Brand hospitality is one of 2025’s most impactful marketing trends and creator-led businesses understand its power more than most. From Maebe’s coffee and cake Manchester pop-up to Vieve’s “Glasglow” studio offering attendees free matcha and jewellery-making, these startups are prioritising activations led by generosity. Everyone who attends gets a treat, the chance to meet the brand’s famous founder and to socialise with fellow followers.
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You might align this with 2025’s much-discussed community-first focus which rewards customer loyalty, but brand hospitality is arguably a nurture mechanism to get consumers on a path to this. It’s the invitation to have a nice time, no spend required.
Generosity as a point of difference
We are living in an era of infinite choice and creator founders understand this challenge first-hand. Theirs is a brutally competitive strand of media to succeed in and while you may be flavour of the month for a time, popularity tends to not last forever. Core audiences will always watch and buy, but for most influencer-founded brands – which are accessibly priced and D2C – scale and repeat purchase is required. In short, preaching to the converted won’t cut the mustard.
Alongside this, many of these brands’ products are good but not unique. Why give Maebe a shot when you can get something similar and more affordable from a fashion chain? A programme of marketing led by the very human principles of hospitality – friendliness and welcoming – gives consumers a reason to believe the cost is worth it.
Brand hospitality in traditional businesses
Brands without creator founders can learn from this logic and many are testing the water. A good reference is Reiss’ Valentine’s Day activation in which it partnered with Feyi Flowers to give its first 100 customers a free bouquet. Other brands that lead with a long-term commitment to hospitality include Jo Malone London, which offers complimentary hand and arm massages, and John Lewis which gives shoppers free access to styling help.
All of this creates a reason to love brands, a reason to spend more and a reason to return. Activations like this can seem fluffy, but they are driven by a steely understanding that customer acquisition requires a point of difference that can feel personal.
Hospitality to fight market homogeny
At the end of summer 2024, a weary luxury hotel veteran noted to me that they believed the sector had lost the magic that drove retention: hospitality. Attempts to ride the unpredictable post-pandemic shifts had led to inevitable cost-cutting and the end of all the little nice-to-haves. They referenced a hotel chain which used to leave bananas in every room – a silly, quirky freebie but one which set it apart. The end of such brand identifiers was creating homogeny in the market. It was leading to the idea that a hotel’s a hotel.
Hospitality in its many forms kills that notion. It’s a human-first moment of generosity to set in motion a person’s belief that becoming – and remaining – a customer is a good decision. Any brand attempting to build revenue through community in 2025 should consider this as the first step.
But how does this grow brand awareness?
In the age of highly algorithmic channels like TikTok, YouTube Shorts and, increasingly, Instagram Reels, savvy brands will understand just how far content about hospitality-led activations can go and it needn’t be produced by influencers. Anyone posting can achieve millions of views, no matter what size their audience is. The main thing for brands is to give them something positive to cover. A business that realised this early was Blank Street Coffee, hence its remarkable global visibility on social.
When every social user has the potential to reach millions of consumers, the value of brand hospitality can scale. Brand values are communicated and remembered, delivered by peers who were impacted enough to share the experience.
By Sara McCorquodale, CEO and founder of CORQ.
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