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Singapore, October 2007
Boutique hotels, small properties typically offering an
enhanced level of service and marketed to the affluent business guest, are no
strangers to the concept of immersing their visitors in a unique and often
sensory experience. One brand consultant in Singapore however has been taking
that prescription to the next level, advising boutique properties in the island
republic and beyond on how they can deploy stimuli such as music and fragrance
to create a specific mood, a brand experience or simply relax the guests and
allow them to chill out within the hotel surroundings.
Simon A.
Faure-Field, CEO of Equal Strategy says that creating a pleasant environment no
longer cuts it in the competitive world of hospitality. “A hotel is effectively
in the space business and what is important is how proprietors pay
attention to that space in ‘sensory’ terms. Do the guests react to the
space?, does the space stimulate positive emotion, or negative
and/or neutral emotion? A hotelier who does not pay attention to the sounds
which permeate a given space, or the scents that can be discerned in the air,
is wasting some of the most powerful branding tools available to them”.
According to Faure-Field, businesses are no longer just
selling products anymore, they are selling experiences. “When you walk into a
shop you don’t just see things, you hear things, you smell things. Music sets
the mood, and the sense of smell is directly connected to the brain’s centres
for memory and emotion. Customers remember whether a space smells nice or not –
it cannot be neglected”.
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.
Faure-Field recently installed solutions in two new
boutique hotels in Singapore, Naumi and M Hotel. Naumi, which opened in
September on the premises of a pre-existing property – the Metropole Hotel - is
the brainchild of the Hind Group. True to the theme of ‘eco-architecture’, the
40 room Naumi hotel harmonises nature integrally with the building’s design,
offering guests “a jungle sanctuary in the heart of the bustling city” according
to its developer, Indian entrepreneur Surya Jhunjhnuwala. M Hotel meanwhile is a
more conventional 413 room design-focused boutique hotel in the heart of
Singapore’s financial district which focuses on providing modern technological
amenities to guests in a chic setting.
Naumi
features a refreshingly stylish ‘chill out’ bar concept in the spacious lobby of
its Seah Street entrance, which overlooks one side of the illustrious Raffles
Hotel. Faure-Field has advised the proprietors to install a combination of
ginger and lime fragrance combined with a classy selection of downtempo and
lounge coupled to nu-groove elements interwoven with touches of vocal and latin
house, leading through to upbeat melodies and intoxicating rhythms in the later
hours which give guests the sensation of being in a cool and chic night club
from the moment they check in. Visual aspects such as interior design and bar
configuration add to this sense of being in a modish bar rather than the lobby
of a hotel.
For M Hotel,
Faure-Field has installed a combination of fragrance and music in the property’s
lobby and ‘music styling’ in the hotel’s Café 2000 and buffet area, whilst
separate play lists for the hotel’s spa, pool and business centre are also in
the works. The lobby is permeated by a signature gingerly fragrance which adds a
subtle but pleasing Asian flavour to this Asian hotel property.
For the hotel’s Café 2000, Faure-Field was given free reign
by Mark Gailey, Director of Food & Beverage at the hotel, to go to town in
developing play lists which would correspond with the feeling of various times
of the day. Working closely together and reviewing every single track in a play
list comprising literally hundreds of songs (Faure-Field has access to over 2
million fully copyrighted tracks), Gailey and Faure-Field created mood settings
for breakfast, lunch, mid afternoon and dinner ranging from Latin, Cuban and
bossanova to a light sprinkling of jazz with a European and South American
undertone. Says Faure-Field, “Music, tempo and genre were all critical in
creating the appropriate mood and momentum to the time of day, corresponding to
how diners would be feeling and their state of alertness and arousal at
different periods of the day.”
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 shoper’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
collaborates with world renowned fragrance house Belmay and Australian company
BrandaromaÔ to design fragrances which can be customised for particular brands.
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.
Faure-Field’s consulting company, Equal Strategy
(Singapore) Pte Ltd has also worked extensively with major hotel chains like
Westin, Starwood and Pan Pacific on similar spatial branding solutions. 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.
www.equalstrategy.com
www.millenniumhotels.com.sg/mhotelsingapore/index.html
Footnotes
¹ Ronald E. Milliman, Using Background Music to Affect the
Behaviour of Supermarket Shoppers, Journal of Marketing, Summer
1982.
About Equal
Strategy
Equal Strategy delivers “music”, “fragrance” and “recorded
telephone messages on hold” to businesses in a scientific way that enhances the
overall customer experience of the brand and causes the customer to stay longer
and buy more! Equal Strategy is the only company in Asia that specialises in
deploying “music” and “fragrance” solutions to business where the two senses are
stimulated in synergy with each other. Sound and smell deliver stimuli directly
to the memory centres of the brain, influencing behaviour and creating
suggestion at both the conscious and unconscious levels. Decades of behavioural
research into the habits of consumers has found that “consumer arousal” can be
either stimulated or suppressed through the use of mood settings like music and
fragrance.
Media & Images
Contact
Danny
Chaplin
Tel:
(65) 6256 5100
Email:
danny.chaplin@chaplinpr.com
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