Talent Agency 411

The Key Ingredient

You’ve heard it yourself. He’s the life and soul of the place, a grand man
altogether. She’s the heart of the business, a formidable woman. Sometimes, it
seems to me that the more successful hotels or restaurants are those that are
closely identified with their larger-than-life owner or founder. In Ireland, the
personalities of P.V. Doyle, Myrtle Allen and Paddy Fitzpatrick stand squarely out in
front of the places they created. Elsewhere, Conrad Hilton and Heston Blumenthal
do the same. Did I say ‘closely identified’? Sometimes, in our minds, they are the
business. We find it impossible to imagine these establishments without them.

In many ways, these characters make the business of branding the hotel or
restaurant a simple matter. No need to worry about the tricky question of
differentiation for they are one of a kind, outstanding in a field that they’ve paced
out, planted and grown. If you need to know how the brand should behave, just
study the owner and watch what he or she does. He is the brand in action, she is the
brand made flesh. The story of their lives is your brand manual, each entry a lesson
in how to greet a guest, treat a supplier or promote the business.

However, whilst it has many obvious attractions, this can be a dangerous
strategy. What happens when the defining character passes away or moves on? Who
do we look to for direction? The world of business is full of stories of withering
decline following the departure of the main man or woman. They leave a gap that
cannot easily be filled.

So how do we find another way to breathe life into our business and safeguard
its future? This was the challenge facing Declan and Bernadette Fagan in early 2005,
as they made plans to add to the success of their business, The Temple Spa in Co.
Westmeath. The pair had tended to the steady growth of Temple from a farmhouse
offering bed and breakfast accommodation to one of Ireland’s first dedicated spas.
Now, they wished to stretch a little more and sensed that it was time to develop an
identity for the business that was less reliant on their own, immediate delivery of it.
They invited us to help and we met with them in late spring to begin work together.

History Ready-Mixed?

Their already difficult task was made even harder by the fact that they
proposed
to move their accommodation and spa facilities from the farmhouse that had
housed the business since its beginnings some fifteen years previously, to a new
building across the farmyard. For their guests, the image of the eighteenth century
farmhouse stood for all that was best about Temple and the prospect of both
stepping back from the business and stepping out of the building that had been its
home for so many years was a daunting one for its owners.

So, where were they to look to in order to find a story for their business? At
first, the answer seemed obvious. The farmhouse at Temple stood on a site that had
its origins in the seventh century when it had been closely associated with St. Kieran
of Clonmacnoise. The ecclesiastical centre founded by the saint is only a short
fifteen miles away and the earlier title of the place, Teampaill Mac An Tsaoir, carried
his family name (meaning Son of the Carpenter in Irish). Even better, there was
evidence to suggest that members of the family of the saint had set up house on the
site of the current Temple, which stands just off the nearby esker line, one of the
natural roads left behind by the glaciers that were the routes of transport and
pilgrimage in earliest times.

A ready-made story, straight from the tin and ready to eat! This was too good
to be true. And so it proved. We raced off to the history books to research the life of
St. Kieran, sure that we had found a personality whose story could become the story
of Temple. There, we discovered accounts of an extraordinary character whose life
read like one great adventure story. Kieran had founded monasteries, commissioned
great books, performed miracles and left an indelible mark on the face of early,
Christian Ireland. However, we also discovered his reputation as a driven holy man
and scholar of impossibly high standards, who was possessed of a fierce
determination and inflexibility that would try the patience of, well, a saint, I
suppose.

Or A Family Recipe?

We were in a fix. How could we square the story of the life of this formidable
and difficult-to-live-with saint with the story of our much gentler Temple? Should
we look elsewhere? Despite the misfit, it seemed to us that we were somehow in the
right territory. And then, we wondered. We imagined what it must have been like to
live and work at Clonmacnoise in the shadow of a saint. In many ways, monasteries
were the cities of their time and St. Kieran’s community crowded together at the
crossroads of a network of some of the earliest routes of both pilgrimage and trade.
We imagined the place as a hive of activity, busy with the comings and goings of
hundreds of people. Towering over this bustling society was the figure of a living
saint, fierce and demanding. It is not difficult to imagine that a man living in the
shadow of this ancient metropolis might have experienced something we now know
as stress.

Nor is it difficult to picture this same man, waking one morning and quietly
removing himself from the hustle and bustle of Clonmacnoise to seek out a place of
retreat where he might spend time alone with his own thoughts. He wouldn’t have to
travel too far before he found the place that is Temple and it would have struck him
then, as it strikes us today, as the perfect place for a man to put away his worries
and his routines and simply be.

In time, of course, others would hear of the quiet corner that this man had
found for himself and would make their own way from Clonmacnoise to spend some
time there before returning to the rigours of their everyday lives.

The Way To A Man’s Heart

Did it happen as we have imagined it? Probably not, but it could have done.
More importantly, this is a story that helps make sense of what we now know of
Temple and what Declan and Bernadette need in order to grow their business. Their
new story becomes much more a story of place than one of history. It is a place that
predates the farmhouse that has been the face of Temple for the last number of
years and one that continues to offer the same quiet appeal now that the business is
moving across the farmyard to new accommodation.

In the story of our holy man seeking exile from the madding crowd, there is
much that rings true for both the owners of the business and their guests. His move
away from the hectic worlds of commerce and academia has echoes in the escape
from modern pressures. His seeking out of a quiet place in which to heal speaks to
his more contemporary cousins, beaten down by the stresses of life.

We can easily imagine him in the Temple of today, occupying himself with
simple household tasks or basking quietly in a corner of the garden that briefly
catches the sun. This gentle man has his own faith, but is just as comfortable with
those of other faiths or none. All he asks is that they step lightly in his world.

A Second Helping

On a practical level, the story offers Declan and Bernadette a new model for
behaviour and communications in their business that owes much to their own values
and practices but is bigger than them and therefore less dependent on them. It
helps them to describe their business in a less self-conscious way.

They can now talk of Temple as a place apart, a way of life and a state of mind,
somewhere that their guests can return to both by road and in their mind’s eye. The
story deepens the connections that Temple has always enjoyed with those who have
visited. It takes the emphasis off the spa element alone and celebrates the broader
range of peace and quiet, great food, treatments, guided (and free-range) walks,
yoga and fine wines that Temple has to offer. This in turn has prompted the
reframing of Temple Spa as Temple Country Retreat & Spa.

Finally, the accent on place enables the owners to deflect attention from the
newness of the recent work and any concerns in the minds of returning guests that
this represents an upheaval - after all, this is just the latest in a long series of gentle
changes made since Temple was first inhabited some 1,500 years ago.

About The Blend

Adding To The Mix is part of a series of articles in which Gerard Tannam takes
a look at how to cook up a great brand, samples some of the ingredients you’ll need
to make one of your own and weighs up the impact of branding on different parts of
the business mix.

More articles in this series can be found in “The Blend’ at http://www.islandbridge.com/brandwidth.asp

Gerard is the founding Managing Director of Islandbridge, a business that
delivers brand direction, planning and communications across a wide range of
sectors including property, retail, hospitality, retail and tourism. Recent clients
include Temple Country Retreat & Spa, Platinum Hotels, Liberty Limousines, The
Westport Woods Hotel, The Arbutus Hotel Killarney, Liffeyside Properties, Sapphire
Cove Resort, The Smile Conference and DIT School of Hospitality Management &
Tourism’s MagicTouch Partners.