Marriott Hotels &
Resorts and the first Renaissance Hotels & Resorts under the
Marriott Hotel Group have gone live with Equal Strategy’s advanced
environmental fragrancing solutions for their Malaysian properties
“great rooms”, beginning with the Renaissance Melaka Hotel.
Marriott Hotels & Resorts’ “great room” concept, introduced last
year, redefines the way that guests relate to and use the common
spaces within hotels like lobby, check in areas, restaurants,
social areas and retail outlets. The concept of the great rooms
will be to create “more fluid, organic spaces where individuals
can enjoy public privacy”. The new model is also expected to
create some trends by giving guests fresh ways to work and play
within the property that they couldn’t outside of the hotel.
By removing architectural barriers, the spaces will be designed to
adapt to guests' needs. The “great room” zones will include
welcome, individual, social and business zones. The great room
concept was conceived around the ideas of "relaxing work" and
"social business." Relaxing work has been defined as a much less
formal way of working in the presence of other people, akin to the
way people work at Starbucks.
Marriott’s “Great Room” fragrancing project implemented by Equal
Strategy is designed to standardize music and fragrance across
hotels in the Marriott’s brand portfolio. Equal Strategy has
delivered the fragrancing for various Renaissance Hotels in
Malaysia including the Renaissance Kuala Lumpur Hotel (Zanzibar
Mist), Renaissance Kota Bahru Hotel (Calypso Orange) and the
Renaissance Melaka Hotel (Calypso Orange). On 6th November 2007,
the Renaissance Melaka Hotel went live with the fragrancing of its
hotel lobby. It was followed a few days later by the Renaissance
Kuala Lumpur (East Wing-Lobby and West Wing Lobby Lounge).
According to Simon A. Faure-Field, CEO of Equal Strategy, Marriott
Hotels & Resorts is one of the major international chains leading
the pack in terms of introducing innovative new ways in which
guests are able relate to the interior spaces of a hotel.
“The chain has examined the latest evolving guest behaviours, both
socially and also at work, and have redefined their spaces into
“zones” which support and extend those new behaviours. This is
incredibly inventive for a major hotel chain to think outside the
box like this and break the mould of its previous service model.”
“Equal Strategy is proud to partner with the two chains to provide
a signature scent to those spaces which supports and compliments
the underlying role of the space and imprints a recognisable
sensory cue which guests will find pleasing and which reinforces
brand recall and loyalty.”
Equal Strategy has consulted other hotel chains, as well as
boutique properties, on similar sensory branding solutions
including Westin Hotels, Starwood Hotels, Pan Pacific, Naumi and M
Hotel to name a few. This same month Equal Strategy has also
delivered musical styling to four different outlets of the
stunning new Raffles Dubai property. The company is the only one
of its kind in the Asia region advising forward-thinking hoteliers
on the deployment of these sensory brand techniques.
Faure-Field started his business in 1998 providing companies with
telephone recorded answering services designed to help them
project a consistent brand image when interacting with customers.
His company’s services currently cover telephone on hold
messaging, messages broadcast within retail businesses and hotels,
the creation of music play lists and fragrance deployment which is
the most sophisticated system available in Asia.
Mr Faure-Field is the only consultant in Asia Pacific specializing
in combining music with fragrance to synergise a consistent brand
experience for customers. His work is solidly grounded in
behavioural science research and draws extensively upon the finds
of researchers in the field of effects of background music and
atmosphere on retail environments. In the retail arena, studies by
Areni and Kim, for example, noted that music can be a critical
component of store atmosphere, playing a role in the
decision-making processes.
Their studies, and others, show that if shoppers stay longer and
travel slowly through a store, they are likely to purchase more.
Another study by Milliman¹ found that the tempo of music can
affect a shopper’s pace of movement around the store. For this
reason the music tempo at Borders is slow and relaxed. Creating
the right ambience in a store through music can have other
benefits too, such as facilitating discussion between customers
and sales staff, something that can be carried over into the
hospitality field.
Faure-Field also collaborates with world renowned fragrance house
Belmay and Australian company BrandaromaÔ to design fragrances to
positively reinforce brands positioning. The system, which creates
an aerosolised fragrance deliverable through the property’s air
conditioning system, also has the ability to cancel out malodorous
smells like body odour and residual cooking smells emanating from
kitchens and food preparation areas. OdourfoylÔ has the ability to
actually change the genetic structure of bad smells so that the
brain can no longer recognise them.
Footnotes
¹ Ronald E.
Milliman, Using Background Music to Affect the Behaviour of Supermarket
Shoppers, Journal of Marketing, Summer 1982.
