You Can't Out-Amenity the Property Down the Street.

If a guest can't tell your high-end property from the one down the street, they'll book whichever one is cheaper. Every time, no matter what your marketing says. That's the antithesis of brand.

Most developers try to fix the problem the wrong way. They add yet another amenity, label the experience "luxury," or license a famous name. But the property down the street can match you amenity for amenity, label for label, and flag for flag.

The first reason to build a brand is so you can earn a premium. Brand is the only investment that breaks you out of the amenities arms race, because it convinces guests your property offers a remarkable experience they can't get anywhere else. Skip that work, and you've volunteered to compete on rate alone.

"Luxury" doesn't mean anything anymore.

Calling yourself "luxury" is the cheapest way to try to justify a higher rate. Every property in the category calls itself luxury. The word gets stamped on new builds, tired renovations and everything in between, and nobody holds it to a standard. It's become shorthand for "a little above the rest," which means it says almost nothing.

Guests know this because they've been burned by it. They've booked the place that promised luxury and found out at the front desk what the word actually meant there.

I had that experience recently at a sought-after property in Miami. It was summer, which in Miami means rain every twenty minutes. On my way to a meeting, I asked the front desk if I could borrow a house umbrella. The attendant looked surprised by my question, but said she'd be right back. She disappeared for five minutes and returned with her own personal umbrella.

It was a kind gesture. I thanked her and explained that I couldn't accept her personal umbrella. 

At that moment, I knew this place wasn't operating at the level it claimed. Nobody had planned for the most predictable request in the city.

Say luxury enough times without backing it up and guests stop believing anyone who says it — like a reverse form of crying wolf. Once every property's claims sound the same, and guests have learned to discount all of them, the only thing left to compare is the rate. 

That's how an entire category ends up in a sea of sameness.

Differentiation starts with a point of view

Investing in brand — and the real differentiation it affords — starts before there's a shovel in the ground or a dollar spent. 

You sit down with your team and ask three foundational questions. 

• Who are we? 
• What do we do? 
• Why does it matter?
  

The first two questions are relatively simple to answer. The third is hard if you approach it honestly, and the answer is where your money gets made. It's the reason a guest would pay more for your property than for the one next door.

You can still build the pool and spa. You can still offer an incredible wellness program. But you need to make the entire experience signature to you so that when a guest encounters it, they think, I haven't seen that before, and it speaks to me.

A lot of developers come to market without that answer, which is part of why branded residences are so attractive. Put a name with fifty or a hundred years of history on the building and you've bought someone else's point of view. Even then, the name on the façade only sets an expectation. What happens inside the building has to live up to the brand you’ve borrowed, or you're right back to crying wolf.

The amenities have to belong to the place

A point of view gets real when it starts making decisions for you. 

The Cove at Shore Lodge sits in the wilds of western Idaho. Any property in the region could lean on that landscape. But The Cove’s point of view goes further: it embodies pure Idaho adventure. That spirit of adventure is the part the brand owns, and it's built into the property's DNA. 

A spa built on Far East mysticism would have been perfectly nice. It also would have been completely wrong for that property, an inauthentic expression of the brand that could have been dropped into any resort anywhere. The same goes for a rustic, wood-and-stone spa in the middle of a bustling city. Guests feel that mismatch even when they can't name it.

You pay for the spa either way. If you build it from your unique point of view, guests will pay you back for it.

What differentiation feels like when you arrive

Stay at enough properties and a handful will stick with you. Those are the ones where you walk away thinking, I've never experienced that before. That feeling is differentiation doing its job. 

One memorable example of differentiation in action: the valet stand at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

It's a show out there, with cars coming and going and people who came to be seen. The valets understand they're an understated yet important part of that show. The captain sits at the stand giving signals to the runners like a baseball coach. Unless you're watching for it, you'd never notice. Everything arrives on time.

When we pulled up, a valet asked if we were staying with them and took my name. As I turned away, he said something into his headset. At the front desk, people who had never met me said, "Mr. Natale, good to see you." How'd they know that?

You leave with an expensive receipt in your hand, and all you can think is, that was cool. Nobody interacting with the valet service is thinking about the rate at the hotel down the street.

Your brand is everything a guest touches

Most people think of brand as the logo, the icon, and maybe a tagline. Those are component parts of something much bigger. 

Sergio Zyman, who ran marketing at Coca-Cola, described a brand as a container for every experience a customer has with a product. Your brand, and the point of view it represents, gets expressed in every single thing a guest touches, down to the way the phones are answered.

There's so much potential in that definition. Imagine intentionally orchestrating every guest's experience with your property. Very few properties make that kind of investment, which is exactly why the ones that do are so easy to tell apart.

The property down the street can match your amenities, your claims, and your flag. Your point of view — your brand — is the one thing it can't copy, and it's what stops guests from shopping you on price. 

Give guests a reason to tell you apart and they'll pay for the difference. Skip it, and you're one more pool and palm tree in the feed, competing on rate.

Keep reading: Once guests can tell you apart, the next question is what that premium is worth. We put numbers to it in Brand. Capital, Not Cost.