Streamline Training & Documentation: A Credible Branding Story

Thursday, April 19, 2007

A Credible Branding Story

The Loews Hotels Corp. impressed the editors of Training magazine enough to come in at #75 on the magazine's 2007 Top 125 (pdf) — a list of companies doing an especially effective job of employee training and development.

On Tuesday, Training provided further detail on Loews' approach in an online report. The report focuses on the training portion of a large-scale branding initiative, and I'm citing it here because it is among the most credible such efforts I've encountered.

Nan Stanley, Loews' corporate training manager, highlights three best practices for branding training:

Recognize "the value of professionalism, proper vocabulary, addressing people by name in correspondence and picking up a telephone."

Include all levels of employees. "If you are going to define yourself as a luxury hotel and are attempting to project that image, ... [a]bsolutely everyone in your organization has to understand what that means and interact with guests and clients accordingly. So, yes, we targeted our sales team heavily with this training, but the real value of the program came from the fact that everyone else was expected to go through the training, too, including senior leaders in our home office, managers at all levels, and other team members such as bell service, reservations, and front desk workers."

Help employees understand how to work in the particular environment you create for your customers. For instance, in Loews' luxury environment, employees must feel confident in presenting themselves (as opposed to being either diffident or pretentious).

As Stanley explains,

Brand awareness is especially important for us. The majority of luxury brands in our industry have more hotels than we do, and they tend to focus heavily on their names for brand recognition. In some cases, however, people don't necessarily know much about the Loews brand because there isn't a standard look to our properties — all of which are localized. We don't want a guest room in New Orleans, for example, to look like a guest room in Santa Monica. The standards and quality are the same across all of our properties, of course, but each hotel looks different, which makes brand awareness more challenging.

Another goal was differentiation. For us, the way to do that was through exemplary service and exemplary employees. So, we wanted the training to brand these competitive elements and strengthen the brand even further through our regular interactions with customers.

Loews has rolled out two training programs as part of the branding initiative: "Living Loews," whose topics include behavior, communication, presentation, salesmanship, hosting meetings, public speaking, dress, and etiquette; and "Loews Language," which focuses on communication skills and "word choices that reflect the Loews brand positioning."

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Labels: Branding

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