Cornell Research: Successful Service Branding: Lessons for Hospitality Managers
Hospitality brands today face a brutally competitive environment characterized by a “sea of sameness” that threatens to drive all brands in a race to the bottom.1 However, little empirical information exists on how to best manage service brands in general and hospitality brands in particular. We have long understood successful goods branding, but we have not studied how successful services branding differs from that of goods branding. This article attempts to fill that void by analyzing 11 years of data in an empirical study of goods and service brands to determine how service brands succeed. Analyzing three factors—namely, service quality, service personalization, and service relationships—we found that service brand success can be achieved through relationship-based personalization accompanied by a level of quality that is consistent and meets customer expectations. Consistency in quality is a key to successful brand and firm outcomes. We conclude that either falling short of or exceeding customer quality expectations can have deleterious consequences for brands and firms. Moreover, we found that quality improvements should be achieved gradually.
