Storytelling och tematisering i varumärkesuppbyggandet : en studie om hur hotell i Sverige kan bygga upp sitt varumärke

Competition in the hotel industry has increased depending on changes of today’s society and of the needs and wants of the hotel guests. Hotels today should compete with something more than just a good service and pricing, since it has become something ordinary. They need to have something special, something extraordinary to attract customers and add to their competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how hotels in Sweden can use themes and stories to build their internal brand. In this study a deductive method has been used and telephone interviews have been made which are declared in the empirics. This has been done to exemplify how the internal brand building process may turn out in story-telling hotels and theme hotels. Our conclusions from this study are that the brand building process may be different depending on how companies build their immaterial brand. The difference is due to other parts of the process may become more important, which we also implicate with our brand building model that you will find in our analysis. The study also shows that it is very important for hotels with a theme and story-telling to be credible, have well informed staffs that are able to mediate the story or theme and to be coherent through the whole concept. If the hotel management has all this in mind while building their brand, it will lead to a memorable experience for the guests. It also helps to build an immaterially strong brand. The conclusion is also that the use of story-telling can be seen stronger than a theme. This study contributes with new information about theme and brands which still is a relatively unresearched area.