Accor Hotels
How might we
Co-create the branding of our upcoming projects with potential customers?
In 2018, Accor Hotels asked us to provide them with a quick naming proposals for 3 recently acquired and created brands. One of which ended up being WOJO, formerly known as Nextdoor coworking spaces.
Products are shaped by their users. Brands are shaped by their audiences. As the audience, choosing a product is about making a choice with your brain. Choosing a brand, on the other hand, is about making a choice with your gut. Brands lie in the realm of intuition. Ruled by the unconscious and its cognitive biases, identifying the best decision making method when building a brand strategy can sometimes turn into a tricky challenge.
The challenge
How do you get people with different viewpoints and from different backgrounds - namely teams, managers and audiences - on board with one consistent and seamless brand personality? Having built numerous brands over the years, AccorHotels is well aware of those challenges and has mastered its subtleties. Our goal together was to build a collaborative naming strategy method, which would be quick, cost-efficient and easy to implement on their upcoming projects. This methodology was used in 4 of the company's projects.
The insight
Co-creation methods are enriching experiences. They nurture inclusive design, they connect the company to its audience, they foster team building and they enable a higher degree of divergence, offering more creative outcomes. The issue is that brands can't always afford to implement them, as they can turn out to be costly and time-consuming.
The solution
Two days, one brand. We suggested a 2-day method meant to co-create brand concepts with users and to deliver them in two days, always using the same 4-step method. Sourcing the users, conducting the co-creation workshop, extracting a selection of 10 brand concepts and shortlisting the top 5 ones.
