CAP
PTURE
Airbnb, the world leader in accommodations of the “sharing economy”, allows you to find places to stay directly from individuals in thousands of cities around the world. It allows you to rent apartments (or even entire houses) from people all over the world, almost everywhere in fact. The platform really revolutionized the world of accommodations. There’s a place where we call home, stay there, live like a local, don’t try to escape ordinary, capture it, ordinary always the things that you miss the most. experience the rich culture in inside. We believe in a world where people belong, anywhere.
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INTRODUCTION
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While business traveler gravitate toward hotel chain, people taking personal trips tend to prefer boutique hotels with unique design. Chronic travelers or students, however, may opt for guesthouses, hostels and other alternative accommodations. Whatever the case, finding the optimal place to stay is rarely an easy task. Founded in 2008 in San Francisco. Airbnb is a sharing service that allows property owners to rent rooms or even houses to online users. Although the company is under 10 years old, it has exhitbited astionishing growth, being valued at figures that rival those of Hiltion Hotels and Resorts, and continues to be a key author in the tale of the modern startup. Before Airbnb, accommodation sharing was mostly limited to companies like Couchsurfing, a service that allows homeowners to offer their couch to traveler for free. Operating on a similar principle, Airbnb applied all the advantages of the digital era to appeal to a wider consumer base, and is going further by offering new possibilities. In the course of building their company, Airbnb’s founders learned that users were interested in more than just accommodations: they want the local experience.
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CONTENTS
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Introduction
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Brand Story The birth and rise of Airbnb.
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Tone of voice Love, Sharing, trust.
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Seed Home is where we begin our story.
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The new Airbnb Oh, hey there!
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The one Nothing can express our identity more profoundly than the stories of people who make up this community.
BRAND STORY Airbnb entered the hospitality market with was once centered around creating a platform for short-term and apartment rentals targeting budget travelers. We love each other, trust each other, most importanting we like sharing.
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Without the customer, there is no product. In this case, the customer – both hosts and guests – is the brand. For anyone not yet familiar with Airbnb, it’s an online marketplace in which homeowners can offer their property, or part of it, for rent. Travelers then use the site to book a stay in their home. Or at least, that’s the general idea. Today the site includes more than just private homeowners – many hotels offer rooms for rent via the site, too. And you won’t just find places to stay, either. The company provides a space for hosts to offer experiences, and places to eat.
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The services offered may have expanded, but it’s still the customer that is the brand. We don’t own or manage properties ourselves. We simply provide a forum for customers to promote and book properties, meals, and more. Most companies still have a product, even if nobody’s buying, but not Airbnb. We know this, and instead of telling the company’s story, we gets our customers to tell their stories. This is so important that we have a whole section dedicated to “Stories from the Airbnb Community.” Stories. Front and center.
Our product is the trip, we see Airbnb as a lifestyle company that could believably extend into more aspects of the trip, like Airbnb Experiences. But the real genius is that storyboards became part of our culture and helped make Airbnb a resilient,
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creative organization. Giving people problems instead of to-do lists empowered them to examine their work through a new lens. They were invited to be creative and come up with new ideas and possibilities that leadership could never have
imagined. You can’t know the future in such a fast-moving organization or in a global market. And, when you’re truly disrupting, you don’t want to be limited by what you think your company can be right now.
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TONE OF VOICE Love Love bring us together. We love each other. Love makes a lot of things in life worthwhile and after all, we all deserve it. Trust Building a relationship with another person is done a step at a time as we explore the ways we can interact and care for one another. Sharing Sharing builds relationships and is part of our social nature as human beings. When you share with someone it creates a relationship of loyalty between the you and the recipient which helps you to bond. Along the line, that person may even offer you something in return as a ‘reciprocation’ for your kindness, even if that return is non-physical such as elevated status in their life or an unwavering loyalty to help you in times of need.
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We used to take belonging for granted. Cities used to be villages. Everyone knew each other, and everyone knew they had a place to call home. But after the mechanization and Industrial Revolution of the last century, those feelings of trust and belonging were displaced by mass-produced and impersonal travel experiences. We also stopped trusting each other. And in doing so, we lost something essential about what it means to be a community. After all, our relationships with people will always be the most meaningful part of our lives. You just need to get to
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know them. That’s why Airbnb is returning us to a place where everyone can feel they belong. Like us, you may have started out thinking you were just renting out a room to help pay the bills. Or maybe you were just booking a bed for a night on an unexpected layover. However we first entered this community, we all know that getting in isn’t a transaction. It’s a connection that can last a lifetime. That’s because the rewards you get from Airbnb aren’t just financial— they’re personal—for hosts and guests alike. At a time when new technologies have made it easier
to keep each other at a distance, you’re using them to bring people together. And you’re tapping into the universal human yearning to belong— the desire to feel welcomed, respected, and appreciated for who you are, no matter where you might be. Belonging is the idea that defines Airbnb, but the way we’ve represented Airbnb to the world until now hasn’t fully captured this.
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Love Love Love traveling, love everyone who around us. Love is a fickle emotion. Its like being Dory in Finding Nemo except you don’t have short term memory loss but a a helpless desire to feel love. We feel love in the touch of words, in the way the trees sway, in a kiss, in a hug, and even in breathing. We love living, people, animals, art, and any other excess that we can find.
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Trust This is a trusted community marketplace for consumers to list, discover, and book unique accommodations for unique travel experiences. Nothing would work that efficiently as it does today if we human stop trusting each other. We aim to build the community that bring people other and trust each other. trust people, after all world is not that bad place.
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I F l T P t T L S F L A t T s t t t
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Sharing We not only share stories. We discover new things. We create stories together. Our sharing economy individual hosts have developed invaluable entrepreneurial skills, while also expanding their knowledge regarding customer service and marketing.
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SEED Home is where your story begin. It becomes embody how we live and see ourselves. And these spaces evolve when we focus on what makes us happy. When you walk into a home, you instantly feel welcoming. And it’s not just because you enjoy the decoraton or delicous food – although both help. There’s something else. That’s the ordinary makes you feel home. It can be a book puting on the bed, a hanger hanging your favourite color shirt, the oily smell of the kitchen or even a post-it note on the fridge, etc.
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The ordinary makes home
“what I have found personally and from talking to others about this is when you have a feeling of familiarity you feel at home. When you feel safe , warm and cozy you feel like like it’s home. This can be a place or with someone.”
“Home is where their heart is, or maybe where their family is. It’s where they feel the most safe or secure, where their things are. It may nowhere, or everywhere! Animals may make someone feel at home, their items, their family, whatever is close to them!”
“Home is where your heart leads you! Its not a word, its a feeling. You can feel it when it comes to your parents, your siblings, your soulmate, your favorite place or anything else. It varies for all of us. Sometimes the soothing affection of any person can make you feel like home. Sometimes being in a group of your genetic relations can not make you calm and feel like this. So, in my view home is a soothing, calming, relaxing feeling in vicissitudes of life. That’s it.”
“Home for me is where I feel most comfortable. I don’t feel the need to have to pretend to be myself, I can be me, freely and without judgment. Home is where the people are that you love the most. Home doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific place and it doesn’t necessarily have to stay a specific place. Saying a person feels like home means that wherever they are is where you feel most comfortable, where you want to be.”
“ A place feels like home when I can be myself, when I don’t have to hide who I am or pretend to be someone I’m not. I can live in jeans and t-shirts, forgo almost all makeup, and not worry about having the latest hairstyle or making enough money. I’ve lived most of my life in Dallas and have spent most of that time trying to get away. Even though my closest friends and family are here, as are years of memories, it’s not where I belong.
“I believe a feeling of home comes from being comfortable, at peace & a feeling of belonging. As of yet I’ve never truly felt “at home” anywhere because I never really feel like I belong (not having genetic family) but it doesn’t stop me from making my physical dwelling into a space that looks like, feels like,etc what I’d call home. In essence home is where your heart is.”
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Local It is that local experience that draws many guests to Airbnb. Indeed, despite all the emphasis on hospitality, one of the major selling points—and, as we previously discussed, also one of the major drawbacks—is that Airbnb is not a hotel. Guests who use the site typically want to experience a city in a more local, authentic way. Tapping into this desire—perhaps an extension of Chesky’s “starting with the
perfect experience and working backward” —the company has been placing increasing emphasis on facilitating this local experience. In November of 2012, Airbnb launched two local initiatives—Airbnb Neighborhoods, which the company refers to as “the definitive guide to neighborhood experiences around the world”, and Local Lounges.
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THE NEW AIRBNB An identity is about more than symbols. So we’ve redesigned the entire Airbnb experience to better reflect the people who make up this community. Our shared vision of belonging is the thread that weaves through every touchpoint on Airbnb. We have redesigned every single page of the user experience across the web and mobile to bring our new identity to life. Now we have a platform that reflects your feedback, and that can continue growing as we keep listening.
Bye-bye.
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Oh, hey there!
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THE ONE In the end, nothing can express our identity more profoundly than the stories of people who make up this community. When we started Airbnb, I had no idea about the people we would meet, or the friendships I would make. Then I met Amol, one of the first guests, who later invited me to his wedding in India. I met Sebastian, who was trapped in his house in the middle of the London Riots in 2011. Before his own mother had a chance to check that he was okay, seven of his former guests did. And I met Shell, who saw the devastation wrought by Hurricane
Sandy, and listed her home for free to those who were displaced. These people, along with millions of others, have their own unique backgrounds and life experiences. We all come from vastly different cultures and places. And yet, no matter how many miles may separate us, we are united by the universal, powerful, human desire to connect, to understand, and to belong. So together, with this new identity, I look forward to starting the next chapter of this improbable journey with the idea that first set it in motion—the belief that belonging can take us anywhere.