Mandarin Oriental is an iconic global Asian luxury hotel brand competing on excellent service, high quality, unique Asian authenticity and prime hotel locations delivering exceptional customer experiences across touch points. Mandarin Oriental is famous for its Fan Campaign featuring top celebrities endorsing the brand.

The Mandarin Oriental brand strategy

A strong brand is characterized by a unique brand promise (the customer focus) and an outstanding brand delivery (the organizational system and performance behind the promise). The brand promise and the brand delivery must be consistently balanced in order to build and sustain strong brand equity. The modern brand-driven organization is characterized by three distinct characteristics which set it apart from less brand-focused organizations:

• The right boardroom mindset toward and beliefs about branding
• The right skill sets to build and manage brands
• The right allocation of organizational and financial resources to achieve the various business objectives and build sustainable brand equity

Mandarin Oriental has built its brand on service excellence with a stated mission “to completely delight and satisfy its guests”. The core of the Mandarin brand is steeped in offering customers an unforgettable guest experience by blending Asian cultures with international expectations. It can be defined as twenty-first century luxury with oriental charm.

The brand equity of Mandarin Oriental was built by creating a very strong and distinct personality in line with the organization’s philosophy. The management team has ensured a continuous investment in all aspects of the brand to ensure consistent delivery of all the brand promises. Its guiding principles include the following:

Delighting its guests

The Group is committed to exceeding guest expectations by anticipating and fulfilling their wishes. For example, to celebrate the cherry blossom spring season in March 2018, The Spa at Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo is offering a Sakura version of its popular Totally Tokyo “Five” Journeys from Nihonbashi treatment and an exclusive, new audio healing therapy called Sensory Blossom. Its bars and restaurants are also offering Sakura-themed drinks and dishes, showing how it anticipates customer needs as many travelers travel to Tokyo during this season to enjoy the cherry blossoms.

Delighting its colleagues

The Group is committed to provide a caring, motivating and rewarding environment for all its employees, through effective training and personal development, enabling a fulfilling career. For example, Mandarin Oriental offers its employees various retirement plans depending on the length of their service and their role. The company also organizes an annual global Colleague Wellness Week in September to help its employees lead healthier, happier and more balanced lifestyles.

Becoming the best

The Group is committed to being an innovative leader in the luxury hospitality industry through continually improving service delivery, and the quality of products and facilities. In its latest strategic brand performance review, it has committed to invest in its core brand attributes of exceptional design and architecture, restaurant & bars, spa & wellness. One striking example of how Mandarin Oriental strives to be the best in industry is the fact that it has 14 restaurants with 21 Michelin Stars, more than any hotel brand in the world.

Working together

The Group is committed to teamwork and treat each other with mutual respect and trust. This is evidenced in how past employees of Mandarin Oriental speak highly of the coordinated team effort throughout the Mandarin Oriental employee experience, particularly between the hotel’s front desk, gym, bellman, restaurants and room service teams.

Acting with responsibility

The Group is committed to maintain integrity, fairness and honesty in all its internal and external relationships and to support initiatives that improve the environment and community. Mandarin Oriental is committed to sustainable tourism and supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). The Group has a framework of sustainability strategies and programs in place to address topics such as decent work and economic growth as well as clean energy and water scarcity.

The fact that Conde Nast Traveler has rated Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group the number one hotel in many categories several times is a testament to the hotel brand’s success of delivering high quality and authentic Asian hospitality services.

(cr: www.martinroll.com)