Building Five Stars with Nothing to Show

Most brand projects start with a product. You have something to show, you can take photographs, describe the taste, the promise. Brand work is about finding the best language for something that already exists. Britannia Hotel was different.

In March 2017, we were three people with a clear mandate and a hotel closed for renovation. No photographs of finished rooms. No guests. No completed menu. What we had was a dream, a story, and a name that for years had meant the wrong thing.

Why 150 years of history was a liability

Until 2016, Britannia Hotel presented itself as a worn-down four-star Thon hotel. Outdated in expression, concepts, and brand. The rich history, 150 years of influential guests, royal families, and international celebrities, was not an asset. It was a burden people used as a reason to choose something else.

And there was a year that was wrong. For years the hotel had communicated that Britannia Hotel opened in 1897. That was not correct. 1897 was the facade. The hotel itself opened in 1870, four years older than Grand Hotel in Oslo and Stockholm. Among the classic hotels of the world, much depends on being the oldest.

We changed that. Early and clearly.

The mandate: make Norway’s best hotel

‘Make Norway’s best hotel.’ That was the assignment, formulated by Peter André Gjerde, Marketing Director at Britannia Hotel, and Mikael Forselius. Two people with the vision and courage to give us as an agency the space to think big and challenge what Norwegian luxury could mean.

No hotel chain behind us with ready-made systems and manuals. We had to build everything from scratch: brand, identity, communication and digital, with just over two years to do it. The work was grounded in our Brandcell® model, a process that distinguishes between what a brand is, how it is experienced, and what it actually does in its encounters with people. The Brand Story became the tool that tied the parts together, because a hotel with no finished rooms had nothing but the narrative to show.

The first priority was not design. It was insight. We let ourselves be inspired by the world’s best five-star hotels, restaurants, and bars, from Paris and Tokyo to New York and Singapore. Not to copy, but to understand what the best had done right, and bring it home.

Jonathan’s teppanyaki grills came directly from Japan. They were the first in Norway.

How to brand a hotel with six concepts

Britannia Hotel is complex. A five-star hotel is not one product, it is six different food and drink concepts, a spa, conference facilities and retail. All with their own audience, their own narrative, their own expression.

How to build a brand before the product exists

The hotel opened on 1 April 2019. The brand work began two years earlier.

The challenge was to create expectation and desire for a product we could not show. That void forced us towards a more strategic and more narrative approach than we might have chosen if all the cards had been on the table.

We dove into the archives and found the stories from the golden age. Fridtjof Nansen had his second home here. We launched the sub-brands one by one ahead of the opening, so that people had time to get to know each narrative, each door in.

And Britannia Hotel entered into partnerships that told you who the hotel was without having to say it directly: Ayala Champagne, from 1860, which turned out to have been served at Britannia Hotel as early as the 1890s. Twinings from 1706. Hästens from 1852. DR Harris, London’s oldest pharmacy from 1790.

Heritage speaks to heritage.

Three lessons in hotel brand strategy

Britannia Hotel is still developing. We are working on a brand refresh in 2026. The fact that the platform we laid in 2017 holds, and continues to grow, is the strongest test of whether the brand foundation was solid.