Notes on a rebrand: Aubade

Every rebrand begins with a period of pretending you have not already decided. We had opinions about Aubade before the first meeting: the name was good, the properties were better than the marketing, the loyalty scheme should be quietly retired. All three turned out to be true. None of them was the idea.

The idea arrived in week five, from the guest reviews, which are the least glamorous document in hospitality and the most honest. The highest-rated stays across all four hotels barely mentioned the rooms. They mentioned the bar, the walk, the hour after arriving. Aubade's product was not a bed. It was an evening.

We nearly got the identity wrong twice. The first system was too warm: candlelight became orange became a chain restaurant. The second was too cold, a correction that read as a bank. The one we shipped sits between them, drawn from the colour of a room lit by a single lamp, and it took eleven rounds to find.

The campaign was shot entirely between six and seven in the evening, across four cities, over three weeks. The rule was expensive and it is the reason the work looks like one brand. Light is the cheapest consistency there is, if you are willing to wait for it.

What I would tell another studio: the idea is always in the data nobody presents. Ask for the reviews, the cancellations, the complaints. The strategy deck is where a company tells you what it wants to be. The reviews are where it finds out what it is.