Consistency

Good design is good business, so it is vital that the whole issue of how your customers perceive you and your staff is given the amount of thought it deserves. You need to be consistent in all your communications so that you start to build up the value of all your efforts and expenditure. For instance your recruitment adverts need to have the same style as your advertisements for conferences and meetings. Any and every communication from you needs to be instantly recognisable as being from you, either in the consistent use of your colour or the way that the words are laid out.

Although it seems to be very pedantic, you need to value your corporate identity in the same way that you value any other asset. Over time you will spend a lot of money making it valuable, so it is wise to look after and nurture it. Make sure that you use your agreed logo in the same way every time it is reproduced. Always check the colours and the typeface.

Outside

As I said earlier, I see many hotels that really let themselves down by how they look from the road. If I see a broken sign or weeds growing in the car park it doesn’t give me much encouragement about the care that the hotel is likely to offer to guests. Of course I may be wrong, and the gardener has it on his list for tomorrow, but can you afford to take the risk that I might drive by?

On the other hand I may not be your target market, so it is all a question of congruence. If your target audience care about standards then you need to make sure that your standards meet their expectations. The trick is to keep looking at your physical product as if you are seeing it for the first time, which is difficult. One solution is to make a checklist and make sure that someone checks it at least every week.

If you have limited funds for development, it may be more profitable to spend it on the outside rather than the inside. At least if you can entice people inside, you have the chance to work your charm on them.

Signage

Signage is probably one of the most important but often most neglected aspects of your physical product. How many people see it depends on your road position, but even if it is only committed customers that see it, poor signage can undo all that good work that you have done to get your customer over the threshold. What your signs look like will be a development of the work that you have done on your logo and the colours that you have chosen.

There are many different types of signage products, from plastic to wood with much in between. Plastic suits fast food outlets, and traditional wooden signs suit traditional businesses, such as country house hotels. Keep the wording simple and to the point and make sure that these words are readable from the road.

Remember that your customers and guests tend to lose the use of part of their brain when they are in ‘foreign’ territory: I know I do whenever I go to an airport. Walk through the whole journey from car park to bedrooms and in reverse and wherever there is a choice of where to go, put a direction sign.

Inside

The same issues apply to the inside of your property. Does it always reflect exactly the image that you want to give? Have you allowed some very cheap signs to be stuck up around the building to promote a special night in the restaurant or bar? Although you might have got used to them, any new customer might be negatively surprised by their cheap quality. It is the same with how a room smells: you may have got used to that stale smell, but will it be the first thing a potential customer notices? Check that all areas are comfortable; some sofas look great but give you backache.

For some reason operators of hotels tend to be very unresponsive to the atmosphere in their property. The lighting is often very harsh and the music off or too quiet. Ambience needs to be created instantly and you cannot wait even an hour to change it. If your restaurant is quiet then dim the lights, put some candles on the tables and turn the music up. The same goes for reception areas, which often look like station concourses. Every location within your building needs to be constantly monitored and changes made to reflect the needs of the moment.

It is easy to get used to things yourself, so you need to continually ask new people to assess you. This is where mystery shopping can be a great help, but if you use an outside company brief them carefully on your operational standards so that they know what to measure.

It is also vital that you have an overall colour scheme for the interior. You will probably carry out redecoration over a long period so it is easy to introduce different colour schemes without really thinking about it. Choose a colour palette and stick to it. (See 6.)