It's Not The Space. It's The Feeling.
Brand is just a fancy word for 'feelings' and 'experience'.
Walk into a beautifully designed hotel and you notice the interiors. Walk into a great restaurant and you notice the atmosphere. Step into a premium office and you admire the architecture.
But when you leave, those probably aren’t the things you remember most.
It’s likely you remember how you were greeted, or whether someone anticipated your needs without you having to ask. Or perhaps how easy it was to navigate the space.
I’ve come to realise that whilst buildings create first impressions, experiences create everlasting ones.
Working in commercial property has reinforced something that I think applies just as much to hospitality as it does to offices: every interaction shapes a brand, from start to end.
The website.
The booking process and system.
The arrival and greeting.
The reception.
The signage.
The wayfinding.
The speed of a response.
The tone of an email.
The warmth of a conversation.
Together, these small moments become the brand.
It’s made me think differently about the role of marketing.
The strongest marketing teams help shape the experience people have once they arrive.
That’s where customer experience, employer brand, internal communications, service design and brand strategy begin to overlap.
They’re different ways of designing how people feel.
Some of the world’s most admired hospitality brands understand this instinctively. Some of my favourite examples; Soho House, The Hoxton, and Gordon Ramsey Restaurants… (just to name a few!)
The secret behind building a memorable brand is choreographing lots of small details, with intention, frequently and consistently, to the point where guests don’t think twice about coming back.
Picture a hotel lobby:
Immaculate, beautifully scented, exactly as designed. Then a member of staff looks straight through you as you walk in. In that moment, none of it matters. The marble floors, the fragrance, the flowers on the concierge desk all disappear behind that one small failure. Because it was never the lobby that was going to bring you back. It’s the experience that lives inside it.
I think commercial property has a lot to learn from hospitality.
As offices continue evolving into destinations that people choose to spend their time in rather than places they have to be in, the line between workplace experience and guest experience is becoming blurry.
Perhaps the future isn’t about solely about designing better buildings. It’s about designing better experiences.
Because people will probably remember a space.
But they’ll definitely remember how that space made them feel.