Don’t you love how every industry has its own language? Buzzwords that insiders use to make what they do sound as though it is something new and mysterious. Computer gurus talk about RAMs, WANs, and gigabytes. Financial experts tout SmallCaps, IPOs, and Leaps. Hoteliers banter back and forth about rack rates, REVPAR, and room blocks. And marketing folks? Well, we toss about AIDA, Positioning, and TOMA as part of our secret lingo. And, of course, one of the hottest buzzwords in the marketing dictionary is Branding.

Branding. It’s a term that carries an image for the guest and means equity for the hotel. Yet not too many of us really understand how this thing called branding works. Branding isn’t new and it certainly isn’t mysterious. In fact, it dates back more than a hundred years to when Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his research into branding. What, you say? Pavlov? Wasn’t he the guy with the dog and the bell?

Exactly. Day after day, Ivan Pavlov would ring a bell and, at the same time, he would rub meat paste onto the tongue of a ...