Marketing Success Story - Alegria Hotels Branding

The Challenge

Until a few years ago, consumers in the tourism sector were not so demanding with tourist establishments. The hotel chains did not see the need to specialize their offer as there was no such demand. The clients chose their holiday destinations considering several factors: the prices, the location of the hotel and the experiences they offered (sun and beach, city, wellness, etc.). However, this absence of demand disappeared after the new factors that conditioned the way hotels sell: the rise of the Internet has brought a drastic change in customer behaviour and the saturation of companies in the hotel sector.

Given this new situation in the tourism sector, the demand from customers has become much greater than in the past: it is no longer enough to comply with basic conditions to attract customers to establishments, consumers want to live unique experiences that would give them value. In order to adapt to the new pace of the tourism sector, differentiating is essential for a hotel chain. Customers encounter a multitude of tourist brands, and if consumers identify with the values they transmit, they will opt for one brand or another. The brand brings together the image and intangible values of an organization. That is why branding has gained greater importance today in the hotel sector.

The logo, the claim, the corporate colours, the values ... all these factors have to reflect the branding strategy of any hotel establishment. And for these factors to get the message of your company to consumers, it is essential to make a correct application of all of them in the communication strategy of the organization. Without a correct application of the brand in all its formats, the brand will not arrive homogeneously to the target audience, and it will not be possible to reach the objective of differentiation from the competition.

Alegria Hotels had intangible values, a defined mission and identity. But to transmit all these factors, one more element was still required to convey its differentiating message to consumers: a graphic image that served to convey the personality of Alegria Hotels through its graphic communication and in all its applications. A coherent, homogeneous graphic image favours the social identification of the company. The challenge of Alegria Hotels was to obtain a graphic image that managed to transmit the commitment of the hotel chain with its values of quality, innovation and expansion, along with creating a global message for all its tourist establishments and in all existing applications.

The Solution

With the aim of achieving a graphic image that would correspondent to the values of Alegria Hotels, we worked on creating a coherent graphic style that covered the different essential factors of the image of any organization, and which we divided into four phases: logo, graphic elements, communication systems and brand architecture.

1. The logo

We developed the main logo in which the "A" capitular became the symbol of the identity of the hotel chain, leaving the denomination in the background. This denomination, on the other hand, presented typographical characteristics different from those of the logo symbol. The objective was to design a logo that was descriptive and linked to the business area of Alegria Hotels. Two main versions of the logo were presented next to the main logo (without a background, or with a black or coloured background) and a secondary version, so that Alegria Hotels would have different logo formats for using it under the restrictions of different formats. Next, we worked on the logos of the Alegria Hotels sub-brands. We made a segmentation of the brand in relation to its three differentiated products: Live (generic product), Love (family product) and Feel (adult product). Finally, from the main logo, the logo of the Apartments service of the hotel chain was designed, so that the identity of the apartments was different from that of the hotels.

2. Graphic elements

Colour is one of the main visual assets of the brand. For the corporate palette of Alegria Hotels we chose main colours, secondary colours and their chromatic gradations. The main colour of Alegria Hotels is the coral colour, which is part of the main logo and which was chosen as the main colour in the brand's applications, while the black colour, also main, was used preferentially in the applications of the brand that requires its use. The sub-brands also acquired their colours, so that they become protagonists in their context and would expand the corporate palette. The defined corporate typography was "Roboto" in all its extension (regular, black, bold and light); its use contributes to the correct legibility and hierarchization of information, so that it fits all the printed and online communications of the hotel chain.

In terms of product photography, it was essential to choose the images that had the power to convey the identity of the brand. The appropriate photographs for the Alegria Hotels brand had to be adjusted, mainly, to the corporate colour palette, just as they had to comply with a sharpness and a frontal perspective. To achieve a more personal style, we developed a decorative photograph that could be used if secondary images were used for the brand's applications. For example, to use it as background photographs. In order for Alegria Hotels to carry out the brand's applications in an appropriate manner, we made a proposal of decorative elements so that the applications would comply with a uniform vision of the brand. As a last graphic element, we made a proposal of iconographic style that helped to provide more coherence to the applications of the organization. This iconography consists of a style of open lines, rounded and non-organic shapes to achieve a modern aesthetic feel and a smooth appearance, as well as being a visual reinforcement to the idea transmitted through texts, or even replace it.

3. Communication system

With the objective that the communication systems are fully realized, we designed a grid system so that it would be possible to organize the information in a simple way in complex communications where it is necessary to apply different levels of information (image, text blocks, etc.). This grid is composed of 7 columns (and as many rows as necessary) with asymmetric margins, so that the arrangement of the elements is always homogeneous and balanced.

4. Brand architecture

The declination system should be unified and coherent if it is to facilitate the construction of the architecture of the brand, its understanding and its identification with the global identity. For this, we presented the technique to build the logos of the hotels registered in different sub-brands of Alegria Hotels product. This exhibition includes a vertical and a horizontal version, a version of the Exclusive label, another one for the logo of the Apartments of the chain, and a logo for those hotels that do not fit within the product segmentation.

After preparing this graphic style, we prepared a corporate identity manual that specified to all members of the Alegria Hotels team how to properly conduct the graphic communication application of the hotel chain both at the level of corporate identity and in the sub-brands of Alegria Hotels.