Dorchester collection
The Challenge
With a series of legendary hotels spanning the globe, Dorchester Collection has eminence in its DNA. From the group’s original and eponymous monument to luxury in London’s Mayfair to their 12-acre paradise behind the gates of Bel-Air to Rome’s Hotel Eden; the first hotel to offer the luxuries of lifts and electricity in the nineteenth century, Dorchester Collection’s remarkable properties all balance heritage and culture today, sharing an alchemy of good living, refined elegance and bespoke service.
As each has grown and strengthened its own proposition, the Dorchester Collection brand has become over-indexed by the names in its portfolio. Needing to harmonise the properties beneath one overarching and outstanding brand and bring the Collection itself to the forefront, the Dorchester Collection team engaged Matter Of Form in 2022 to ultimately build brand equity in the master brand whilst celebrating the individuality of each destination.
Through Brand Interactions™, our proprietary framework for meaning innovation, we set in motion a series of projects to ensure an elevated and cohesive experience across the master brand, identifying innovation potential in both digital and physical touchpoints, to clearly communicate Dorchester Collection as a global, ultra-luxury group of incredible hotels.
Mapping The End-To-End Experience
Following a site visit, service safari and ethnographic research processes, we ran a series of collaborative workshops with Dorchester Collection, analysing the existing customer experience at brand level and mapping out ideas for the future experience.
The Brand Interactions™ process is designed to identify unique, brand-centric opportunities for innovation and enhancement all the way from initial awareness through to engagement, conversion and loyalty. To that end, grasping the overall vision of the group was fundamental, and gleaned through close relationships with key stakeholders, insights from which then informed the ideation outputs.
We organised the ideas based on defined experience principles (pillars we can use across UX and CX to create a cohesive guest journey), which were then prioritised based on brand and business impact to identify wider opportunities for moments of service, commerce and delight along the entire guest experience.
The Dorchester Collection team will look to incorporate these innovative moments and enhancements progressively, elevating their stance as a forward-thinking hotelier and engaging Matter Of Form to support with expertise in CX, brand and digital.
The Dorchester Collection Digital Experience
Off the back of our Brand Interactions™ processes, the digital experience was a clear central touch point. The Collection’s previous site lacked personality, while its tech stack wasn’t primed for scale. We wanted to transform it into a vessel for the brand world of Dorchester Collection, with interaction design reflective of the high-touch, human service they’re famous for.
Driven by the Dorchester Collection team’s desire to push boundaries and not fall within the safe and oversaturated hospitality aesthetic, we had the opportunity to look outside of category for architectural and visual inspiration in our design, leveraging their newly defined brand to push even further.
Following the Collection’s rebrand by Construct – a studio Matter Of Form regularly collaborates with – we looked to tastefully weave the Collection’s refined identity into the digital experience, continuing to hero the legendary brand and its reputation, whilst showcasing their impressive portfolio and individual properties.
What resulted is a dynamic and nuanced digital experience that unites nine properties, each uniquely renowned, under an overarching brand with just as much personality, prominence and value as the iconic names within it. And a fully primed channel for the rich content work we’re currently embarking on to further distill that legendary status in every interaction a person has with the Dorchester Collection brand.
