You've likely heard about a popular exercise called KISS: Keep, Improve, Start, Stop. Four honest questions, usually asked at a reflection point in a business or for personal development to help inform future decisions. Well, today, it's time for Hospitality Branding to finally get the big wet KISS it deserves!

Keep room for the unscripted

The best hospitality moments are the ones nobody could have written into a script, a surprise that delights in ways that only hospitality can deliver. But that can only happen if the system leaves space for it.

A lot of brands these days are built to remove spontaneity entirely in order to make things faster and more efficient. Every message pre-approved, every social post automated, every touchpoint templated, which leaves no room for a person to actually notice a guest or be aware of a cultural moment or see something interesting happen and respond like a human.

Parts of the brand system should be designed to bend. They'll often end up doing more work than the parts that don't.

Improve the printed signage in the room

Hotels seem to have a habit of explaining everything, in writing, everywhere. How the shower works. What time breakfast stops. Please don't forget your charger. When experienced together, it reads less like a comfortable, relaxing stay and more like an instruction manual with a nice bed in it.

None of that guidance needs to disappear completely, but it needs be better: fewer laminated cards, more design that guides a guest without spelling every. single. step.

Start designing for the person on shift

Everyone in hospitality talks about designing the guest experience. Few talk about the person checking them in. But the guest experience is downstream of the staff experience: if the ops manual is confusing, the signage is unclear, or the uniform doesn't work for a twelve-hour shift, that uncomfortable feeling reaches the guest eventually, just later, harder to trace and even harder to undo.

Designing for the team first isn't a soft, internal-only exercise. It's the shortest route to a better guest experience there is.

Stop briefing branding and interiors separately

Most hotel and restaurant branding projects still run as two parallel conversations: one team building the identity, another building the space, each working from their own brief with barely a shared call between them. The result is a logo and a lobby that technically match on colour but don't actually agree on what the place is.

If you're a client hiring two studios, that's fine, but it's on you to get them in a room together from day one. A shared brief isn't a nice-to-have, it's the only way the two end up telling the same story.