Project services
Brand definition
Brand purpose workshops
Manifesto
Values definition
Launch presentation
Agency partner
Design Hotels In-House
Our brief
Design Hotels is a global travel and hospitality platform. It connects its community of conscious travellers with a carefully curated collection of hotels.
They had a vision statement, but it was unloved. It didn’t capture the soul of the business nor did it connect emotionally with its core consumer audience, who were increasingly purpose-driven. They needed to answer the question: ‘Why?’.
Our challenge was to create a compelling expression of brand purpose that would inspire and unite the business.
What we did
Brand definition
Design Hotels had commissioned a deep dive into the consumer trends that would drive the future of luxury hospitality and travel, identifying a new target – the ‘Promads’. Increasingly conscious of the impact of their travel on the environment and culture around them, they wanted to be part of meaningful change in travel. They wanted travel to be redesigned.
The other side of the Design Hotels platform also needed to know ‘why?’ Independent hotels, part of the Design Hotels collections, were increasingly able to sidestep the platform and go direct to their consumers. Back-end functions were becoming commoditised by new technology packages. So why did they need to be part of the Design Hotels community?
Brand purpose workshops
Getting to ideas early with an inspirational two-day leadership workshop, translating purpose into action with a clear set of behaviours and priorities for everyone in the business.
A brand’s purpose needs to be authentic: it needs to articulate a fundamental truth about the business, its people and the change they want to create in the world. Our role as strategic partner is to extract the brand purpose from within the organisation, not to invent it. To provide clarity, to make connections and to articulate the ideas that are at the heart of the brand.
For Design Hotels, we used a two-day leadership workshop to catalyse this process. We held a mirror up to the team, showing them distilled insights about the brand’s existing positioning, the competitor landscape and the evolving needs of the Design Hotels community. We completed a series of exercises to align the three overlapping rings of purpose: passion (‘What gets you out of bed in the morning?’), skills (‘What can you be the best in the world at?’) and usefulness (‘What does the world need right now?’). And crucially, we started to explore how we could put the purpose into words. This was not about writing by committee, instead, it was about speaking from the heart, creating early prototypes of the purpose statement, accelerating our learning and forcing us to make ideas tangible right from the start.
Brand purpose, manifesto & values
Strategy by Design worked with the senior leadership team to challenge, build and articulate the ideas at the heart of the Design Hotels brand.
Working closely with Marketing and HR, we developed a brand purpose statement, a manifesto for the Conscious Travel Movement, and an evolved set of values that would make Design Hotel’s culture more inclusive and inspirational for the next generation of talent.
The purpose, manifesto and values were launched within the business at the start of 2021.
Everything needs to connect to a brand’s purpose: culture, strategy, product, innovation, communication. Purpose needs to be fuel for action, a compass for decision making, a daily source of inspiration. Too often, it’s a statement – strategic decoration, it looks great on a paper but has no real impact on the day to day of the business.
Working closely with the leadership team, we put the purpose to work immediately, using it as a catalyst to evolve the values of the business, content strategy across all channels, and the criteria used to select hotels for the Design Hotel’s portfolio.
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Design Hotels
