Unreasonable Hospitality*

Is it reasonable to expect—throughout your months to years-long client engagement process—that every touchpoint of their experience with your brand might not just be well-considered, but unreasonably well-considered?

A recent book by Will Guidara (of Eleven Madison Park and NoMad restaurant fame) got me thinking about this very thing: Unreasonable Hospitality*

In my brand strategy work with clients, I outline an entire process that allows us to define everything about their brand—from their ideology and ethos to the marching orders on how to execute it across every touchpoint.

And I mean every. single. one.

Listen in to my recent interview on the ​Thrive in Design​ podcast and I’ll break this whole framework down for you!

Ok back to hospitality.

I know what you’re thinking…c’mon, Ericka.

The experience of a guest in a three-star Michelin restaurant is remarkably different than that of my design clients:

⭐️ it’s just one evening compared to many months (or more!) our projects take to complete,

⭐️⭐️ the guests of a Michelin starred restaurant are used to being treated this way (they expect it!) so to compete at this level you have to have worked in the world’s best kitchens or restaurants and have enormous operating budgets,

⭐️⭐️⭐️ or…these restaurants have hundreds of people on staff to help them execute the experience flawlessly, I’m just a small team (or even a team of one).

And yes, those are great points!

But I encourage you to also consider that the guest’s overall experience with a restaurant can be broken down into manageable bites that great marketing can easily support:

• from the moment they first read about it in a magazine or on social media (lead with a crystal clear marketing message),
• or are intrigued by a colleague’s glowing recommendation (encourage word of mouth referrals),
• to how delightful it is to make a reservation on the restaurant’s website (make yours easy and fun to navigate),
• to physical touch points (ya’ll got this one!)…like how they’re greeted when they arrive, the weight of the flatware in their hands, the crispness of the wine glass edge on their lips, the typography on the menu and the feel of the paper as they pick it up…all the way to the moment they see the small box of granola they received as a parting gift sitting on their kitchen counter the next morning, packaged in a beautiful little box with a hand-written note. Whew!

Everything about this carefully designed guest experience says … we welcome you.

What Will Guidara reminds us in his book is that great restaurant experiences are about more than just serving great food.

It’s about building a brand for the restaurant on magnitudes of enchantment.

To invite feelings of belonging and safety…of comfort and ease…of pleasure and luxury. Of hospitality!

These become memories just as important as the way the food was plated or if the flavors lived up to the hype.

It’s the result of breaking down the entire approach to service that allows them to stand out amongst all the rest(aurants)—to examine under a microscope what might cause a ripple at any time in a guest’s experience, taking the time to smooth it out, and training everyone on their team (from the valet to the person who locks the door at the end of the night) to deeply believe in their own critical role in executing the extraordinary quality of this experience.

It’s about the promise of the brand.

It’s about setting expectations, and always exceeding them.

I love this!

And it’s just as true for design services as it is for customer services or banking services or content services.

How you make people feel throughout every encounter from your website to the last thank you note should be magical. ✨

Because that’s what people will remember about your brand.**

So my question for you this week is this:

And what small steps, what easy wins, might you uplevel today across your client experience timeline that can add up to a truly brand-defining experience overall?

That can increase in magnitudes of enchantment? ✨

Send me an email and let me know! I love hearing your thoughts. 

**Thanks for reading to the end! Here’s a quick Case Study from my own work to help bring this to life:

Last year, a B2B furnishings brand hired me as a consultant to guide their strategy to reposition the brand amongst a more luxury market of manufacturers who sold to both the trade and retail partners.

In our discovery phase (ie. researching the brands “reputation” in the industry, uncovering what their customers were saying about their brand, and hearing stories about their actual experience with the brand) we uncovered two seemingly small, yet significant issues that were having an outsized impact on how their customers perceived working with them.

First, one of their suppliers hadn’t been able to reliably keep up with order demand, resulting in delays and inconsistent deliveries that were affecting the brand’s ability to deliver on their promised lead times.

While they were working hard to sort this out in their operations, they hadn’t done a good job of communicating with their clients, leaving them disappointed and disenchanted with the brand.

Second, they were over-investing in the front-end brand experience to increase sales—including an over-the-top showroom experience, lavish events, and gorgeous collateral (all amazing things don’t get me wrong!)—but bringing in more new accounts had the counter effect of creating even more unsatisfied customers, and further diminishing the reputation of the brand.

YIKES!

So.

We created a strategy to mitigate the impact the supply chain demands were having on their brand—strategically diverting budget from the pre-purchase phase of their client experience journey into the near opposite post-purchase phase—with an emphasis on over-communicating (actual phone calls even!), which couldn’t solve their delays, yet significantly reduced the client’s anxiety by simply keeping them informed.

It was an investment in their brand that paid for itself as they grow in customer loyalty (and market share)！

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Let’s work together!