What’s in a name?

Any company aims at being recognised by creating a name or a brand. The value associated with this recognition is immense in many aspects:

Positioning
Customers expectation
Return visits
Financials

If we mentioned brands like McDonalds, Zuma, Hilton, one would immediately understand what to expect and an idea of cost. That is not the result of chance, but the fruit of many hours of deep reflection, strategical thinking, and correct communication.

THE 4 KEY QUESTIONS

While seating in front of your white board, there are 4 questions you should be starting with in order to define your brand….

The WHY

Why does your business exist?

This must be the essence of your aspiration, the purpose of the business. This is at no point about money, as money and profits are only a result of all aspects and mainly an operational result.

I will take in this paper the example of McDonalds to illustrate the 4 questions; For them the why is to make delicious feel food moments easy for everyone.

The WHO

Who are you as a business?

You will have to list the various values that your business represents. Could it be collaboration, accountability, friendliness, all these points will define the services provided, the style…

The HOW

How do we do things?

Here we cover the behaviours you are looking for and from people to deliver the WHO and WHY. This is how we want to look and feel, how to place the name / brand across to the customer.

This will cover the tone of voice you use in all aspect of communication, internal and external.

For Mac Donald, these would be light-hearted, playful, welcoming, dependable, unpretentious.

The WHAT

What do you do?

This is a summary of the business intention.

To carry on with the McDonalds example, they want to be the world’s largest informal eating out chain.

Once your 4 questions are clearly answered, you can work on word’s association and searches that will relate to most of the answers given. This will become your brand. There will be a meaning attached to it, and a clear understanding of what it represents for the public and employees.

The final step will be to work on a logo that would represent that brand. Logo could be a word, a symbol but it should link to most of the answers you already gave and be clearly associated with your brand.

The Logo M of McDonalds is clearly recognised all over the world. It is associated with the sense of hospitality, you are welcome under the arch, the yellow is warm and the line is soft and welcoming

INSIGHT HOSPITALITY CASE

As a final example, lets look at how we finalised our own name and logo by responding to the 4 questions:

Why – we aim to be the best in class for consultancy services and offer a one stop solution for hospitality projects.

Who – we are a group of accessible experts in different fields bringing their expertise to one common project.

How – we offer a no fuss approach; we want to use all of experience into information for our clients and create a collaborative approach. We are light footed and adaptable.

What – we use our classic training to approach any project but bring a modern touch to it.

Having answered these questions, it was obvious that we wanted to have the word “hospitality” in our name. We are aiming at bringing services not only to restaurants, but also clubs, hotels, cafés…

When looking at the years of experience we were bringing to the table, we knew we have extensive knowledge from various aspects of the business and wanted to use our classic background to approach every client but adapt to the current time and add the potential use of trends and technology available. The word insight came to our mind to summarise this wealth of information that we have as a collective.

Here we had our name “INSIGHT HOSPITALITY”.

LOGO

Once the brand value defined, the logo will have to capture the important element of the brand.

For us, we wanted to represent a collective of people, who have a classic education and history but approachable and in tune with modern technology and trends.

The first set of proposal came as followed:

The first concept was too modern and not reflecting the classic background we are looking to represent.

The second concept playing between a dining plate and an eye was a bit too encrypted for us.

No. 3 logo was the right direction, playing between the I and the H. However, it felt still corporate and classic.

The fourth concept felt too institutional and classic

So we wanted to look at various colour that could give it the touch of modernity we were after and various fonts.

The development came back with various options :

We eliminated the options 1 and 2 as we felt that the frame around the I/H was harsh and gave a sense of restriction.

The font on option 2 was this time too modern for our purpose.

Concept 3 was too heavy, against our value of light footed. We finally wanted to have a connection between the font in the logo and the font used in the name.

In regards of the final colour, we felt that option 4 was correct and reflected a sense of modernity we wanted to have.

So here we ended up with out final logo by also retouching the colour of the wording for a deep blue and not a classic black.

What do you think?

August 2022

www.insighthospitality.net