June 2008
Smell and sound are the next big branding tools.
Branding, as far as the hospitality business is concerned, is now no longer just about brand standards, logos on everything which can be monogrammed or even service excellence. In a business characterized by visual and tactile experiences, comes a sensory experience which looks to be the next big thing with hotels looking to imprint their individual brand of hospitality on to their guests.
Equal Strategy scientifically delivers to the hotel and hospitality industry a combination of music styling, fragrance and telephone music and messaging, enhancing the overall customer experience of a hotel’s or hotel chain’s brand and stimulating pleasing guest experience of interacting with that brand.
Decades of behavioral research into the habits of consumers has found that “consumer arousal” can be either stimulated or suppressed through the use of mood settings like music and fragrance. Equal Strategy applies this technology and thinking to hotel guests by delivering sounds and smell stimuli directly to the memory centres of the brain, influencing behavior and creating suggestions at both the conscious and unconscious levels. This can support and extend the brands of hotels and hotel chains and indeed any business (retail, consumer, etc.) which communicates to audiences in private or public space.
Equal Strategy delivers behavioral influences through the most sophisticated technologies available today. The company also provides a full spectrum of customer consultation and support services to maximize the effectiveness of its visionary environmental branding solutions for the hospitality industry. Equal Strategy is the only company in Asia to consult and advise hotel clients on the deployment of integrated sensory branding solutions.
The fragrancing portion of its business was based on the fact that around 80 percent of the brand decisions humans make are based on smell. This is because the sense of smell is the only sense directly connected to the brain’s centres for memory and emotions. The use of fragrancing in hospitality environments is starting to gain more traction in Asia in recent years and hoteliers are beginning to harness the power of smell.
For example, Starwood’s Westin Hotel brand uses a white tea fragrance in all its lobbies worldwide. Another chain which uses its own exclusive ‘signature’
Other, smaller, hoteliers the company works with – often boutique properties - do not always require a ‘signature’
Explains Equal Strategy Chief Executive Officer Simon Faure-Field,”
Tuned In, Turned On
Businesses place great emphasis on the look of their customer environments, and often overlook the ambience and mood created by music and this affects their customers. Music styling is so flexible that it can be used to support strategic positioning of a brand, tactical requirements and motivate customer behavior.
Studies show that using the right music increased supermarket sales by 38.3 percent. What’s more, other research indicates that 40 percent of shoppers made an unplanned purchase after hearing an effective audio message.
Says Faure-Field,”
“The beauty of the service for hoteliers is that they are able to use our suit of music styling tools to control mood, theme and ambience throughout the public areas of their hotels such as lobbies, restaurants, spas and corridors. Music played in hotel corridors can also be used to effectively mask noises from inside guest rooms, thus ensuring a measure of guest privacy. Music is a truly versatile sensory tool with a range of useful applications.”
Equal Strategy is involved intimately in the music selection process. As with fragrance selection, music selection involved with management and staff at all levels and takes a focus group approach to determining what is considered the best mix of genre and playlists. “From this client consultation, we revert back with a specific recommendation on the kind of music to be played within the property, and how that music selection is varied at different time during the day, or depending on how a specific hotel space is being used,” explains the dynamic sensory guru.
Calling The Shots
The telephone is the most frequently used and most important touch point. Do callers to hotels have an experience that is as impressive as the brand’s advertising?
Enhancer, Equal Strategy’s end-to-end telephone messaging consulting service, provides callers with music and messages on hold, converting a source of frustration into an informative, brand-aligned, and even enjoyable experience. The company works with some of the best Asian and international voice over talent to select the best image for their hotel client’s brands.
Take Two
Meanwhile, Singapore’s M hotel has become the latest boutique property in Asia to adopt 360 degree sensory branding solutions created by Equal Strategy. The hotel brought in Equal Strategy to devise a sophisticated brand atmosphere in the property’s public spaces which would create a pleasing environment and promote guest loyalty.
For M Hotel, Faure-Field has installed a combination of fragrance and music in the property’s lobby and ‘music styling’ in the hotel’s Café 2000 and buffet area, whilst separate playlists for the hotel’s spa, pool and business centre are also in the works. The lobby is permeated by a signature ginger and lily fragrance which adds a subtle but pleasing Asian flavor to this Asian hotel property.
For the hotel’s Café 2000, Faure-Field was given free reign by Mark Gailey, Director of Food & Beverage at the hotel, to go to town in developing playlists which would correspond with the feeling of various times of the day. Working closely together and reviewing every single track in a playlist comprising literally hundreds of songs, Gailey and Faure-Field created mood settings for breakfast, lunch, mid afternoon and dinner ranging from Latin, Cuban and bossanova to a light sprinkling of jazz with a European and South American undertone.
Says Faure-Field, “Music, tempo and genre were all critical in creating the appropriate mood and momentum to the time of day, corresponding to how diners would be feeling and their state of alertness and arousal at different periods of the day.”
Source:
http://www.equalstrategy.com/
For more iformation visit http://www.equalstrategy.com/
