Client: Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel, St. Moritz
Project: Billboard
Role: Low level brand audit, brand strategy, layout, artwork, concept collaboration with Creative Director
Year: 2019

Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel Billboard

Concept and layout for a large billboard that sits at the base of a mountain pass that leads to the hotel destination.

The project scope was to highlight the hotel restaurants, bars and club, but especially to make the restaurants more accessible to people and to tone down the elitist aspect of the restaurants.

In the initial meeting the Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel could not articulate why they did not like the proposed layouts they rejected by other agencies. The challenge was to find out exactly what the client did and didn`t like about the rejected layouts.

Within the meeting we took Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel on a client journey by asking questions to unpack the comments that they were making regarding the layouts and scope of the project leading to discovered insights. It became obvious that the rejected layouts were not founded on any insights about the Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel brand or it᾽s values. We advised them that this was the problem and that is why they could not relate to the layouts that were rejected.

The hotel did not have a brand manual and the brand values had changed, but had not been updated to reflect the actual values and position of the hotel. It became apparent that the work done over a long period of time has always been tactical and not strategic.

Discussing this unfavourable situation with the client, we suggested that they needed to do a rebrand to update their brand. They did not want to make an investment in a rebrand but agreed that we needed to do some research to find some values to anchor the layout for the billboard.

I undertook a low level brand audit to discover insights into the hotel᾽s vision, mission and values. This involved looking at the hotel᾽s homepage and printed material over the last few years, as well as talking to staff members. Looking at the competition to see exactly the position of the hotel compared to other luxury hotels in the area.

After discovering insights and fine-tuning the Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel brand values it was discovered that people associated the hotel not with the luxury or food, but the fact that the hotel had a “magical” quality.  So we created a concept that highlighted the magical aspect of the restaurant and food as well as giving the magic association for the hotel. We were able to create a billboard that the client loved, that contain insights and values of the Badrutt᾽s Palace Hotel.