Inside Tempo by Hilton: New Brand to Focus on Minimizing Disruptions to One’s Lifestyle Caused by Travel
Once upon a time, someone created a hotel with a happening scene, cool lighting, and hip music, and called it a lifestyle hotel. After that, every hotelier wanted to have a lifestyle hotel, even though no one knew exactly what it meant.
Now we may know.
Last week, Hilton introduced a new lifestyle brand, Tempo by Hilton. Hilton announced it as “an elevated and approachable” lifestyle brand but a lifestyle brand nonetheless. Let’s put aside the fact that every major hotel chain in the world from Jumeirah to Marriott to Hyatt to Radisson to InterContinental to even Hilton itself has at least one hotel brand that it refers to as a “lifestyle brand.” A quick survey of those brands would reveal that they have little in common with one another and offer little to support a guest’s particular style of living.
Let’s look for a moment at what “lifestyle” actually means, both in common parlance and in marketing speak, to better understand why what Hilton is doing here may be unique.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “lifestyle as “a way of life or living of a person or group” and an excellent marketing-specific definition is “the totality of the likes and dislikes of a particular section of the market, especially when expressed in terms of the products and services that they would buy” and “a marketing strategy based on the self-image of such a group.”
The group in this case is “modern achievers,” a term brought back to life by Hilton. The earliest usage of the term we can find is in Robert Grau’s “The Business Man in the Amusement World,” a book published by Broadway Publishing Company in 1910, with reference to Joe Wood, a theater promoter who reinvented himself in the vaudeville era.
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