The Nike Hotel Test

If you heard that Nike was opening a hotel, do you feel like you'd know what to expect when it opened? The decor, the service, the amenities.

Oddly enough, you do. The staff might be in sports gear. There'd be the usual pool, but you wouldn't be surprised if there were a half court for basketball too. The lobby would be bright and open. Vast images of the world's best athletes on the walls. Maybe running track lines marking the route to the lifts.

You already know the decor

What if I told you Pixar, Apple, Louis Vuitton or IKEA were opening a hotel, and you were in charge of the decor? Without ever having worked for any of them, with no experience in hotel design, you'd go into it with confidence that you'd get it right for each one. You'd create an on brand result, wouldn't you?

Now flip it. What if Marriott, Hilton or Hyatt wanted to start a shoe line, and they put you in charge of product development? Would you have the same confidence?

I wouldn't have any idea where to start.

That is the power of a brand. It doesn't just attract your ideal customer. It makes everything in your business easier. How you talk to guests, how you design physical spaces, what you add to the offering, how you create the experience, and where you set your price.

So consistently aligned have Nike's actions been to their brand strategy, for so long, that even laypeople like us feel we could envision a Nike hotel.

The acquisition test

Perhaps that's led you to wonder whether you have a strong brand. Here's a second test.

If a competitor acquired your business tomorrow, would it be absorbed into theirs? Or would your brand be strong enough that you'd give them no choice but to keep operating under it?

When Steve Jobs was negotiating the sale of Pixar to Disney, he insisted that Pixar continued to operate as itself. Bob Iger, Disney's CEO, says that dissolving the Pixar brand would never have happened regardless of that clause being in the contract. The brand was too strong. The culture was strong, the productions had an X factor, and the fans weren't just fans, they were fanatical. He wouldn't risk losing that by folding the team into the existing business.

What would happen if a competitor acquired your brand? Is there a chance it would disappear and nobody would miss it?

If so, your brand is not strong, and you need a strategy to address that.

Tactics can be copied. Strategy can't.

Businesses can and often do copy tactics. They'll copy an ad, a Facebook post, your colours, even what you offer. What a business can't copy is strategy. It isn't the publicly facing stuff. It's the core of what you do and why you do it. The bulk of the iceberg under the surface holding everything else up.

Thinking you can copy a business's strategy is like thinking you can copy someone's character. You can mimic their traits and how they talk. But character is unique to each of us. Your brand strategy is the core of your business's character. It should make every decision and action as predictable as a person's character makes theirs.

Building a brand like Nike, Apple or Pixar doesn't happen by accident. It takes consistency and commitment, and more than anything, clarity about what you're trying to build and for whom.

Ultimately, you want guests to feel your brand so strongly that their intuition would tell them what your hotel would look like, if you were planning one.

Would it?