FEATURE
Sound advice
Rob Wood of Music Concierge continues his ‘sound advice’ with a look at the essential part music plays in differentiating a hotel brand and the guest experience.
easy bit because we are trained for it. The hard bit,” she explained, “is making the hotel different from all the others.” Indeed in today’s market the contemporary hotelier needs to be focused on making their property stand out from the crowd more than ever. Hoteliers can no longer afford to let their property be seen as a commodity product if they want to attract the most valuable guests – the high spending, repeat visiting kind. Making sure they choose your hotel over others in the same destination is the key to a successful and sustainable business. Impressive architecture, tantalising interior
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design, angelic service, and mouthwatering food are all well-known ways of endearing customers to your property and separating the good hotel from the bog standard. In my second column about sound and music in hotels, I’m going to explain the essential part music plays in differentiating your hotel brand and your guest experience from the competition: The role music has in helping a property rise above the commodity end of the market, so that valuable customers choose you over others in your destination, and how putting a music strategy in place affects your bottom line. Let’s start by looking at what music does to people. We all know it can irritate when it is not controlled – when the sound quality, content or volume are wrong. But when
recently asked a general manager how hard it was to manage over 300 staff. She surprised me somewhat by answering “that is the relatively
controlled and presented properly, music affects your guests in three ways. Firstly it can create a powerful emotional bond and consequentially loyalty. Secondly it affects the way they perceive your brand and the quality of the product. And thirdly it can influence them to spend more time in the hotel itself, most notably in F&B outlets.
CREATING A LASTING AND HONEST BOND BETWEEN CUSTOMER AND HOTEL BRAND
If there is one thing that successful hoteliers need to do above providing a great night’s sleep and hot shower, it is to create memories for their guests. Whether it is a desert island hideaway, a funky business hotel, a traditional country house, an iconic luxury institution, or simply a quirky urban bolt- hole – all guests want their experience to be slick and comfortable, but they’d also love it to be inspiring and memorable. This is what creates connections between us to our favourite hotels. What’s more it generates word-of-mouth promotion over dinner party tables both physical and virtual as those high-spending ambassadors champion your brand to the world around them.
Hoteliers have long known that art,
books, music, scent, and to some extent technology when it is playful (and easy to use), can engage and impress customers. Together with the hotel design, these things form the glue that binds people’s
aspirations and tastes to your hotel name. By making your mark through well-chosen morsels of culture, innovation, or sheer good taste – you are enabling guests to make an emotional connection, bonding to you with their heart, not just their purse strings or stomach. These are the bonds that will last. Sound has an incredible potential for
creating impressions. Brands like Apple, O2, and Bacardi have long seen music as a powerful medium that can help bring the emotional qualities of products and services to life. We all know that music has an innate ability to connect on a profound human level. Most of us love music. But it’s important to realise that music not only emotionally tugs on our heart strings, it also denotes complex social messages, together with a honesty that cannot be contrived. As a result a level of music literacy is required so we can understand what resonates with guests. Using tired, dull, or poorly thought-through music is no longer an option. Today’s well- informed guests can spot brands imitating, or those with simply no personality, as soon as they cross the threshold.
MAKING THE RIGHT IMPRESSION AND KEEPING THEM COMING BACK FOR MORE
So a carefully considered music strategy can help create emotional bonds with customers and therefore build loyalty. It can also enhance guest’s experience of the hotel as one of
WWW.SLEEPERMAGAZINE.COM NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2012 139
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