Branding in the hotel industry is very very important, without branding its very difficult for your brand to succeed, unless of course, you are a very small hotel company or a single hotel that isn't exactly looking for worldwide or national exposure.

For a company like Starwood Hotels - branding is one of the most important facets of their marketing campaigns. Branding establishes what each of their hotel brands stand for, differentiates them from the competition and encourages the customers to want a particular brand over another.

Branding obviously encompasses a number of different aspects - it can mean everything from the amenities that are included with a hotel stay, a word, saying, or song that establishes a connection between the brand and the consumer, or it can be as simple as a font, graphic, or logo.

Some companies have managed to associate their font/logo with the consumer that whenever one sees the color combination, font size or letter count - they automatically think about the brand. For example - Google's multicolored logo, if a competitor were to put each of the Google logo's colors into their own logo, it would subconsciously be associated with Google.

Starwood Hotels for years has had a very plain logo - instead they have been more focused on the individual brand logos, since that's what the consumer would look for - but as time goes on, the regular Starwood Hotels & Resorts logo has looked a bit boring, the only excitement it has is the circle with the star in the center - but even that seems to have been phased out for just text.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts Logo with Swirly and Star

Starwood Hotels Logo in plain text

Starwood Hotels has always been at the forefront of branding their individual hotel brands, in fact it seems as though they are the leader in discovering new concepts, and then the rest of the hotel industry follows, or at least the major hotel firms always seem to do .

That's why I was happy to see a new Starwood Hotels & Resorts logo which has a bit of a playful feel to it, as well as a more inviting feel than the "corporate" look of its existing logo.

New Starwood Hotels Logo

Now I don't have any verification that this is in fact a new logo, or that this is the finalized logo - I simply saw this on an invite to a Starwood sponsored hotel development event in Las Vegas - so I think its safe to assume that this would be their new logo since its rare that a fortune 500 corporation would randomly put a logo that's never appeared in public on a company sponsored event.

Their new logo is fun because its not in a block-type font like the old one was, it incorporates colors in the actual logo as well as a graphic - in this case, a star. One facet which jumps out is the center/right justified "Hotels and Resorts" text. I'd normally have expected to see "Hotels & Resorts" centered on one line - but instead it's centered to the right underneath the blue star.

I think this logo portrays a playful and fun company, which isn't all dry and boring. That means a lot in the hotel industry when some of Starwood's competition hasn't changed their logo in decades and doesn't seem phased by the appearance of boring and not-updated.

usually with an updated logo brings an updated corporate look - so I think its safe to assume if this is in fact going to be the new Starwood Hotels & Resorts corporate logo that Starwood's entire corporate appearance will be going through a bit of an update, including its website.

I'll be keeping an eye out for changes - but since the event for which this new logo appeared occurs in Mid-May of this year, Im sure we'll see a complete roll out by the end of this summer.

andrew@alconic-inc.com

Andrew Calvo is a 26 year old Commercial Real Estate Advisor in New Jersey. I live in Tinton Falls, NJ. This blog is about my passions - primarily hotels, commercial real estate, and development, etc.

Since I have been in High School I�fve had numerous jobs, but the field which has always interested me is Real Estate, Hotel Development and Construction. I consider myself a zealot in that area - I try to absorb as much as I possibly can, take the experiences that I learn, or read about and use them in my life.�

www.passionsofazealot.com/2009/04/19/starwood-hotels-and-resorts-has-a-new-modern-playful-and-fun-logo