FILA, Toy Story, and Hello Kitty Latest to Jump on Hotel Branding Trend
Photo Caption: A rendering of the new headquarters of ANTA Group in Shanghai, where the FILA HOUSE will be developed. Hyatt Newsroom
Skift Take
To lose connection with your customer is to lose meaning in your message. After a time of social-distancing, brands are coming up with ways that bring them closer to their consumers than ever before.
When the pandemic brought about the loss of interacting in-person with your favorite brands, many loyal customers surrendered retail shopping and indoor dining experiences. But emerging from that drought, the hospitality industry is seeing an increasing number of consumer brands leveraging the lack of physical business and investing into a new sort of experiential marketing — their own hotels.
In 2020, Skift identified as a megatrend the rush by consumer brands into the hotel business. Today, despite a pandemic, consumer brands are continuing to dive into the hotel sector for a slew of reasons, the first being to appeal to a new audience that they’ve never catered to before. Some recent entrants include FILA, Toy Story, Hello Kitty and Bvlgari.
“In terms of per capita spend on travel, the millennials are catching up to the Boomers,” said Chekitan S. Dev, a tourism professor at Cornell University. “But there is also a supply imbalance of hotel brands that appeal to the millennial.”
A rapidly growing movement is taking place among legacy hoteliers and consumer brands alike, in hopes to appeal to a younger crowd who is technology and design savvy but still wants to pay reasonable prices, according to Dev.
“Consumer brands are looking to rework their brand image in an immersive and ex
