Dress Rehearsal

The NYTimes peeks inside the complex world of hotel branding, where everything from the provenance of the staff uniforms to the functionality of the showerhead work in concert to provide a finely articulated sense of comfort:

"Since 2005, some 31 (hotel) brands have been announced, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, more than at anytime since 1988-89, when 27 were introduced. And with this increased competition, identifying market segments and customer preferences has become essential to creating customer loyalty -- which is where the showerhead, among other details, becomes crucial."

Sheets with high thread counts are not enough. This is an ubiquitous issue across so many companies, from coffee to furniture to clothing, that architects undoubtedly understand: how can you provide something that is at once highly standardized while remaining recognizably distinctive? It's a design problem, both in terms of business structure as well as product design.

"Competition...has taken the art and science of hotel branding to a new level. Enormous resources are being poured into researching and designing hotel rooms, lobbies, amenities and services -- all intended to inspire brand loyalty by creating what hoteliers hope will be a distinctive experience for guests."

While the largest hotel chains are busy developing niche hotel brands to appeal to different demographics, not all players are big. The CEO of Nylo Hotels, a niche hotel brand based in Atlanta, puts it this way:

"Now it's time for a whole new category, the lifestyle brand. People like their Mini Coopers, they like to be connected, they like different architecture and design, and they live in loft-style apartments. Yes, 30 new brands have been launched, but only three or four will rise to the surface, and that hinges on creating a unique brand."

(The implicit message, of course, is that people wish they did have these things, even if they don't. The architecture and finish of the hotel must evoke those aspirations.)

Nylo is customizing everything in its guest lofts (don't call them rooms), including the staff's fashion wear, which was designed by Daniel Vosovic, one of the more successful contestants from the cable television series "Project Runway." Nylo is also spearheading a contest with local artists, whose work will be selected for display throughout its hotels. But Mr. Russell (Nylo's CEO) says that this is not just about decor but also about experience, a word often repeated by hotel brand developers.

Below: Nylo's future "guest lofts."

Words from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink (which I read a few weeks ago, while staying in a particularly nice hotel, coincidentally) seem apropos here. Particularly the part about "sensation transference:"

This is a concept coined by one of the great figures in twentieth-century marketing, a man named Louis Cheskin, who was born in the Ukraine at the turn of the century and immigrated to the United States as a child. Cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions (or aspirations, as per above) that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself. To put it another way, Cheskin believed that most of us don't make a distinction -- on an unconscious level -- between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.

It's interesting to consider Cheskin's point alongside what the CEO of Starwood Hotels says about hotel branding in the NYT article. The brand experience is roughly equal in importance to the design and configuration of the hotel. In these things we search for validation:

Exhaustively researching details like a showerhead is important, but the sum is greater than the parts, Klein said. "When people are traveling," he said, "the first thing they're asked is, 'Where are you staying?' The answer, the hotel brand becomes an emotional representation of the guest's personality, and that is new to the landscape."