In the crowded hotel market, there isn’t any room for brands that undersell their businesses. Molly Pierce reports on City Inn’s transformation into Mint Hotel

City Inn was a name that was always designed to be built on, an urban, modest brand.” Such is CEO David Orr’s opinion of the six property UK hotel business that rebranded itself as Mint Hotel in November 2010.

“We wanted to be clear about who we were, but the connotations of the name had become overwhelmed by the market, hence the mass mis-perception of our brand.” The ‘City Inn’ name aligned the brand with other hotel businesses that weren’t providing the same level of service the Orrs felt their hotels offered; but conclusions reached in internal sessions needed more scientific backing in order to set change in motion.

They turned to market research consultancy BDRC to provide this. “We knew we needed to change – but we wanted a forensic understanding of why,” remarks Orr. The brief was for BDRC to identify areas with support for the existing brand, and to demarcate the lines between existing and prospective guests.

The response was swift and straightforward: within four hours of the surveys being issued, BDRC received over 800 responses, displaying an unprecedented enthusiasm. Existing guests felt strongly that ‘City Inn’ didn’t match the delivery they had come to expect from their hotels, and that the experience provided sounded nothing like the name.

Respondents who had never stayed at a City Inn, however, positioned the hotels in the budget sector of the market, and were twice as likely to say that they would stay at the hotel when shown a photograph with no identifying name as when shown a City Inn logo.

The company now had the empirical evidence to consolidate the desire for change. The opening of two new hotels – a second London property at the Tower of London in December 2010, and a first overseas venture in Amsterdam, March 2011 – provided the perfect timescale to review the brand, as the new openings meant the number of hotel rooms being operated by City Inn would double: a memorable, exciting new brand identity would be more important than ever.

The Orrs turned to the advertising agency Diamond to collaborate on the branding exercise with them. Diamond had the right pedigree for the repositioning of City Inn, having overseen projects at Sheraton and Park Plaza hotels, and was eager to take on the peculiar challenges of City Inn. “The product itself is unusual”, explains Piers Bracher, a partner at Diamond, “and the branding challenge even more so, as we were searching for an identity to live up to a fantastic offering; rather than brand change being the catalyst for organisational change, the organisation here was the catalyst for brand change.”

In the 4-star UK hotel market, brands define themselves by location, by heritage, by their design styles – leading to a confusing and a crowded market. Orr knew the company needed to distinguish itself, and when ‘Mint’ was suggested in an early planning session, it struck exactly the right chord.

“We were searching for an identity to live up to a fantastic offering; rather than brand change being the catalyst for organisational change, the organisation here was the catalyst for brand change”

“It was modest but modern; subtle but innovative – a brand that sticks with you, like Apple” he says, invoking the holy grail of modern branding. Bracher goes into more detail on Mint’s connotations: “It was just an immediate fit. It’s different for a hotel brand, but fresh and reassuring – few people dislike the flavour of mint. It’s also durable: you start your day with mint, when you brush your teeth, and it recurs throughout the day. That synaesthetic suggestion of freshness was important for us.”

The visual identity developed with the new name maintains the urbanity of City Inn. The junction of the four leaves forms a subtle urban landscape to underlie the more immediate naturalism, and whilst Mint is a concept without any particular geographic specificity, the leaves also suggest a saltire – a nod to the Scottish nationality of David and Sandy Orr – and a Union Jack. This flag imagery retains the sense of Mint as a British brand whilst allowing for the planned expansion into European territories.

The new name was decided on by mid-summer 2010, with a pre-determined date of 29 November as the final deadline for the rollout. Bracher estimates that strategy, planning and research took a little over two months in total before the internal comms team put together by Orr started to implement the changes. The strategy, he says, was guided strongly by the new name. “The joy of Mint is that it’s an attitude – it creates a positive outlook. Although we avoided referring to things as ‘Minty’, which veers close to toothpaste territory, we started thinking of things as ‘very Mint’. The creative strategy was as much a state of mind as anything, a refreshing of the old strategy.

“Again, it’s an unusual rebrand in this way – communication usually leads the process of product change, but this is already an innovative product. The communication strategy was really about catching up with this fantastic product.”

The complex process of implementing an entirely new brand across eight hotels, six cities and 1,000 staff then began. “I was incredibly impressed with the internal comms team,” says Orr. “They didn’t know what project they’d been picked for, and then they had five weeks to wrap their heads around it. 300 nondisclosure agreements were signed across the company, and we didn’t have any leaks in confidentiality. Every single thing – every smallest item – that had a City Inn name on it had to change.”

The implementation was again a collaborative exercise, with Diamond in the vanguard on big items such as artwork and signage. The internal team rolled out Diamond’s guidelines across detailed items, contracting their own print suppliers as HR worked simultaneously on branded gifts and room items. The digital aspect of the rebrand was also managed inhouse, as the website was reskinned whilst remaining fully functional. Everything came back through Diamond for approval to ensure that brand continuity wasn’t neglected, and to aid with the construction of branding guidelines.

Putting the new identity in place also brought with it the question of what to do with old materials. In the current economic climate, even if a business isn’t concerned with its green credentials, it simply doesn’t make sense to throw away unused stocks. Orr points out that the lead-time given to the internal team meant that they were able to run down supplies, and cites an internal statement to manage recycling as far as possible. Wastage was further limited by donating any non-recyclable branded materials, such as pens and pencils, to educational organisations in the Third World: a fresh take on stock running down that corresponds to the overall Mint outlook.

The internal reaction to Mint was always going to be a crucial indicator as to whether the gamble on a name change would pay off. It seemed they were in luck. “It was absolutely incredible,” says Orr, simply. “I’ve never seen such spontaneous, immediate approval,” adds Bracher. “It got a standing ovation from the sales team. You can never be 100% sure about these things, so although we had complete confidence in Mint, that was remarkable.”

External evaluation of the new brand is somewhat more difficult to measure, but Mint and Diamond feel as though the public unveiling of the new identity has gone equally smoothly. Phase 2 of the rebrand is due in 2011, including a thorough review of the website, and Orr is looking forward to the natural opportunities for brand communication afforded by the opening in Amsterdam in March. “We’re examining marketing initiatives that are focused on building brand awareness whilst protecting our existing customer base. We’re not losing customers, and the personal response I’ve seen has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Bracher expands on this, citing the very first respondents to the new brand – “the customers who checked in at City Inn and checked out from Mint liked the new name and, crucially, liked the handling. Where their opinion really counts, however, is in their take on the product, and the fact that they ‘remain delighted’ is very important to us.”

It may still be too early for official feedback, but the proof of the new brand’s benefit will be in whether it is successful in bringing in those potential customers revealed by BDRC’s research at the year’s beginning. “The reassurance will be in the hoped-for success of the new hotels,” Orr concludes, “but we already feel that there are very few ways in which the risk wasn’t worth it.”      

Peter Matthews, Nucleus

New 4 star city centre hotels must stand out from the crowd, as Malmaison and Hotel du Vin have proved, otherwise the distribution power of Hilton, Radisson Blu, Crowne Plaza et al will prevail. In this company you do not want to be called City Inn. Inn means ‘not a hotel’ (or worse), so the name change is a step in the right direction - assuming Mint Hotel can trade mark the name.

Mint’s product is clean-lined, contemporary and liked by guests (see Trip Adviser), but while the new brand identity communicates some urban chic style, it leaves me thinking that the execution is just a bit insipid, too literal; too, er, minty.