Salesforce's State of the
Connected Customer Report states that 80% of customers say the experience a
company provides is as important as its products and services, highlighting why
experience-led branding is no longer optional.
There is an entire category of business that
has understood brand experience for decades before the rest of the world caught
up. Walk into a well-run hotel, and within the first five minutes, you have
been welcomed, oriented, made comfortable, and given a very clear sense of what
kind of place you are in. Nobody handed you a brand guidelines document. The
experience communicated it.
Hashtag
Designs draws on this observation regularly when working with clients outside
the hospitality space. Because what great hotels and restaurants have always
understood and what many tech startups and consumer brands are still learning
is that brand is not what you say about yourself. It is what people feel when
they interact with you.
"Hospitality
brands have always been experience-first," says Madhushree Kulkarni,
founder of Hashtag Designs. "They do not have the option of hiding behind
marketing. The product is the experience. If the experience is inconsistent,
the brand is inconsistent, full stop. There is no layer of polish that
compensates for a bad check-in."
The lesson
that transfers most directly to other categories is the idea of sequenced
experience design. In a good hotel, every interaction has been thought through
in order arrival, greeting, orientation, room discovery, dining, departure.
Each moment is designed to build on the last. Nothing is accidental. The brand
is not communicated in a single moment but constructed across a series of
carefully choreographed ones.
Most digital
products and consumer brands do not think this way. They design each touchpoint
in relative isolation a website here, an app there, a packaging decision
somewhere else. The result is a brand that makes a strong impression in some
moments and a weak one in others, without any clear logic governing which is
which.
Hashtag
Designs applies hospitality thinking to brand projects by mapping the full user
journey before designing any individual component. What is the first thing a
user encounters? What do they need to feel at that moment? What happens next,
and what does the transition between moments communicate? This sequential
thinking often reveals gaps that would never appear in a component-level design
review.
"When
you map the journey, you start to see the emotional arc of the brand,"
Madhushree Kulkarni explains. "A user should feel something specific at
each stage curious at first contact, confident during onboarding, reassured
when something goes wrong. If the design is not intentionally creating those
feelings, something else is filling the space. And that something else is
rarely flattering."
There is also
a lesson in how hospitality brands handle failure. In a hotel, when something
goes wrong a room is not ready, an order is incorrect the response is part of
the brand experience. The best hospitality brands have designed their recovery
moments as carefully as their peak moments, because they know that how you
handle a problem is often more memorable than the problem itself.
Most brands
treat error states, customer service interactions, and failure moments as
operational problems rather than brand problems. Hashtag Designs works to
change that framing. Because users form their strongest impressions of a brand
not when everything works perfectly, but when something does not.
Hashtag
Designs encourages every client to spend time experiencing brands in
hospitality contexts, regardless of their own category. Noticing how a well-run
hotel manages transitions, resolves problems, and maintains tone across staff,
signage, and digital touchpoints is one of the most practical brand education
exercises available and one that costs nothing but attention.
"The brands users remember most are the
ones that felt consistent under pressure," Madhushree Kulkarni says.
"Hospitality taught us that. The rest of us are still catching up."
Hospitality has mastered
this for decades, and now it is becoming essential across industries. If your
business is ready to design experiences that build trust, loyalty, and
long-term growth, visit Hashtag Designs and discover how experience-led branding can transform your business.
