2.5: Innovation and Game Changers > Watch: Views on Business Model Innovation
Topic 2.1: The Role of Strategy in the Industry > Watch: Ask the Expert About Franchising
Expert Bill Minnock on franchising.
Franchising has become extremely popular in hospitality organizations because there are many hotel companies that can successfully operate the hotels to deliver a high-quality customer experience.
Franchise agreements have only income-producing assets and don’t require companies to invest capital.
One concern from a brand company’s perspective is whether or not they can deliver that high-quality customer experience through the franchise model.
Franchising in North America is well-established and will become more popular in the rest of the world.
Topic 2.2: Corporate Strategies > Watch: Ask the Expert About Synergies
Expert Dan Coleman on synergies.
Synergy for Disney is about leveraging each business unit to help promote and foster the brand in general.
If you’re looking at a television that is ABC, you may see Disney content that’s related to parts on it.
So all of those efforts are intended to make our population within our viewing areas aware of what the brand is, aware of what we’re offering, and then also connect the dots between the brand that they’re most familiar with and connect it with another entity of the Disney company that they’re not so familiar with and want to seek out to get more information about it or experience it.
Topic 2.2: Corporate Strategies > Watch: Creating Value
This approach is around creating cost efficiencies and cost benefits for the customer.
Just as differentiation requires a tremendous amount of attention to building uniqueness and providing the kind of service and expectation that a particular customer will value, to accomplish low cost, you have to do things such as building economies of scale to reduce costs.
Any organization that attempts to consolidate do that because there are several costs that go down as the quantity of hotels goes up.
Costs of marketing, costs of distribution, costs of purchasing, those are some of the things we can get scale economies on.
True strategy means trying to simultaneously create a competitive advantage and minimizing the costs in executing on that product.
Topic 2.3: Strategic Management > Ask the Expert About the Mission Statement
Expert Sandeep Bhalla on mission statements.
At the Berkeley Hotel in London, our mission is basically we excel at everything a guest would expect in a world class hotel and offer them pleasures and surprises that they would never expect.
This is communicated through our brand book.
We have our brand language that speaks exactly about the same throughout the hotels.
So if you were to have a poster in a corridor, that would reflect exactly what our brand is about.
Every communication with a guest reflects our brand and our mission and what we believe in.
Introduction of The Hotel Competitor Analysis Tool (HCAT).
It’s a series of Excel spreadsheets to help you think about doing a competitor analysis, examining your own hotel and that of those in your market and considering what factors are critical for success.
The Critical Success Factors portion allows you to enter factors critical for success and then give them a weight.
After I’ve done that, I rate my own property and each of my competitors using a scale from 1 to 10.
Topic 2.5: Innovation and Game Changers > Watch: Views on Business Model Innovation
Innovation, in its simplest form, is a new idea commercialized.
The important thing is to realize that innovation is taking something and solving a problem by either altering it, recombining it, reinventing it.
We’re interested in innovation when innovation can give us the opportunity to either reduce costs, increase customer value, reduce costs for customers, and increase their value.
Innovation requires commercialization- creating wealth, putting that new idea or that invention into practice so customers, consumers, users can take advantage of that new idea.
