Marketing Success Story - Alua Hotels Branding

The Challenge

Currently the tourism sector is undergoing an important change: the change in consumer behaviour due to the rise of the Internet and the saturation of businesses in the tourism market. Given the wide range of hotel establishments, consumers go to the Internet to investigate each hotel chain and find the necessary information. Customers are no longer interested only in the prices or the location of the hotel, they want to find the experiences that suit their interests, which is a new challenge for hotels as it requires a further differentiation from the competition.

The first impression of the differentiation of an establishment reaches customers through the hotel brand. Consumers are exposed to a multitude of tourist brands, and each of these brands generate different feelings and thoughts that help building the image of each establishment. The clients choose one or another brand depending on their identification with the values of the company. That is why it is essential to develop a brand that transmits the intangible values of the hotel chain in a clear and coherent manner and through appropriate communication. If you want to create a positive link with the customer from the first moment, the message of the hotel should reach consumers without distortions.

Alua Hotels & Resorts is a young hotel chain, but with a team with more than 20 years of experience in the hotel sector. The team has values based on the experience in management of its founders. With a team of professionals who know the needs of the tourism market and solid values, it is essential that the chain has a brand that transmits all that experience that exists behind its name, since it is its most powerful differentiator. The challenge of Alua Hotels & Resorts was to build a solid and coherent brand that would represent its characteristic vision of hospitality and all its attributes, and that would be transmitted in a homogeneous manner through all the channels that Alua Hotels uses for communicating with consumers.

The Solution

At Amara we know the importance of defining a solid communication style in order to take advantage of the opportunities that arise through the numerous channels where interactions with customers are carried out. For this reason, our solution for Alua was the creation of a branding strategy for the construction of the company's graphic image. This strategy was divided into different stages of the development of each of the essential elements of the brand.

1. The logo

We presented a logo that consisted of the name of Alua Hotels & Resorts written with certain typographic characteristics, placing the name Alua as the protagonist of the logo. The logo was accompanied by an imagotype, a descriptive symbol linked to the business area of Alua.

Two versions of logo were presented: a main version and a secondary version, in which the logo was structured in different ways, so that the company could have the secondary version of the logo in case the use of the principal one was restricted in some of its different application formats.

Then we worked on the development of the logo for the Alua sub-brands (AluaSun, AluaVillage and AluaSoul). The imagotype of the main logo was used in all these new logos, and the differentiation was applied both in the colours and in a variation of the typographic characteristics. This way, each sub-brand had a different identity thanks to its specific logos, and at the same time maintaining its relationship with the main logo of Alua Hotels.

2. Graphic elements

Colour is one of the most determining factors in the attractiveness of the Alua brand. We developed a chromatic range with colours that fit the main colour of Alua, so that it continued to be the main colour of the company's brand, but with the possibility of having secondary colours that would not steal its prominence.

For corporate typography we chose the font family "Source Sans Pro". The reason why we chose it was because of its readability, and its formal and friendly appearance. In addition, it has an extensive family (light, regular, semibold, bold, light italic, italic, semibold italic and bold italic) and is suitable for both online and offline applications.

Alua's product photography should reflect the values of Alua, so we made a selection of inspirational photography. These images fulfilled some specific characteristics, such as the detail level, since this way the honesty, the quality and the freshness that define Alua are better appreciated.

There are limited applications that require additional elements when the previous elements cannot be applied, so we designed graphic resources. One of them was a symbol that represents the phases of the moon, and its function is to accompany the titles and highlighted texts. The second proposed graphic resource was a selection of frames to use for a background. These frames represent the natural elements visible at night: the sea, the stars and the moon. In this way, the frames reinforce the original idea of the brand and its image.

In order for Alua 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.

Our next proposal was the iconographic style that would act as a visual reinforcement of the idea transmitted in texts of Alua, or even act as a substitute. Our proposal of iconography was simple lines and pure forms, which confer a modern aesthetic and a friendly appearance.

3. Applications

To demonstrate to Alua how the incorporation of all the elements to its application style would look like, we developed a presentation of examples of applications so that they had a global view of the application of the logo, the chromatic range, the corporate typography, the graphic resources and the iconographic style.

Finally, we developed a corporate identity manual with the necessary standards for the construction of the corporate identity of Alua Hotels and its sub-brands, so that the entire team can apply the brand in all the communication formats of the chain. The homogeneous follow-up of the application strategy is fundamental for a company to have a firm and global image at all times.