When Airbnb appeared in 2008, the young founders, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, didn’t think much about new power. They just wanted to find a way to pay their San Francisco apartment rent.
As the company grew, it did something unlike the franchise business model, where every room looks the same. In reality, it was more like a movement, where early users shared a passion for a new type of accommodation – instantly introducing you to a community in a new place to stay.
By 2014, eight years later, Airbnb had grown exponentially, and it had many ways to surpass its previous self, creating a more “homegrown” and intimate feel. But the founders wanted to ensure that the brand remained connected to the original experience. They needed to maintain that crucial point of difference from the check-in and check-out process at a Best Western hotel; the loss of the general spirit and community spirit of the early days was a real business threat.
And there was another threat: regulatory challenges to Airbnb were emerging in cities around the world. Airbnb had begun to rally its hosts in a way that opposed city governments, which made user loyalty to the platform more serious.
So, Airbnb relaunched its brand, with a brand story created for the new power era. Douglas Atkin, Airbnb’s managing director with the unusual title of “Global Head of Community,” summarises the story like this: “Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.”
Airbnb's new logo wasn't designed to be stared at in admiration, but rather to be remixed and adapted by the many different tribes of people within the Airbnb community. The soft, pliable, upside-down (or twisted, depending on your perspective) heart has attracted a remarkable level of online engagement.
Airbnb even introduced a tool, called Create, that makes it easier to remix the logo and make it more meaningful to hosts' purposes. “Most brands would send you a cease and desist letter if you tried to rebrand them,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said when this distinction was made. “We wanted to do the opposite.”
The Create tool is a bit flashy, no doubt, but it signals how Airbnb views its community—as a place where you can both belong and be yourself. That aligns with Marilynn Brewer's behavioral science concept of “optimal distinctiveness,” which suggests the right formula for building an effective group is to make people feel like they are part of it and that they can stand out within it.
Along with the new logo, Airbnb has re-established its company language with a manifesto that reads like a selective living community:
‘At a time when new technologies make it easy to distance ourselves from each other, you will use them to bring people closer together… The feeling of belonging is the idea that shaped Airbnb, but the way we’ve described Airbnb to the world until now hasn’t fully captured this idea.’
Airbnb's brand voice is built to foster a sense of community and belonging, and executives are betting that this will be a key competitive advantage—because it makes Airbnb hosts or customers less likely to switch to another platform when a similar new one emerges. Airbnb now spends millions of dollars to host annual meetups for its thousands of most-engaged hosts, building solidarity and team spirit in the way churches or the Rotary Club once did. Going further, it has invested in supporting local host groups as part of a decentralized “home-sharing club” ecosystem, powered by Airbnb but led by its most engaged members.
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Article posted on Motthegioi.vn
