On Purpose Read online

  Image 2.1 citizenM logo

  Rattan Chadha – citizenM chairman

  The insight

  The idea for citizenM started when I owned the fashion retailer Mexx. We had 1,200 stores in 56 countries. It was a big business and by the time I left it was turning over more than €1 billion per year in sales. I had about 100 designers working for me in fashion design; they were all in the age range of 25 to 40 years old, from 26 different countries. I insisted that they travel every month – to New York, Paris and London to look at the new trends and absorb whatever they could in order to create differentiated and desirable collections. Every year my design director would come to me and say there was a hassle with hotels, because these kids didn’t want to stay in bland, boring budget hotels and we couldn’t afford to let them stay in five-star hotels because they were travelling so often. They refused to stay in a Holiday Inn Express or a Ramada Inn or a Travelodge, which is what the budget allowed for, and so they always found some bed and breakfast somewhere far away and then spent more money on taxis. Some of the places they were staying in were not in safe areas.

  So that planted something in my head about the absence of ‘hybrid’ hotels. I experienced hybrid in almost everything else I was doing. For example, I wear an Armani jacket with a shirt from Zara or Gap. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have money; it’s a choice. And that choice didn’t exist in hotels. I finally said ‘I’ve got to take this on, this whole idea of a hybrid hotel.’

  I actually recruited all the senior team before I had a site, before I had the name. We had nothing except about 12 to 15 people on the payroll. I spent millions at that time just figuring out how to design a hybrid hotel. What are the things that are important and what things are not important? We looked at the current hotel industry and asked ourselves ‘How can we change all this and cut the waste?’ We did about 500 interviews with travellers around Europe. I did many of those interviews personally.

  We heard the same story every time. A traveller goes to a city for business. They go to the hotel and dump their bag and check in – single occupancy for 80 per cent of the time, usually people travelling on business. They run out of the hotel, do their work, come back in the evening at 6 o’clock and then have a shower, do some e-mails in their room maybe, come down to the bar, have a drink while they wait for people to take them somewhere for dinner. Then they would come back to their room, watch TV and get a good night’s sleep. And the same pattern the next day or they would leave. And that pattern was consistent.

  We added our own frustrations of travel into the story. For example, arriving in Hong Kong and waiting in a queue behind 20 Japanese tourists to fill out this silly registration form; the hotel has all my details, I’ve stayed in the hotel five times before, but I have to fill out my name and address and sign here, sign there, do this, do that. So the whole idea of self check-in came from the frustration of standing in a queue to check into a hotel. I also noticed that most people working on reception and at the concierge desk do not ever step out from behind their desks. As a customer I have to go to them and stand in a line to ask for their help. But half the time the concierge is on the phone and I have to wait. What the hell do these guys do? The other crazy thing about five-star hotels is that before I get to the hotel I’ve carried or wheeled my suitcase all the way from Amsterdam to Hong Kong; I’ve been wheeling it through airports and into taxis but to get it from my taxi to my room I suddenly need help according to the hotel. I just stayed in a Four Seasons Hotel in Paris where you pay €1,200 per night for a standard room. The guy who took my bag was wearing an immaculate uniform that must have cost at least €1,000. He dropped my bag and then stood there for that extra five seconds and that killed the entire experience for me. How much shall I give him, €50 because I don’t have change? Should I ask him for some change back? Shall I tell him I’ll pay him later? Such a frustrating experience. Hotels insist on giving you what you don’t want rather than what you need.

  Stand up – purposeful leadership

  We took a clean sheet of paper and said ‘I want this price.’ We started with the price because we want people to be able to afford it. Then we said ‘I want a hotel that I will not be embarrassed to tell people that I stay at. It has to have great style, great design and have all the things that are critical to my stay. I don’t care about the rest.’ The third starting point was the people working at the hotel. We said they are not to do any functional jobs; they are there for the customer, nothing else. Everything else we will outsource. So that created the blueprint of what we were trying to do.

  That led us to work out how to make it affordable for this kind of customer. For example, I don’t need a wardrobe large enough for me to stay for two months; I carry one suit when I go for two days or three days to a city. So we thought how we could use space more effectively. A lot of the people told me we were crazy, because we should build more rooms and make the lobby small. I said, ‘But the lobby’s my living room. When I go home how much time do I spend in my bedroom? I go to my bedroom, I dump my bag and maybe I change and then I come down to my study or my living room, somewhere I can relax or work. Why would I stay in my bedroom? Why should a hotel be any different?’ So we created the lobby as a living workspace and we said, ‘Let’s extend the public space for people to relax and work.’

  We have tables, computers, TVs, fireplaces and books on display because I want it to feel like it’s home, not a hotel. We have hundreds of books; I want people to use the books but people say that guests will steal them. You know, guests in my house may also take books away; I don’t care. The experience for me is more important than worrying that the guest might take a book home; I want them to feel at home.

  Rattan’s last point goes to the heart of what is wrong with so many brands and why, as the Havas survey shows, 73 per cent of them could disappear and people wouldn’t care. Brands are too often built with the business in mind rather than with the consumer or customer in mind.

  Our vision would have been easy to realize if it was a five-star hotel, but it was difficult to achieve because it had to be done within our target budget. That meant that staffing had to be very low. We couldn’t afford receptionists. We couldn’t afford a concierge. We couldn’t afford housekeeping if the room was complicated to clean. I wanted a maximum of 10-minute clean-up per room because that means the room costs me £5 to clean instead of £25. So everything was driven from that desire to make it affordable, because as soon as you let that vision go it becomes too expensive to make the concept work.

  We wanted everybody to be a concierge. That became the idea of our ambassadors; everybody’s equal, everybody does the same thing. One of the things we recognized early on is that the single most important thing for me in a hotel is if I can recognize a person or they recognize me. If everybody is available where the guests are, they get to know the guests. When I’m checking in it’s the same guy; I go and get a coffee, it’s the same guy; I need help, it’s the same guy. I figured they will be much more in contact with guests if they are floating around at what I call the ‘moments of truth’, the interaction points – they will get closer to the customer. If you look at TripAdvisor they say the ‘service is fantastic’; actually we do nothing, we’re just there standing next to you. We don’t fill out forms, we don’t fetch you a cup of coffee, we don’t even get you a glass of water; you do it yourself. And yet we rate a consistent 9 on TripAdvisor.

  I want to be the Starbucks of hotels because it gives you easier operations, so it is very cost-effective. Second, it gives you brand building; you’ll be a dominant force. So when you go to London, if I have one hotel you might not stay because it might not be convenient for you, but you cannot escape me if I have six. Remember, a citizenM hotel has only a few hundred rooms, and I believe we have many more mobile citizens who would like to stay with us. I can’t build a hotel of 2,000 rooms on one site but I can build 2,000 rooms across multiple sites – it’s
a question of having the rooms to satisfy my customers.

  The key is to do one thing and try to do it right. Stick to who you are. I’m the brand director here, 100 per cent. I say ‘This is not right for citizenM’. I said no to so many locations. Great financial deal, but I’m not touching it. Why not? Because my customers are not going to come here, this is not coherent with what citizenM is all about.

  It needs a lot of discipline to build a brand. I’ve learnt that the hard way. It takes a lifetime to build a brand, to build a true brand. In fact citizenM, the brand book, was ready before I had the first site: the entire brand book, including room design, the living rooms, everything. I imagined a hotel and from that I decided what it was going to look like; this is what the mattress is going to be like; this is how dark I want the room. The people who don’t get our DNA think our coloured lighting is a gimmick – and copy it, but what they don’t realize is that it’s not about the f*****g lighting – it’s about the whole concept, the citizenM DNA.

  Note

  1 http://leadershipcircle.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Bowling-Green-Validity-Document-Final.pdf

  Part Two

  Stand out

  We have our purpose. So all we need to do, then, is to communicate it. That is often the attitude of many organizations, particularly if their agency has been instrumental in helping to write the purpose. But this would be the worst thing to do. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a typical customer to find out why.

  A customer’s perspective…

  I remember it well.

  1995, and the Seattle Coffee Company had just hit the streets of London. A ray of light shining out amongst the grey, soulless London cafes strewn across the capital.

  The smell of freshly ground coffee, the mellow jazz, the warm welcome, the theatre of the barista and the thick dense foam swirling on the cappuccino. But above all, I remember the feeling that the people who worked there really cared about me. Every time I walked through those doors, I felt uplifted because they greeted me personally and remembered my favourite drink. It was my temporary escape from the world.

  For me, it was the beginning of a new way of thinking. Coffee was no longer an instant brew, it was a fulfilling experience. Did the brand have some kind of purpose statement, guiding everything it did? I don’t know. But it fulfilled a real purpose for me.

  Sadly one of the big brands came along (Starbucks), took over the company and gradually the personality died and a little part of my daily life died along with it. Sure the coffee was good, but the soul had gone.

  Now 20 years later, and we’re seemingly in the ‘Age of Purpose’

  I hear that many brands have a purpose now. According to the experts, it’s the meaningful way of ‘engaging with us customers emotionally’ and ‘turning us into brand advocates’.

  But I’m not really sure I care about their purpose. I am more concerned about mine.

  My bank is telling me that their purpose is to ‘help people fulfil their hopes and dreams and realize their ambitions’. But I’d far rather that a person, and not a machine, answers the phone when I call them and that they don’t put me on hold for 40 minutes, subjecting me to phone ‘music’, before eventually connecting me to someone in a call centre whose accent is authentically different, but totally incomprehensible (HSBC).

  My mobile phone operator also now has a purpose. They say they want ‘to empower everybody to be confidently connected’. I say, just give me a reliable mobile signal, whenever I want to use my phone – and I’d be happy. Unfortunately, half the time I can’t get a signal at home and they can’t tell me why (Vodafone).

  As far as I know, my local convenience store doesn’t have a purpose. But it’s always open when I need it. They always deliver friendly service and never overprice anything. They are there for me when I need them and so I make a point of shopping there.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ‘dissing’ ‘purpose’. I would always prefer to deal with brands that had an ethical purpose or some kind of social conscience, but I above all want to do business with brands that first and foremost care – yes, genuinely care – about their customers.

  And I want them to prove it.

  Just give me a great experience first – and then maybe, just maybe, I’ll care about your purpose.

  Robert Stephens told us that ‘a cynic is a romantic with higher standards’. In other words, we all hope for the best but are frequently disappointed. We shouldn’t be surprised if customers are as cynical as the real customer quoted above. Brands bombard them with promises that they fail to deliver, offers that turn out to be spurious and service that is grudging. So, whatever you do, don’t decide to communicate your brand purpose in some way on your website or allow your agency to put it into some folksy story unless you have first ensured that you are delivering it.

  So far we have argued that it is important for organizations to stand up for something; to have a purpose beyond profit. But this is just wishful thinking unless this purpose is evident to customers and employees. The most inspiring purpose in the world counts for naught unless people are clear about it and unless it serves to differentiate you in some meaningful way from competitors, be they in the general market or the employment market. That’s where stand out comes to bear. It is the process by which you make tangible your purpose. It is manifested in three ways: through the way you communicate, the way you deliver experiences that create value for target customers and, finally, the way that you innovate in order to continue to be the brand that you want to be.

  Chapter Three

  Infectious communication

  Infectious communication is the result of creating such compelling experiences and content that your customers enthusiastically become your best advocates. It involves any method through which your message is conveyed by willing and (usually) unpaid intermediaries. It can cover everything from word of mouth to shared media such as TedTalks, for example. Success is when things go ‘viral’ and develop a life of their own beyond your control, scary though that may be.

  More and more organizations see the benefits of infectious communication. Brands such as Burberry, LEGO and Apple are moving most of their marketing activity to social media platforms. Unfortunately many others are simply applying old rules to new media. You see it on websites that are clunky to use and therefore deliver poor user experiences. You see it with demeaning pleas for customers to ‘Like us’ on Facebook, or worse still, the purchase of followers and fans from sweat shops in India. Why do some organizations simply not get the power of infectious communication and how to achieve it?

  Marketing should be a verb, not a noun

  The answer to the above question is that in many organizations marketing has become a noun, a set of processes and a function. Instead it should be a verb, a set of behaviours and everything that an organization does. When John Lewis, Arthur Guinness and Conrad Hilton started their brands they saw marketing holistically. They believed that it was how they treated their customers and ran their companies. But, perhaps, because of the introduction of the scientific view of management largely founded by Frederick Taylor and continued by Alfred Sloan in his time at General Motors, fuelled by the rigour of P&G’s approach to brand marketing in the 1960s and 1970s, and reinforced by the plethora of MBA programmes since then, marketing has become a function supported by its own set of rigid principles not dissimilar in their rigour to finance. But this is changing.

  The advent of social media has opened up so many communication channels that are beyond the remit of traditional ‘above the line’ marketers. The ways in which consumers form impressions of brands are so much richer than advertising alone that marketing activity has become an experience in and of itself in many organizations. Adam Greenwood, a teen ‘vlogger’, discovered that there was no loo paper available when he used the toilet on the Virgin Train from Euston to Glasgow so he did what any good millennial w
ould do – he tweeted Virgin HQ about it. Virgin picked up the tweet and within a few minutes a Virgin employee was knocking on the door with a roll of toilet paper to rescue Adam from his predicament. That tweet and its follow-up story have been ‘liked’ and shared by over 6,000 people.

  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/06/toilet-paper-delivery-twitter_n_6423760.html

  Is this story about customer service? Is it about complaint resolution? Or is it about marketing? The answer to all of these is ‘yes’. The fact is that ‘above the line’ is now ‘below the radar’ for many consumers.

  Research by Thales S Teixeira for a Harvard Business Review article revealed that the percentage of ads considered fully viewed and getting high attention has decreased dramatically, from 97 per cent in the early 1990s to less than 20 per cent in 2015.1 In 2013, the average American was exposed to about 52,000 TV commercials. So it is no surprise that, in these days of remote controls, TiVo and digital video recorders, consumers vote with their fingers and skip the ads – unless they are entertained. The most powerful way to entertain people is to engage them emotionally through storytelling. At Christmas 2014, the supermarket brand Sainsbury in partnership with the Royal British Legion released a moving video that celebrated relationships forged in the First World War. Despite it being 3 minutes 40 seconds long, nearly 17 million people have viewed it on YouTube.

  http://youtu.be/NWF2JBb1bvM

  Tell a story that people care about

  John Lewis Partnership released its own Christmas ad, also celebrating relationships, in this case featuring a penguin. It has been viewed nearly 23 million times.