Brand Report Card Analysis Of Hyatt Brand Portfolio Marketing Essay

When a company is assessing its own brands, it is often important to give an objective and precise assessment on its competitors as well. As a Chinese saying goes, the only way to win a war is to try to know your prey completely. Constructing similar report cards of brands for the competitors can give the company a clearer and more vivid picture of their strengths and weaknesses so that it can formulate corresponding brand strategies and adjust its brand management (Keller, 2000).

Combined with Keller’s brand report card knowledge, this article takes Hyatt as example to analyze Hyatt’s brand portfolio. Linked with the analysis of the InterContinental brand portfolio which has been analyzed in the former article, a comparison of Hyatt and InterContinental is given to analyze the points of parity and difference of the two world top hotel brand portfolios.

The two hotel brand portfolios are strong competitors in the hospitality industry both focused on providing extraordinary experiences for their customers which includes outstanding service and high quality. A comparison between the two brand portfolios will help obtain a better understanding of their brand positioning and brand marketing strategies.

About Hyatt Brand

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is an international hospitality company operating multiple hotels worldwide with widely recognized brands, innovative and completed hospitality service with a history more than fifty years. With their mission to provide trustworthy and gorgeous hospitality by making a difference in customer hoteling experiences, Hyatt focus on pursuing a goal of becoming the most preferred brand in each segment that they serve for their associates, guests, and owners (Hyatt Official Website, 2010).

Hyatt’s core businesses cover managing, franchising, owning and developing Hyatt branded hotels, resorts and residential and vacation ownership properties throughout the world. As of March 31, 2010, the company’s worldwide portfolio consisted of 434 properties (Hyatt Official Website, 2010). According to HOTELS, Hyatt was ranked top ten in the list of 2009 Global Hotels Company Top 300 with 738 hotels and 144671 rooms worldwide while Intercontinental Hotels Group was ranked first with 3606 hotels and 537533 rooms all over the world (HOTELS, 2009).

Hyatt mainly operates three global brands – Hyatt Regency, Grand Hyatt, and Park Hyatt. The three brands are all five-star qualified and aim at upper market consumers. In addition, Hyatt builds a worldwide resort base Hyatt Resorts which is a collection of properties within the Park Hyatt, Grand Hyatt and Hyatt Regency sub-brands (Hyatt Official Website, 2010). The group sets up a brand portfolio that covers luxurious upscale hotels in the world’s major cities and resorts that offer customers personalized service and irreplaceable value.

Analysis of Hyatt’s brand portfolio

Hyatt’s brand portfolio is set for different markets. The three brands segment the upscale market into different levels and each serves to one of the segmented market.

As the core of the core three brands, Hyatt Regency is designed as premium business hotel for those gracious business and leisure traveller which is generally located in urban, suburban, airport, convention and resort destinations around the world. Hyatt Regency contains the full spectrum of hotel types offering a full range of services and dining options tailored to serve diverse needs of conventions, business travelers or resort vacationers (Hyatt Official Website, 2010). It aims to bring the guests a feeling of revitalization and freshness. Hyatt Regency offers different guests with personalized services that it embodies convention hotels, business hotels and resort hotels that cater to particular needs of guests. Hyatt Regency has properties range in size from 200 to over 2000 rooms.

Grand Hyatt Brands are usually located in the center of metropolitan areas and gateway cities which is designed to satisfy elegant, dignified guests desiring for some luxurious experience from life. The majority of its customers are experienced individual business and leisure travelers. Grand Hyatt hotels encompass magnificent and energetic lobby surroundings, spa and fitness centers, dining options full of innovations and comprehensive business and meeting facilities to meet high level and all directional metropolitan’s experience needs. Grand Hyatt also caters to most types of conferences, corporate meetings and social gatherings of all sizes. As its brand name “grand” illustrates, these hotels are big and can provide up from 500 to 800 rooms.

Park Hyatt is targeted on becoming the top in top hotel brands which is only located in some of the world’s premier cities, the heart of international metropolis and select resort destinations. Park Hyatt provides an unparalleled experience of elegant, contemporary luxury operated with super five-star standard. Each Park Hyatt is custom designed to combine understated sophistication with distinctive regional character, and every single detail of the stay experience of its guests is thoughtfully and impeccably executed (Hyatt Official Website, 2010). Park Hyatt provides most private and secret space for guests who have made particular requests. Due to its exquisiteness and incomparability, Park Hyatt provides limited and not more than 250 rooms to provide a more intimate, personalized service.

Besides the three core brands, Hyatt has brands like Andaz, Hyatt Summerfield Suites, Hyatt Place and Hyatt Vacation Club to cater to markets the three brands do not cover. Andaz takes on boutique style hotel similar to Holiday Indigo while Hyatt Summerfield Suites is an extended-stay hotel brand with a relaxed environment.

Application of the brand report card to the Hyatt brand

Since Hyatt has such a diverse brand portfolio and aims their target market clearly at upscale consumers, it has a strong brand loyalty and stands steadily in the hospitality industry. In this part the article will have a basis assessment on the Hyatt brand portfolio with the tool kit of Keller’s ten attributes that most of the world strongest brands share.

Combined with the brand report card analysis of Intercontinental, a competitive analysis is given to have a general overview of the two hotel brand portfolios’ strengths and weaknesses.

3.1 Application of the brand report card to the Hyatt brand

According to Keller, world top brands share ten common attributes which make them become successful worldwide (Keller, 2000). Then companies who are aiming to build strong brand equity and larger market share shall take these ten points into considerations and assess how well it has behaved by the ten dimensions.

With the ten points mentioned above, this part gives a general assessment of Hyatt’s brand portfolio. Combined with Keller’s brand report card, Figure 2 illustrates how the Hyatt brand portfolio has behaved.

Figure2 Application of the brand report card to the Hyatt brand

Attribute

Brand

a

b

c

d

e

f

g

h

i

a

Hyatt Regency

Meets customers’ true desire

Often adjust with changes

Comfortable and fair price

Proper, personalized service

Consistent

Targeted at upscale

Greatly involved

Doing well

Great support as core business

Efficient brand audit

Grand Hyatt

Excels customers’ true desire

Quick adjust with changes

Expensive and elegant

Clear

Consistent

Targeted at upscale

Greatly involved

Doing well, esp. Asia

Stable

Efficient brand audit

Park Hyatt

Excels customers’ true desire

Greatly relevant to changes

Luxurious, highly priced

Clear

Consistent

Targeted at the richest

Highly involved

Doing well, esp. Eu & US

Special support

Efficient brand audit

Hyatt Resorts

Meets customers’ true desire

Stays relevant

Relaxed experience, fair price

Clear

Consistent

Targeted at leisure/travelers

Highly involved

Doing well, esp. Eu & US

Stable support

Periodically brand audit

Other brands

Meets customers’ true desire

Stays relevant

It depends

Unclear

Consistent

Other

Less involved

Doing average, in Eu & US

Less support

Sometimes (PS: The vertical list is the Hyatt brand portfolio and the horizon list represents the ten dimensions explained above respectively simplified by a, b, c,…, j which can be found in the former article.)

As the figure shows, in many of the dimensions Hyatt has behaved satisfactory. The stable development of the company has proved that it possesses good brand management skills and applies mature brand schemes to stimulate the targeted markets.

It owns less hotels and rooms than InterContinental worldwide but it has a very brand positioning and brand perception. All their hotels are built to make sure that they are serving for the best services and facilities. With the three core brands designed for three different markets, it has clear marketing strategy to support building their brand equity and thus win brand loyalty which is especially true for Park Hyatt. Then it has some other brands to supplement market blank like extended-stay hotels and boutique style hotels. The brand portfolio of Hyatt is attentively built and managed, with the company always keeping consistent on an upper-server road.

Hyatt puts forward “FORCE Scheme”, which is short for Family of Responsible and Caring Employees. Hyatt is dedicated to provide volunteering services to those responsible and caring employees and families. No matter when and where, Hyatt keeps its commitment to local residents and environments. These bring love and commitment to employees as well as its customers and can build a good brand image.

As the figure shows, the hotel brands of Hyatt Regency and Grand Hyatt have segmented markets overlapped in some common areas. They are both set for upscale guests and maybe that’s why Grand Hyatt makes its base in Asian areas and its core brand Hyatt Regency does not enter into. Besides, after the brand extension, Hyatt still needs doing more to revitalize its other brands to integrate it into the whole brand strengthening system.

3.2 Competitive analysis of Hyatt and InterContinental’s brand portfolios

InterContinental and Hyatt are both world top hotels groups that have built strong brand equity around the world. A competitive analysis of the two brand portfolios to distinguish points of parity and difference both portfolios embody will give a more vivid and clearer understanding of the two brand portfolios and their brand management. This part analyzes the points of difference and parity of both brand portfolios on a basis of the former two brand report card analyses.

InterContinental and Hyatt both share some points of parity (POP) in terms of category points of parity and competitive points of parity. On one hand, category points of parity include that they are both international hotel brands in hospitality industry where service and quality are the main winning weapons to survive; that they both focus on growing their brand equity as global upscale hotel brands targeted at premium and senior markets.

On the other hand, competitive points of parity of InterContinental and Hyatt lie in ways of brand extension, brand positioning, target customers, emotional experience and customer-oriented service. Both adopt multi-brand strategy to expand market share and enlarge brand power and both use brand extension as marketing strategy to transfer customer loyalty and strengthen brand equity. As they have similar brand positioning targeting at upscale markets and form competition in the market segments. As for this point, they also have differences and it will be discussed later.

Both of the two portfolios have shared common target customers. InterContinental Hotels & Resorts and Park Hyatt may share the majority of most richest and powerful guests while Crowne Plaza, Hyatt Regency and Grand Regency may share business hotel guests. Hotel Indigo and Andaz, Staybridge Suites and Hyatt Summerfield Suites are sharing certain customers as well. It is largely due to the similar emotional experiences these customers have at both hotels. When guests can enjoy such similar sociological and psychological feelings, convenience is maybe the thing they consider most. Besides, both two brands have customer-oriented service and strive to dig out customers’ diverse needs and improve brand values and uniqueness.

Apart from the points of parity mentioned above, the two brand portfolios have many points of difference (POD) in many ways and it is PODs that distinguish the two brands from one and the other. There are three types of difference which are: brand performance associations, brand imagery associations and consumer insight associations (Keller and Tybout, 2002). Brand performance and brand image can be unique in many ways. Consumer insight alone cannot forge big difference and can be easily copied. Besides, attributes / benefits associations consumers believe are unique, unique selling proposition (USP) and sustainable competitive advantage can also forge PODs of similar brands (Keller, 2006). All together considered to analyze the PODs can provide good basis for brand adjustments.

From the perspective of brand influence and coverage, InterContinental has a larger scale of products and covers more market segments than Hyatt. InterContinental has more specific market subdivision from upper-scale to civilian and now is meant to gradually adjust its business to be more business and civilian-oriented in Asian areas like China. Hyatt sticks to serve for most premium markets and has a narrower target market. Then the two portfolios have PODs in brand performance and imagery associations.

From the perspective of attributes / benefits associations, the two have subtle PODs strictly speaking. Hyatt focuses on giving its guests more personalized services and more flexibility. Like Hyatt Regency, it has sub-brands divided to conference, business and resort fields respectively. Guests may find these attributes more unique and become loyal. Otherwise, Holiday Inn Express provides customers convenience and simplicity as well as special breakfasts other places cannot offer which can win many customers who wish things to be done quickly and simply.

From the perspective of unique selling proposition (USP) or the aspect that differentiates the two brands, the point of difference of the two brand portfolios lies in their brand positioning and relevant marketing strategy. InterContinental adopts quick and large-scale brand expansion and promotion while Hyatt adopts more conservative and careful strategy. The POD of the two brand portfolios in brand positioning is that InterContinental emphasizes first move and focuses more on brand extension while Hyatt put emphasis on becoming the best preferred hotel server in its each segment dedicated first to unparalleled service and quality. InterContinental succeeds in franchising while Hyatt succeeds in management. And all such differences decide that the two portfolios maintain their own sustainable competitive advantage in respective area.

As illustrated above, the two brand portfolios have many subtle points of difference from the perspectives of brand influence and coverage, attributes / benefits associations, unique selling proposition. And as both have points of parity, they confront competitions from marketing and branding aspects as well.

Overall Presentation of the brand report card assessment

In this article, by analyzing similar report cards of brands for the InterContinental brand as well as the Hyatt brand, a general competitive analysis of both two brand portfolios is given according to knowledge of Keller’s POPs and PODs. Combined with Keller’s brand report card knowledge, Hyatt’s brand report card is analyzed and be used with InterContinental’s brand report card to generalize some points of parity and difference.

Hyatt has three core brands which are primarily targeted to provide luxurious and top service and unique contemporary luxury experience. Hyatt Regency and Grand Hyatt aim to attract those discerning business guests and leisure travellers while Park Hyatt gives its distinguishers unparalleled and extravagant experiences with rather personalized service and privacy.

The two hotel brand portfolios are in reality strong competitors in the hospitality industry both focused on providing unparalleled experiences for their customers with top service and high quality. A comparison between the two brand portfolios is sure to do good for those later entrants to learn from, for the two brand operators to take a new look at their brand equity and for those competitors.

As points of parity and difference of the two brand portfolios have shown, though the two brands are all world top hotel brands in the same industry with similar target markets in common, they do have many PODs that can work to separate them to a more independent and mutual beneficial market pattern. If they can strengthen their PODs and extend their leading aspects, competition will decrease more and market segments will also be more perfection.

It is a company’s task in any time in any place to build strong brand equity. In hospitality industry where brand equity and brand loyalty are always playing significant part, a good brand report card of itself and its competitors are crucial to assess strengths and weaknesses of both sides. It is difficult to assess a brand of how well it behaves. Basically speaking, a general brand performance appraisal works as a main criterion for customers and potential customers to make decisions. And Keller’s ten attributes or points illustrated in his paper “The Brand Report Card” has shown a well thought-out, systematic approach to brand management and assessment.

As a matter of fact, the process of building, growing and sustaining brand equity is obviously long and full of uncertainties. Giving a comprehensive analysis of brand report card of the brand helps to smooth and shorten the way in brand management. One can only win in the war after knowing oneself.