Ritz-Carlton unveils new brand logo

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company unveiled a new brand logo and perspective on Sept 10, which will be implemented over the next year. The move to clarify, simplify and amplify the luxury brand's identity comes after a decade of brand evolution and has been created to maintain the hotel company's position with a new generation of international guests.

"Today we celebrate a defining moment in the legacy of the Ritz-Carlton with an updated brand logo, and a new blue," said Herve Humler, president and chief operating officer of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, and one of the brand founders.

At its inception, the Ritz-Carlton was known exclusively as a hotel company. Today, the organization has developed a range of successful brand extensions. They are the largest provider of luxury spas in the United States and one of the largest providers of luxury meeting and conference spaces around the world.

Ed French, the hotel group's chief sales and marketing officer, said: "As a brand that aims to lead the way for luxury, we didn't wait for emphatic data to tell us there was a problem to fix. Instead, we took a leadership point of view and conducted global studies, not on where luxury has been, but where it is going - to shine a light for the others to follow."

Instead of viewing legacy as something a brand can inherit, Ritz-Carlton believes the more powerful legacy is one that is written by the brand in the present. The new brand voice represents a more modern understanding of legacy. While rooted and inspired by the past, it has purpose and meaning in the present.

For iconic global brands, one of the best ways to signal continued relevance is to evolve the inherited symbols of their past, and in the case of Ritz-Carlton, these are the lion, the crown and the color blue.

In the 1920s, affluent homeowners in Boston imported a certain kind of glass for their windows from Europe. The glass underwent a chemical reaction when hitting the Boston air and turned blue. Blue glass windows meant the homeowners could afford imported glass. When the first Ritz-Carlton in Boston installed a blue chandelier in its ballroom, the rare color became an instant status symbol. Blue has always been interwoven into the fabric of the Ritz-Carlton history. In the process of refreshing the brand voice by updating the color alongside the logo, what emerged was a new color for the brand. The new "memorable" blue reinforces the promise of consistent quality and beautiful memories.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company currently operates 90 hotels in the Americas, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. More than 40 hotel and residential projects are under development around the globe.

zhuanti@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 09/19/2015 page10)