How cross-cultural insight supports global branding platform

Context

Hyatt is a leading global hospitality brand founded by Jay Pritzker in 1957 when he purchased the Hyatt House motel, near Los Angeles International Airport. Since then, Hyatt has grown internationally to now offer 21 brands, including Grand Hyatt®, Park Hyatt®, and Andaz®.

Each of Hyatt’s brands is positioned for specific market segments such as luxury, business travel, and wellness, among others—each of which require specific approaches relating to tone of voice and messaging.

Challenge

Over the past few years, Hyatt has taken considerable steps to ensure that its global brand-specific tone of voice guidelines be made available to local teams in their local languages in order to improve overall consistency. At the same time, Hyatt continues to strive to ensure greater local compliance and relevance—which meant that the guidelines had to be adapted in close collaboration with local markets and address nuances unique to each local culture.

With this in mind, Hyatt engaged Creative Culture to deploy its experienced and dedicated local teams to support the adaptation and verification of these guidelines, while adhering to overall brand frameworks.

Solution

As Hyatt’s preferred EMEA region transcreation partner for the past four years, Creative Culture is familiar with the Hyatt portfolio of brands and therefore, we were able to call upon our dedicated teams of Hyatt copywriters.

Starting from general style guides developed by Hyatt and its partners, we tweaked the English framework to meet each market’s requirements by adapting and adding local characteristics: we included language recommendations, tone of voice adaptations, rationales, and information to explain creative and syntax choices in each local language. The process was detailed and comprehensive, and designed to deliver an optimal level of customisation, consistency, and localisation. Alongside Hyatt’s dedicated teams in Zurich and Chicago, we also facilitated the approval of the local versions with key in-market points of contact for a smoother, more optimised process. In some markets—such as Brazil—we sourced a dedicated senior writer who acted as Hyatt’s dedicated local reviewer for the style guide and for future projects.

Results

Hyatt now benefits from global language guidance that helps to ensure consistency and accuracy across its portfolio of brands, all while allowing each local team the freedom to work within their own particular cultural and linguistic specificities to achieve greater levels of engagement and relevance.

The term “Hyatt” is used for convenience to refer to Hyatt Hotels Corporation and/or one or more of its affiliates.