This strategy allows large hotel groups to meet various market needs under a unified brand system. At the same time, it helps reduce risk. For example, even when the recession hit the luxury travel market, they still have a variety of mid – and low-end hotel brands to protect profits.
But for some hotel groups, keeping the number of brands relatively small makes it easier to communicate with consumers and build brand loyalty. Hotels such as Amanaman have spawned a community of “Aman junkies” who seek out different Amanaman resorts around the world, seeing the resort as their final destination and making it a dream to stay in all of them.
At the same time, a mature brand is a rich asset for the hotel group. Hotel groups rarely own their own hotel properties and do not manage hotels. Instead, they license their operations primarily on a franchise model. In a franchise agreement, the Hotel Brand Group (franchisor) licenses its brand, operating system and loyalty program to a third-party owner (franchisor) for a fee to use the brand. In this model, brands are able to quickly build a business on a national or even global scale.
The influx of a large number of new brands will also create a new problem: brand homogenization. Not only from competitors’ brands, but also from similar products within the same brand family. When talking about this issue with industry peers before, he said that if investors have the intention to join a hotel chain brand, there will be more than ten brand chain hotel developers rushed to compete, but they took out the cooperation model is almost the same, the difference is mostly the depth of business conditions.
From the perspective of owners, they are more concerned about the two major elements of brand overflow and return on investment. For them, new brands entering the market lack brand influence at the beginning, and it takes a long time and a lot of resources to establish brand image and attract consumers. The core brand of the hotel group is more competitive in terms of product building experience and market brand influence, and it is more confident in the return on investment of the hotel in the later period.
However, the emergence of new entrants and emerging hotel brands, which may leverage innovative thinking and new business models to capture market share, may put competitive pressure on the existing hotel industry. How to choose the right brand among many brands has become a problem for them. In order to solve this problem for the owners, the hotel group will renew and upgrade the products according to the current consumer market trend, meet the needs of consumers with new products, and help the owners reduce costs and increase efficiency. For example, the longest-established Hanting Hotel in the Huazhu brand matrix has been updated for 7 versions, and the whole season has also been upgraded for 6 times in the past 10 years. Through the version upgrade, Huazhu has successfully shaped the tone of the hotel and improved the stickiness of consumers.
Quji 5.0 extracts humanistic interest from Su words and is an iteration of contemporary Chinese aesthetics. No longer “stressed”, but relaxed, blank, more natural, and natural.
It’s not hard to see that the brand landscape in the hospitality industry is a complex ecosystem, driven by market dominance, franchise models and the need to meet the needs of different travelers. The number of brands has different “two sides”, in the end more or less, there will be different answers.
Future of hotel brand
Three tides of development
In the process of the total number of international hotel group brands breaking through 160, in the past two years, with the incremental integration of the stock and the exploration of the blank market, more and more hotel groups have accelerated the speed of the promotion of new brands, and the cooperation mode between hotel owners and hotel brands has also become more diversified with the development of the industry. In the view of the industry, the entry of new brands has also further intensified market competition, and after the battle for the stock of hotels, the future development pattern of hotel brands may be variable.
At present, the market has formed a multi-giant multi-polar development trend, the whole season, Li Feng, Vienna, Vienna International, Yaduo and other have reached a “thousand store scale”, there are a large number of hotel brands towards this goal impact. For example, Jinjiang Hotel (China) previously released the latest brand strategy clearly pointed out that before 2028, fully tap the growth momentum of scale to create 12 thousand brands, of which Jinjiang Star, Magnolia, IU Hotel, 7 days these four economy hotel brands are included in the thousand brand development plan.
In the “giant” lead, there may be two trends: first, the “giant” will run faster with more accurate adaptation. Based on the brand’s early practice in the market, it can better grasp the dynamics of the consumer market and meet the needs of consumers with better quality products. Second, local high-end hotel brands may produce new “giants”. At present, the head hotel group invests more in the mid-end and mid-high-end markets, hoping to occupy more share of the mass market. In terms of high-end hotel brands, local hotel groups have already begun to do it, but there are not many “out of the circle” brands, and even some high-end brands are just in their infancy.