By strategically deploying brand anchor technologies that have the ability to connect with the hearts and minds of your customers.
In the work that I do as a customer experience design specialist, my main goals are to create a memorable experience that connects with the customers, and also has the ability to differentiate a hotel business over their competition in order to achieve strong customer loyalty that results in increased financial performance.
I employ a lot of different strategies and tactics for achieving those goals. In this article, I want to bring to your attention to the strategic management of sensory response elements within the hotel guest experience through the power of scents. This technology can help in generating and maintaining brand relevance in the hearts and minds of your hotel guests. So let's take on the heart aspect first, also known as building brand love. By doing so, we will take care of the mind aspect as well.
Winning hearts and minds
I can't imagine any hotel brand that wouldn't want to be in the heart of every single customer in the marketplace, as well as being a top of mind brand choice. The best way to a customer's heart is through the emotional connections your business can generate with your guest. Here again with the work that I do, it's all about managing and strategically designing all the different elements that make up the guest experience, right down to what the guest is sensing from the environment within the business.
We've all have experienced very memorable scents that anchor us to a special moment or time in our life. Just like hearing a special song from your past can conjure up emotions and memories. But when it comes to our sense of smell, the emotions generated go directly to the memory centers of the brain, more so than any other sensory response, and by doing so it has the longest impact on our memory. These sensory responses drive our thoughts and emotions about how we feel towards something in our life, as well as our level of engagement.
This is an aspect of the guest experience that shouldn't be minimized. You can really put your business at a great disadvantage by doing so. If your competition is utilizing guest experience design business strategies and employing sensory technology, your ability to build relevance will be greatly affected.
When speaking to a senior hotel executive, who manages a huge portfolio of hotel brands, he shared his frustration with me of competing and thriving in the hotel business, when everything has become equal to some degree, i.e., when looking at the physical product offerings, services, location, price etc… How can you create a memorable lasting impression that builds relevance and loyalty with your customers? When the conversations have become so transactional in nature and it appears that the industry is moving in a more commodity driven direction? I advised him that through managing and strategically designing the customer's experience of your business, that takes everything in your business in to account can help build a competitive advantage that differentiates your business over the competition and to your customers. Which will enhancing the customer loyalty performance you would want to achieve in your day-to-day operational efforts.
Game changer
The sensory brand anchors play a major role in that being achieved. This is known as creating top of the mind brand relevance. We all have emotional triggers that drive us to do things that come from our conscious and subconscious of who we are as human beings. These triggers have the ability to attract or repel us from certain experiences in our lives. For example, the smell of beef tripe cooking makes me want to run for my life, but the scent of fall in the air brings me back to my childhood days in New England playing backyard football in the foliage with my best friends. Which in turn makes me homesick and want to take a trip up north. I share these two examples the show you the Ying Yang of emotions and the impact on memory.
Now, I'm no neuroscience, but I've spent the last 15 + years studying the subjects in and around customer experience design, and I can tell you that a very high percentage of the experiences you have with a business is just as much, if not more, subconscious as it is conscious in how it impacts the way you feel emotionally towards something in your life. Case in point, when you smell something in the air that triggers a food craving, you just can't go another day without it.
Relationships that are built on positive emotional experiences become the memorable and relevant ones in your life and more importantly in your customers' lives. They have the ability to stand the test of time. It's all about creating experiential value with your customers. You have to first build experiential value through the emotional bonds that you create with your customers and then find ways to anchor those experiences with your business and the overall brand identity of the company.
The top company in the marketplace that can help you implement a scent management strategy is Scentair they offer a very wide variety of scent management products. They have mastered the delivery and management in this aspect of the guest experience design. This management strategy should be part of an overall guest experience design implementation that utilizes customer experience design business strategy approaches. By doing so, you will propel your business to a much stronger competitive advantage for gaining brand relevance and guest loyalty as well as increasing financial performance.
About the author
Brett Patten is approaching 35 years in the hospitality industry where he has spent those years accumulating invaluable experience in a variety of leadership positions, and business enterprises. To recently completing his education as an executive leadership and engagement coach in the area of customer experience design.
Brett's unique management and business approach consistently transformed hospitality enterprises with sustainable growth results from his days with the prestigious four and five-star hotels like Stouffer's hotels, Pan Pacific Hotels, and Le Meridien hotels, as well as working with prestigious five-star club resort enterprises like Longboat key, and Greenbrier to the launching of a nationally award-winning four-star hospitality brand in 2007. From there, he built hospitality business strategy platform that he developed and trademarked out of his commitment for achieving customer experience excellence. Brett then turned this business strategy platform into a company called "Five-Star Customer Experience Design," Today, after spending the last 15 years researching, studying and developing customer experience design strategies for the hospitality and tourism industries. In which he engages with some of the top hotel brands and hospitality groups both nationally and internationally in the industry.
