"We’re Not in the Cocktail Business. We’re in the Experience Business."

I was going back through my notes from Independent Lodging Congress recently, and one line from Alexander Buchholz of Bar Rêve jumped out again: “We’re not in the cocktail business. We’re in the experience business.”

It sounds obvious stated plainly like that. I don’t think most operators actually run their businesses as though it’s true. Buchholz followed the line with something that landed even harder in the room: all of the energy should be focused on delivering the experience, not just the product.

The instinct to double down on product is the wrong instinct

In a tighter market — and hospitality has been in a tighter market for a while now — the natural instinct is to double down on the product itself. Better cocktails. Better rooms. Better menu. It’s a defensible instinct because product quality is the thing you can control most directly and measure most easily. But the real risk in a downturn isn’t under-investing in product. It’s defining your brand too narrowly around the product in the first place. You’re not selling a drink. You’re selling how someone feels in the room, and — just as important — the story they tell somebody else the next day.

What hospitality can learn from fashion

One of the more interesting threads from that same panel was how much hospitality has to learn from fashion, an industry that’s arguably years ahead on this exact question. Buchholz talked about placing a brand in a “larger category of cool” — the idea that a hospitality brand’s real competitive set isn’t just other restaurants or hotels, but every other thing competing for the same cultural attention. Fashion brands collaborate constantly, cross-pollinating audiences instead of hoarding them. They understand attention, distribution, and cultural positioning as disciplines in their own right, not as marketing afterthoughts. They don’t operate in isolation the way most hospitality brands still do.

Hospitality, by contrast, tends to think almost entirely operationally — covers, occupancy, food cost, labor. Those numbers matter enormously and I’m not arguing otherwise. But the brands that feel genuinely relevant right now are the ones that have zoomed out from the operational view: building layers into the experience, creating specific moments guests remember and repeat, thinking past the core product toward everything around it. Not for the sake of gimmicks — gimmicks don’t survive a second visit — but because that layering is what actually creates memory, and memory is what brings someone back and what makes them tell a friend.

Music is one of the more overlooked levers in that layering. It’s rarely the headline of the experience, but it’s almost always present in the memory of it, whether anyone can name the song or not. If you’re building a hospitality brand right now, it’s worth asking where your energy is actually going: into making the product marginally better, or into making the full experience — product, space, sound, story — something worth talking about.