Launching a national brand with two writers

Two resort portfolios with two histories, two sets of owners, and two ways of speaking had to become one brand in 2023. The merge was the only moment when the underlying language could actually be set — after launch, every decision hardens.

I was brought in ahead of the launch to help develop brand voice, tone, style guidelines and copy strategy. There were two writers on it. I was one of them.

Write the rules before the copy. A voice described in adjectives doesn’t survive contact with forty people and a deadline. What survives is a specification. I worked on the copy standards that went into the published brand book: a five-attribute voice model, an approved verb, noun, and adjective lexicon, a words-to-avoid list with mandated substitutions, and headline typology.

Make the substitutions enforceable. Never “discount” or “cheap”: say “savings” or “great rate.” Never “perks”: say “benefits.” Never “inventory” or “unit”: say “villa,” “residence” or “accommodations.” Reserve “luxury” for what’s legitimately luxurious.

Modulate by audience, and say so in the guide. The standards forbid “vacay” with legacy and Residence owners, because we don’t speak that casually to them. Writing the exception down is what makes the rule usable.

• Copy standards published in the HVC brand book (June 2024)
• Launch and campaign copy for roughly 100 integrated landing page experiences
• 400+ projects across lifecycle email, landing pages, paid and organic digital, event campaigns, print and UX copy
• The rebrand carried across more than 20 resort properties: maps, fact sheets, signage, parking passes, in-room collateral
• Voicemail scripts, on-hold messaging and in-villa channel copy, because voice includes the sound of the brand
• Ownership guides and technical documentation, including Your GO Guide for the Kā‘anapali Beach resort

• 3.5 yrsContract renewed quarterly for nearly four years, from pre-launch through July 2025.
• ~100Integrated landing page experiences written for launch and campaign.
• 20+Resort properties carried through the rebrand, from maps and signage to in-room collateral.

Worked inside GLŌ Creative & Delivery Services, the in-house agency, alongside designers, art directors, account managers, producers, brand leaders and legal reviewers. Named primary or secondary copywriter across all three HVC business units in the 2022 creative pod reorganization, and supported writers across sibling Marriott brands — which meant pivoting between voice guides in the same week.

When my supervisor left the company, I held the copy function on my own through the gap and then onboarded and trained his replacement.

Hospitality inherits a lot of language from real estate, and the merge was the one moment the vocabulary could be changed deliberately rather than under pressure later. My part was editing to the approved vocabulary across everything the brand shipped, catching what slipped through, and recommending substitutions, with the reasoning attached, as the standards tightened.

The fixes sorted into four kinds. Terms with a clean replacement: main bedroom for master bedroom, partner instead of husband or wife, they and their where a couple’s gender had been assumed. Terms with no acceptable use: “plantation” in every context, redirected to a description of the hospitality the word was reaching for. Terms that exclude by assumption: “walking distance” and “steps away” assume the reader walks — nearby, adjacent, and on-site are more informative anyway. And terms that depend on context: “colonial” is fine for a period and wrong as atmosphere, so specify Georgian or Greek Revival.

I also wrote the alt-text standard the team worked to: describe the image’s purpose, account for the surrounding copy, punctuate because it is read aloud, and keep it to 125 characters. The ceiling did most of the work — a hard limit makes the writer decide what the image is for. It was an internal standard informed by WCAG, not a WCAG requirement, and the document says so.

Sanitized writing samples demonstrating both frameworks are available on request.