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Your brand is not just a logo, colour palette, or typestyle – it’s the reputation you build through every interaction and experience you create. It’s how employees, customers and stakeholders perceive you. Ultimately, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. It’s a reflection of your values, culture and the impact you make.
Hospitality industry trailblazer Hans Meyer knows this well. Meyer was previously a founder and COO of the revolutionary and globally respected CitizenM hotels. Leaving nothing to chance when designing his newest venture Zoku, Meyer had a series of room prototypes created, which ranged from scale models you could hold in your hand to full-size mock-ups. Target customers were then invited to tell him what they liked and – more importantly for him – what they didn’t like about each iteration. For Meyer, the detail in hospitality is everything.
During a meeting with Aéto co-founder Tim Oldman at the first Zoku in Amsterdam in Summer 2023, Meyer checked if breakfast had been to Oldman’s liking. Oldman reassured him it had been outstanding but commented that the freshly prepared omelette was huge, and he’d felt a tad embarrassed not being able to finish it. In passing he suggested that if he’d been asked how many eggs he’d like in his omelette, the experience would have been flawless.
These are the opportunities Meyer constantly searches for. When Oldman stayed at the hotel again in November 2024, he and Meyer breakfasted together. When the server came over to take their order and Oldman again asked for the omelette, Meyer had a mischievous sparkle in his eye when the first response from his team member was “Good choice. How many eggs would you like in your omelette this morning?”
To exceed expectations, one must first understand the expectations. Doing so requires curiosity, enquiry, active listening and empathy.
Meyer and Oldman first connected over conversations around fastidious detail and exceeding expectations. For Oldman, who has a long-standing dislike of employee handbooks no one ever reads, exceeding expectations was cast as the defining requirement of the Leesman team he led between 2010 and 2023. To exceed expectations, one must first understand the expectations. Doing so requires curiosity, enquiry, active listening and empathy. This principle was drilled into each Leesman starter to be applied equally to clients, suppliers and each other, and the Aéto team operates under the very same principle.
Meyer talks often of the time and cost invested in the numerous concept design iterations the Zoku rooms underwent before landing on a design, each testing guests’ expectations. “In this industry you typically build one prototype room, yet we built six, and each one was tested on 100-150 people. We used mobile EEG brain activity scanning and cameras, so we could measure people’s emotions when they were entering the spaces.” Meyer proudly recounts how Concrete, the Amsterdam design practice he used to develop his concept, once accused him of being their most difficult client ever to please. He holds it proudly as an enduring compliment.
How often does a client build multiple mock-ups and ask hundreds of employees to review their experience?
Yet in office design, this approach is almost unheard of beyond academic research. How often does a client build multiple mock-ups and ask hundreds of employees to review their experience? Meyer may be poised to change that. The four existing Zoku hotels all feature some element of co-working or workspace, but the next location will add considerably more office space. “Covid reinforced how important human connection is. We are social animals, yet so much of the technology we use nowadays is eroding how we connect, and I think it’s making us unhappier,” Meyer laments.
Meyer knows this experiment will be challenging. A study by TripAdvisor found that 94% of hotel guests who had experienced a “delightful surprise” during their stay were unconditionally willing to recommend the hotel to others, compared to 60% of visitors who were “very satisfied” with the overall experience saying they would do the same. For a hotel, where visitors return loyally once a year or perhaps on business once a month, gifting a small surprise each time is relatively easy and potentially delivered at no cost. But can the same be true in an office that employees might visit day after day?
Leesman Index data has long since shown that where an office space brilliantly supports what employees go there to do, they are prouder of the space and more likely to agree that it fosters a sense of community. There’s no doubt this office success story starts by
setting a high bar on the basics. Zoku might be in a different market to Four Seasons for instance, but Meyer will ensure Zoku delivers on the fundamentals of an outstanding hotel stay in just the same way services and reputation are complexly entwined and when any one of those falls short of customer expectation.
If you wake from a restless night’s sleep thanks to the noisy corridor to find tepid water dribbling from a dull chrome showerhead with scratchy, grey towels waiting for you on the towel bar, no “Two eggs or three, sir?” at breakfast is going to have you rushing to TripAdvisor to lavish the establishment with praise. These hygiene factors are as true in the hotel as they are in the office, and Leesman data has built up a detailed picture of this over many years. Fail to support fundamentals like focused work, and efforts to embellish collaboration almost always fall short of employee expectations. Bean bags and table football don’t make up for bathrooms that are tired and grubby, but here at least the office may have an advantage – people who run offices know a whole heap more about their customers (i.e. employees) than their counterparts in the hotel business.
A desk with visual and acoustic privacy remains the most critical work hygiene factor for most employees. It’s the office equivalent of the hotel’s crisp bedding and a hot shower.
Real estate and facilities management professionals have been discussing what can be learnt or transferred from the hospitality industry since before the pandemic, but in a rush to take ideas around food and beverage, concierges and comfy lounges, they have forgotten the importance of the basics. A desk with visual and acoustic privacy remains the most critical work hygiene factor for most employees. It’s the office equivalent of the hotel’s crisp bedding and a hot shower. And despite the most rigorous testing amongst its anticipated target customer sample, Meyer acknowledges building a detailed picture of his actual customer is difficult, envious of the corporate employer who knows so much more about those in its employment down to details like age, length of commute, tenure, role, etc. In contrast, Zoku knows very little about a guest, especially those who book through a third-party platform, beyond how long they stay and how much they spend during their stay.
In seeking learnings from hospitality sector mavericks like Meyer, we must accept that scale presents a challenge. Zoku Amsterdam has 133 rooms (Zoku calls them lofts) so on a busy night might be accommodating 200 guests. Aéto client projects include a global headquarters of 12,000 occupants alongside several others of approximately 2,000 occupants. Delighting and surprising daily there is no easy feat.
How do you encourage spontaneity and surprise actions to deliver outstanding hospitality, so they feel like authentic features of your brand without the regularity of them feeling staged, corporate or formulaic to avoid recipients coming to expect them?
Aéto is working with clients to find those meaningful and enduring moments, helping those clients appreciate their heightened and cumulative importance. Think of these moments as critical touchpoints. They are well known in a hotel: the bed, the pillow, the linen, the bathroom, the towels, the breakfast service, etc. Yet we know them in the office, too. Leesman research pre-pandemic identified the significant touchpoints real estate and facilities leaders must get right to give employees an outstanding experience, termed the “sentiment super drivers”.
The better you get at delivering these rational and easily measurable features, the more you must explore higher altitude features that solicit a purely emotional response, and measuring that impact is hard. User-centric environments that routinely delight occupants don’t scrutinise cost on a per-item basis to determine if they will contribute to brand value. Experience-led brands like CitizenM and Zoku know that by building user-centric environments, they are fuelling a self-fulfilling prophecy by cementing brand loyalty. At Aéto, we’re working with our clients to do just that in their corporate environments.