How do customers help tell your PR story?

There are 287 hotels in Hong Kong and 80,596 rooms to fill each day. That adds up to a lot of choices when it comes to prospective customers deciding where to stay, and which boxes each individual hotel tick for a customer.

Creating a brand strategy always comes back to customer response

In a market as competitive as hospitality and in a territory like Hong Kong, an effective PR strategy and brand strategy are essential and must be creative, agile and adaptable. For a smaller hotel like ICON without the benefit of a corporate engine, PR tactics are vital both in terms of positioning and creating valuable partnerships to help us expand and grow into new markets.

A brand as an art is about telling a story or creating a memory, and if word of mouth was always a valuable currency, social media platforms have made it more so, with our customers sharing and interacting with one another, and directly with us as individual brands and hotel groups. The degree to which customer trust influences decisions has never been higher and is clearly rising. So whilst every brand behavior is on public display, customer interaction and building trust are more important than ever. We can create a brand strategy and brand marketing strategy, to tell our brand story however we want, but it ultimately boils down to the response of the customer to reflect this.

To an extent, a brand’s story is now out of its control – the internet put paid to that – so we must recognize our customer as an author and fabulist exploring the possibilities of what they can give towards our overall PR effort, rather than take away from it and build outwards on that.

Hotel ICON make brand stories 'Unlike any other'

How Hotel ICON creates its brand story

Here at ICON we look at every operation and aspect of the hotel and service and make our brand story out of each part, and this tactic has proved successful over the years. We utilize as many platforms as possible and try to engage with as many of our customers as we can on a daily basis, developing conversations and points of view to enable a differentiated position in the market. For ICON, Instagram, in particular, has proved a valuable word of mouth tool.

Now, of course, we have more sophisticated data to integrate, too, which means we can make PR more tailored individually, and certainly here at ICON we are keeping a keen eye on tech advances and how we can use them to our advantage in the future.