Sensory Brand: The W Hotel

The W Hotel uses purple as a design element as a subtle gesture that adds to the guest experience. In a previous post, we mentioned that purple symbolizes a lifestyle of luxury, royalty, and class – all of which perfectly align with the W Hotel brand. When a guest stays at a W Hotel, they are treated like royalty – the staff anticipates guests’ needs, requests, and strives to achieve perfect guest satisfaction. The W uses purple and other exotic colors to ensure that design elements within every hotel communicate the service guests should expect when staying at the W.

The W prides itself on being an innovative, contemporary, design-led lifestyle brand. The hotels are “a world of sensory experiences,” and the W uses these experiences to create loyal guests and a recognized and established upscale brand. In addition to consistent color schemes, the W Hotel has created a brand language, and offers guests a guide to the terms it uses to describe seemingly ordinary things, like the pool (Wet), restrooms (WC), and elevator (lift). This use of insider language gives people the feeling that they are a   part of the exclusive club of W Hotel guests. Just by taking part in separating ordinary things from the general vocabulary of people, the W lets guests in, and forms a community.

Purple drinks

It’s difficult to create a purple drink that has that “fresh, just squeezed” appeal because purple does not occur naturally.  Similar to how a painter mixes paints, purple can be made using the colors blue and red in drinks. You can easily create this color by mixing any red colored drink (fruit punch) with any blue colored drink (Blue Curacao) and then water it down with soda water to meet your shade preference. But beware, customers want fresh natural ingredients over purple food coloring any day! Purple is a difficult color to create in drinks, so we suggest saving the recipes for special occasions and promotions.

Are you ready to add new drinks to your menu? Contact us, we’d love to work with you!

Color Psychology: Purple

Purple is heavily associated with royalty, wealth, prosperity and sophistication. This is because the cost of purple dye was expensive, and only the very wealthy could afford to have purple clothing. Today, purple is seen as uplifting and calming to the mind and nerves.  At the same time, it offers a sense of spirituality and encourages creativity by expanding our awareness.

While viewing the color purple stimulates brain activity used in problem solving, too much of the color purple can promote or aggravate depression in some. It is one color that should be used extremely carefully and in small amounts by those who are vulnerable to these depressed states. Purple also supports the practice of meditation, promoting harmony of the mind and emotions, contributing to mental balance and stability.

Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red, and according to surveys, almost 75% of pre-adolescent children prefer purple to all other colors. For that reason, bright purple is a good choice when promoting childrens’ products. Using purple can also lend an air of mystery or magic. Light purple shades like lavender, can be viewed as feminine or romantic. Dark shades of purple can be considered a wealthy color.  Adolescent girls are most likely to select nearly all shades of purple as their favorite color.