named Phil Knight to create a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. At first, Blue Ribbon Sports imported running shoes from Japan. But then Bowerman and Knight got an idea for a shoe design of their own. They poured liquid rubber into a waffle iron and created a new type of running shoe sole. They called their innovative design Moon Shoes and sold them out of their cars to other runners they knew and competed with.

3. Earring Magic KenBarbie has been a popular toy since the 1950s, and her boyfriend, Ken, has been around since 1961. Both toys have been made over as the years have gone by, reflecting the changing ideas of what men and women “should” look like. Mattel, the company that makes Barbie and Ken, would periodically hold focus groups of little girls and ask their opinion on what Ken should look like. Based on those focus group results, in 1993 Mattel Toys launched Earring Magic Ken, who wore a mesh t-shirt, a purple leather vest, and had an earring in his left ear.

4. McDonald’s Arch DeluxeMcDonald’s decided to expand its range of burger offerings with the Arch Deluxe—“the burger with the grown-up taste.” The belief was that since so much of the McDonald’s menu caters to kids, especially little kids, a more sophisticated-tasting burger might increase the restaurant’s appeal to adults. The burger was taste tested by adult focus groups, and they all approved of its “more adult” flavor as a good new direction for the McDonald’s menu.



5. Kimberly Clark’s Disposable Facial WipesIn the 1920s, women used thick, heavy cold cream to clean their faces. This stuff was very hard to get off, and it would leave the bathroom towels all messy. So the Kimberly Clark Company invented disposable facial wipes—soft, thin pieces of paper that could be used to wipe off the cold cream and then be thrown away once they were used. The facial wipes were even promoted by movie stars who used them to clean up after wearing movie makeup all day. But, by 1926, the company was getting lots of letters from consumers who were using their product in another way. If the company followed this new trend, they would have to give up on all their movie star advertising and start over again—with a kind of product no one had ever heard of before.

6. Planet HollywoodA Hollywood-themed restaurant partially owned by stars including Demi Moore, Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Whoopi Goldberg, Planet Hollywood franchises opened all over the world. The idea was to capitalize on the public’s fascination with movies and movie stars. The restaurant got a lot of publicity when the movie star owners ate there along with their famous friends.


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curriculum.naf.orgcurriculum.naf.org/packaged/assets/downloads/hospitali… · Web viewAt its simplest, a brand is the name, sign, symbol, design, or any combination of these that