With thousands of hotels for people to consider, it’s a challenge to make yours the special one that stands out. Everyone can offer the usual amenities, and some even offer luxuries. But how many can say that they will bring back your childhood? Now that’s something that will get people’s attention.
Enter the plans for the Atari Hotels. The company behind the game consoles that got kids attached to television sets in the last century to play games like Pac Man at home. It is not shifting operations into the hospitality industry exactly but licensing its name to True North Studio and GSD group to build eight hotels in the United States.
The Verge reports that Atari is getting $600K upfront for use of its name and logo and will profit to the tune of 5 percent of hotel revenue down the road. The first hotel location is set to be in Phoenix, Arizona, though the idea is to expand into Austin, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle.
The hotels are to be suitable for business conferences with coworking spaces, and the usual bars and restaurants. In keeping with the entertainment brand association, though, they will also boast arcades, VR and AR installations, eSports, and movie theatres.
As we saw in Building Mindfulness: Lego’s Marketing Play to Adults, building in associations with what adults of a certain age recall fondly from their youth effectively builds emotional appeal into products. If it works for building sets that recreate scenes from the movies and television shows of one’s childhood, it can also work to sell people on selecting a hotel based on the video games of the 1980s associated with that Atari brand.
If it didn’t sound too much like a pun, we may even say that this branding deal could be a game-changer for the hospitality industry.