Skift Take
Nordic Choice Hotels has rebranded to Strawberry as it tries to break free of just being a franchisor of Choice Hotels. CEO Torgeir Silseth is striving to find a whitespace for the private company amid the global giants.
Early Check-In
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Nordic Choice Hotels rebranded in May to Strawberry. It was a bold move for the largest branded hotel company in Scandinavia.
Wholesale name changes are rare because they toss aside brand equity. (Nordic Choice was born in 1990.) Re-brandings are also costly because you have to re-label physical infrastructure and run a blitz of ads to let people know about your new identity. Strawberry owns and runs over 210 hotels in the Nordics, Finland, and the Baltics.So what's the strategy?
CEO Torgeir Silseth told me on Wednesday — when the private company reported its latest results — that his company needed a new brand to reflect its expanded ambition beyond just providing hotel stays. The Oslo-based company — fully owned by billionaire Petter Stordalen’s Strawberry Group — is a franchisor of Choice Hotels. But it increasingly wants to be more than that.I asked the CEO what he wants to see Strawberry become by 2030.
"By 2030, we'll be the preferred place to go f