Kimpton Brand Revolution

The culmination of years of thinking, collaborating, designing, training, and architecting is documented in the comprehensive Kimpton Global Playbook. Far beyond a visual styleguide, the book provides a strategic blueprint for the Kimpton way, from rolling out new distinctly-branded boutique hotel properties, to the operational elements that shape guest experience and guide communication. The book versions to ensure that whenever expansion or evolution calls, you have a ready guide.

At the heart of Kimpton is a guest experience that is somehow familiar everywhere, yet never the same twice. Their "many brands of one" approach calls for a system where a master brand provides continuity without cramping local spirit and style. Mapping a signature guest journey, then creating "dashboards" so each boutique property can create its own detours, is what keeps Kimpton ridiculously personal, never boring. This system shapes hotel brand identity, experience, and operations wherever guests go, and helps invent dozens of new brands along the way.

The definition and structure around Kimpton's special brand moves rolls out into the organization through tools that help train, implement, sell, and service. An engaging curriculum of content and materials indoctrinates General Managers into the methodology for making their property brand come alive. Meantime, a digital "sidekick" and sales cycle strategy helps salespeople guide meetings and event planners through a seamless journey of their own.

Every guest journey is guided by an employee on their own path. Delivering on a heartfelt, "stay human" brand of hospitality requires constantly attracting, retaining, and growing awesome people. An employer brand strategy helps recruit and motivate using credo-caliber messaging, signage, training cheat sheets, interview guides and digital tools to help build a perennial "best place to work" organization.

Kimpton's identity and brand expression nod to a familiar personality, but elevate into a more sophisticated and upscale sensibility. New standards play out across signature operational and business usage, then into brand strategy guidelines for photography of Kimpton people, places, and hotel guest experiences. Just as in design of physical space, visual elements form a defining Kimpton look and expression of the Kimpton brand that spurs perceived value and real experience.

Many luxury hotel brands build loyalty programs to buy loyalty; Kimpton's is built to earn it. As the new name suggests, Karma promises good things come to those who stay. A new technology platform incents guests to seek Kimpton experiences, even the free ones, and make it personal, while rewarding them with the immersive experience of the program itself. Symbolic tiers, graphics, and digital interfaces keep great guests ever-seeking Kimpton's Inner Circle.

The new Kimpton digital environment required a ground-up website design and development, with information architecture to mirror brand architecture and support experience. A massive undertaking, the result is backed by a custom CMS and technology that not only integrates browsing and booking across all properties and all devices, but allows for each boutique property to have their own space within the site, and on their own. It adds up to a measured, profound impact on bookings, conversion, brand perception, and equity. Put simply, it paid for itself immediately after launch.