Reflection on a playful project

Kaleidoscope Collection is comprised of three very different, independent hotels; The Bird, Homewood and newly acquired (in June 2021) Bishopstrow House. However, for all their differences, they share an underlying common theme of creativity, innovation and oodles of personality. This is a group that aren’t afraid to push the boundaries and do things a little differently.

THE CHALLENGE

The new owners of the Kaleidoscope Collection approached 80 DAYS in February 2020, with an open brief – evaluate their brand positioning, primarily for their Homewood property and support the entire business with digital marketing, while migrating their current websites. Discussions progressed and so did the project’s scope. The end result; crystal clear brand positioning, a high-performing digital marketing campaign and two new websites that better reflect their brand.

We sat down with David Gardner of 80 DAYS and Jonathan Walker of The Kaleidoscope Collection to discuss the project in more detail.

WHAT WAS THE INITIAL DRIVING FORCE TO EVALUATE YOUR BRAND POSITIONING?

Jonathan: Well for Homewood, we’d invested in the terrace, the interiors and the bedrooms and we’d also had the opportunity to buy The Mews House, now called Mallingford Mews. The hotel was becoming bigger by an additional 10 rooms, taking it to 31 rooms.

So, the questions we had early days were; just what landscape does this lie in and who are we now competing against?

We knew what the popular destination hotels were and we began to get quite excited at the prospect of joining them. We quickly came to the realisation that we’d need a strong image, great branding and an attention-grabbing tone-of-voice in order to compete.

David: Just to add to that; the first time we met with the team at Homewood, back in February 2020, we went into the meeting with very little idea of what we were going to talk about.

We knew that some help was required, but it was only when we started talking through the challenges that it became clearer. There was broad agreement that we essentially needed to answer two questions; ‘who are we?’ and ‘what makes us different?’.