How hospitality brands succeed: Evidence from brand-level analyses of hotel brands

Abstract

Marketing involves a competition between brands, yet very little hospitality marketing research uses brands as the unit-of-analysis. The current paper fills this need by examining the relationships among hotel brands’ quality/price tier, number of hotels, building size (average number of rooms per hotel), average customer satisfaction ratings, popularity, fame, penetration, average purchase frequency, and annual room revenue. The results indicated that hotel brand popularity and total sales volume were greater among brands in the middle quality-price tier and those with more and larger hotels. After controlling for quality/price tier, greater customer-satisfaction ratings were positively related to brands’ sales per room, but not to brand popularity or total sales volume. These findings suggest that marketing success is primarily a function of brands’ mental and physical availabilities and that unusually high or low experience quality given a brand’s quality/price tier is attributed to, and benefits, the property rather than the brand.