City Experiences Unified Brand Voice Project

Client Profile:

City Experiences represents a diverse portfolio of tour offerings in top cities around the world, including New York City, San Francisco, London, and Barcelona.

In early 2021, City Experiences became the new brand name for Hornblower Group’s growing global portfolio of world-class water- and land-based offerings. Since then, even more land-based companies have joined City Experiences, including WALKS and Devour Tours.

"City Experiences has built a collection of world-renowned land-based experiences, growing our portfolio outside of our maritime foundation and into a more holistic global experiential organization," said Kristina Heney, chief marketing and revenue officer, City Experiences. "To support our growth, we have dialed up the emotional engagement of our brands and are leaning heavily into digital technology to drive personalized communications. We are focused on what sets us apart, our own Tour Guides and Crew.”

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Challenge:

As City Experiences continued to expand its reach through strategic acquisitions, it faced the challenge of integrating newly acquired companies into its portfolio while preserving their unique brand identity and loyal customer base.

Recognizing the importance of cohesive branding and messaging in driving ROI, City Experiences partnered with Delicious Digital to refine the Brand Style Guide and Customer Journey Strategy. The goal of this collaboration was to ensure customer journey touchpoints were aligned across the portfolio, identify opportunities, and remove ambiguity in branding.

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Solution:

Delicious Digital Marketing received the City Experiences Brand Style Guide and reviewed the brand’s purpose, promise, personality, voice, accents, and general guidelines. We then evaluated the marketing plan for three offerings in the portfolio: City Experiences, City Cruises, and Devour. We dug into buyer personas, customer journeys, and individual touch points across digital, print, and OOH mediums.

After intimately researching the parent brand and two portfolio brands, we felt we had a good idea of the branding strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. We were particularly excited by the strength of the brand promise for City Experiences.

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Brand Promise: An experience you’ll never forget, from people who’ll never forget why you’re there. 

We felt there was the most opportunity in curating a unified brand voice by eliminating the different accents presented in the Brand Style Guide. 

A unified brand voice helps customers to recognize and remember the brand, increasing brand awareness and recognition. When a portfolio of brands use a unified brand voice, it helps customers understand how they relate to each other. By using a unified brand voice, marketing can also be done more efficiently and effectively, lowering the time and cost of marketing initiatives. 

As the portfolio grows, more marketers will be working with the brand. By providing stricter guidelines, there’s higher likelihood marketing will connect throughout the customer journey, regardless of brand, medium, or audience. 

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Results:

We developed a unified brand voice for the City Experiences portfolio. This took the brand voice section of the Brand Style Guide from six pages down to one page. The new brand voice is more direct and adheres to the brand promise. 

With one unified brand voice in mind, we provided recommendations on messaging and content for more than 50 customer journey touchpoints across the portfolio. 

After implementing the brand voice to current marketing assets, we felt confident this change would make a large impact to the brand awareness and consistency of the City Experiences portfolio. 

Original Brand Voice: 

• Welcoming, Versatile, Expressive
• Elegant, Refined
• Casual, Fun
• Informed, Local
• Functional, Memorable
• Exciting

New Brand Voice:

• Friendly, Exciting, Memorable

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