Cultivating a brand environment.

The concept of "unreasonable hospitality" and how it supercharges modern marketing.

We live in a technology-centric world. This will likely not come as news to any of you. As new platforms and new paradigms spring up seemingly daily, the pressure to not only understand them but prove expert in them causes me an inordinate amount of stress.

Each post or video I see with a talking head pontificating “here are the 14 AI tools that have radically transformed my life!” causes a visceral reaction, a punch to the gut. I must do more to ‘future-proof’ my career, I think. Then I try to remind myself of a lesson I shared in an earlier post, that it takes just 18 minutes of practice per day to become better than 95% of people at a particular skill.

And yet, when I sit idly, or when I have conversations with creative folks I admire, another truth becomes crystal clear:

Technology, in the long-run, is ubiquitous. People, and relationships, are the only differentiator.

It is an idea that I’ve used to guide my entire professional and personal life to this point, and given that I’m no expert in technology, modern or otherwise, it will remain the lens through which I approach my future too.

Of course, the world moves forward through innovation. Technology enables industries to proliferate and access to democratize as we’ve spoken about here several times. Across commerce, entertainment, medicine, communication and more, the pursuit of new and better technologies carries enormous promise. I belabor that point so as not to devalue its importance. Technology is ever-changing, helping us reach new, previously unforeseen heights.

In the long-run, specific technology is rarely if ever a true moat for an individual company. Competitors catch-up and new innovations emerge that render yesterday’s magic commonplace, or worse, obsolete. In a world always focused on the new, shiny object, the elements that combine to fuel commerce today are ones that have been consistent for generations: relationships, trust, service.

When it comes to marketing and brand-building, this is especially true. Over the past decade-plus, tech has dominated the marketing landscape. Programmatic media, scalability, lead-gen, ad targeting, lookalike audiences, etc., are some of the buzzwords that highlight strategy decks and board presentations.

These tactics shine for good reason, they help companies capture demand, and prove return through conversion on short-term investment. But they don’t create demand. They don’t breed consumer loyalty. Brands they do not make.

Unreasonable hospitality.

So, what does? I have always considered the best brands as environmental entities, and not in the sustainability sense. What I mean is, the best brands create environments where the right consumers want to spend their time, energy, and ultimately dollars. They bring ideas and products to life in ways that inspire, educate, simplify, entertain, or provide some other benefit that distinguishes them from any number of other organizations in a similar space. Surely no industry gives this as much consideration as hospitality, where visual design, flavors, service, music, scent, ambiance etc., are combined in intentional ways to provoke emotion in guests.

I recently began reading a book called Unreasonable Hospitality, written by Will Guidara, a restauranteur formerly of the Make It Nice hospitality group where he co-owned famed establishments like Eleven Madison Park in New York. The book was recommended to me by my brother who thought the concepts would resonate with me (and he was right).

As an aside, I recently finished reading Your Table is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D', so it’s fair to say I am firmly in my New York restaurant book era. The author of that book, Michael Cecchi-Azzolina, who was been on the team at some of the city’s most renowned restaurants, makes a similar point.

The best restaurants in the world offer the very best in service.

Sure, the quality of the food must exist at an elevated level, but at a certain point, distinguishing between the best 50 restaurants in the world becomes nearly impossible on food quality alone. As it turns out, in the hospitality business, food quality is like technology, it is table stakes, yet it is not a differentiator in the long-run. Early in the book, Guidara talks about his first time with Eleven Madison Park at the World’s Best 50 Restaurants Awards. The team came in at number 50. Certainly, an incredible honor to be even included in such company, but once you’ve made it to the event coming in 50th means coming in last.

That night, Guidara and his partners resolved they would reach the top spot, which they did a few years later in 2017. The strategy they planned to focus on in reaching this pinnacle? Service.

Cultivating a brand environment.

Hospitality offers incredibly valuable lessons to marketers and brand-builders across any industry, including and increasingly in the B2B space. At work, in my “day job,” I have always obsessed over the details of events and curated customer experiences much like a hotelier or restauranteur would (though with admittedly far less pressure to get it right!). And if I’m honest, I have never been sure as to why these elements were so important to me. Unreasonable Hospitality puts a framework behind this approach which I hadn’t consciously acknowledged before.

And while I haven’t worked in a restaurant, I have spent 15 years planning and producing comedy and live theater shows in competitive cities like New York and Los Angeles. In some ways, this part of my career taught me more than any business course I’ve ever taken. How to build an environment, how to manage people’s attention, how to blend creative treatments to exceed expectations, etc.

So, I submit to you three lessons that green rooms and stages have taught me about building meaningful brands, to the extent that you might find them useful in your own work.

1. Talent is table stakes. Your table must draw the talent.

When I began performing comedy many years ago, I looked across the ecosystem in popular theaters like Upright Citizen’s Brigade and The Groundlings. I admired the theaters and the incredible talent they produced, but I realized quickly that it would take a massive amount of effort, and a lot of luck, for me to climb the ladder through them to get on the stages I aspired to. So, I went a different way, renting private theaters out personally, staffing and promoting my own comedy shows to run on primetime slots during the weekend. I didn’t know anything about producing the shows, how to market them, or manage the tech / music / lights. So, early on I decided that I couldn’t possibly be successful if I didn’t start by securing elite talent. I never wanted to be worried that the product on stage would be sub-par. If it was, it wouldn’t matter how great the experiential trappings were.

Over the past few years in my role leading partnerships and creative community at Monotype, one of the most effective tactics we’ve used to drive value for customers and to build stronger relationships with them is curated dinners. Similarly, the talent is table stakes. I always focus on bringing together the most interesting, multi-disciplinary people, because I know that if you fill a table with these kinds of folks, everyone will leave having had a positive experience. From there, the trappings (design, content, service) become additive, they’re like a cherry on top.

A simple partnerships strategy that has served me well: pick the best people, then get out of their way. Of course, this is easier said than done.

2. Pay attention to attention.

There is a subtle rule I’ve always followed when producing live theater. Never make the audience sit for more than 45 minutes, an hour at absolute maximum. A perfect comedy show is 90 minutes long with a short intermission. People don’t like sitting for longer than that, and once they’ve become acutely aware of discomfort, it is impossible for them to pay attention and more importantly to enjoy the show being delivered to them. In my first book, Funny Business, I interviewed a comedian / business leader who shared the insight that audiences want to feel “taken care of.” They want to trust that the performers are competent and comfortable and that the production will manage their experience flawlessly.

Capturing and maintaining attention are very difficult challenges for live theater producers, and the stakes are exceptionally high. If you lose an audience it can be near impossible to get it back. Extrapolating this concept to marketing feels fairly obvious. In a crowded marketplace, gaining the attention and ultimately the trust of an audience is quite a challenge. And in many ways it is harder in a marketing context, because you may not have the benefit of observing the nonverbal cues that indicate when an audience is starting to check their proverbial watch. Leave them wanting more. We now live in an attention economy. Act accordingly.

3. Preserve the magic at all costs.

In improv comedy, there is an unspoken rule (well, there are several), which begs performers to never leave the stage empty. It’s a bad look for an audience to be staring at an empty stage, sure, unless it is intentional or part of a bit.

But the biggest reason why you never want to leave an empty stage is that you don’t want the audience to have time to think too much. If you’ve ever been to an improv show, you know that the performers will often come to the audience for suggestions and participation. It’s what makes the experience so unique and enjoyable. Some of the scene work the performers do is incredibly technical, requiring tons of skill and experience to pull off well. But some of the short-form work, the games that you may have seen on a show like “Who’s Line is it Anyway?” are sort of like performance parlour tricks. They’re meant as palate cleansers, energy drivers, ways to engage the most people in the audience in a short period of time. Leaving an empty stage for too long gives the audience time to think hey I can come up with some of these, which makes them take the next misguided step of thinking I could do this all just as well as the performers!

In business, preserving the magic, or the perception of it, is just as important. Why is your audience trusting you with their attention? Can they expect to be wowed, to be told a story, and to be taken on a journey? That is what your customers expect from your brand. Of course, if you sell a commodity, or you compete on price alone, then this doesn’t matter as much. It’s why I love brand stories like WeTransfer, which is a “file sharing” platform that won an Academy Award for Best Short Film with Riz Ahmed. Don’t promote features, sell the magic of (in this case) producing entertainment, and put your brand at the center of it.

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How are you delivering unreasonable hospitality in your business? It may be the secret ingredient to future-proofing your growth.

Photo by Alfred Quartey on Unsplash.