I had the opportunity to spend a weekend at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas recently. Aside from being a fantastic vacation destination, the Hard Rock can also offer us a number of lessons on the effects of strong branding.

1. The Hard Rock Brand

First of all, consider the hotel’s image. When it was built in 1995, the Hard Rock was the first hotel to really break from the upscale, high roller image of top level hotels like Caesar’s Palace and family friendly attraction hotels like the MGM Grand. It was a smallish hotel located off of the Las Vegas Strip and it was designed to cater to a younger, hipper audience that its stodgier counterparts. The entire decor is based on rock and roll, with memorabilia on display all over the hotel. Loud music plays all over the casino. Simply put, when Vegas was turning towards families, the Hard Rock was focusing on keeping the party going.

A look at the website for the hotel shows that although the hotel has expanded, this mindset hasn’t really changed. The flashing images on the front of the site all emphasize the party atmosphere.  Nearly every photo shows attractive young people having the time their lives. Even the restaurant pages are selling the sexiness of the hotel, with the hotel’s coffee shop being sold with an image of a buxom young woman. The Hard Rock website makes it clear that the hotel’s brand is sexy and hip.

Another element of the Hard Rock brand is exclusivity. Not in the elitist sense of the more high end Wynn or Bellagio, but more along the lines of an exclusive nightclub. Whereas many casinos brag about their expansions and how many tables or machines they have, the Hard Rock casino floor is much smaller than most other casino floors and even that floor area is dominated by a central bar. This limited gambling area means that the casino is always busy and creates a feeling of belonging to an exclusive group of people cool enough to be gambling at the Hard Rock.

Although other hotels, most notably the Palms and Planet Hollywood, have attempted to rebrand themselves in this same vein, Hard Rock remains the original and the innovator. What we can learn from this is the power of choosing a brand that doesn’t exist in the marketplace and making it your own. Even if others try to establish themselves after you, so long as you are the first and the innovator, they will always be the imitators.

2. Rehab

The Hard Rock folks had a problem. Although the hotel and by extension, the world famous Hard Rock pool were packed on Fridays and Saturdays with weekend hotel guests, like most of Vegas, they were nearly empty on Sundays. Then in 2004, they had a brilliant idea to rectify that situation: REHAB.

The concept was simple, turn the Hard Rock pool into a daytime party destination. The idea combined two Las Vegas cornerstones, partying and laying out by the pool in an unprecedented fashion. The idea was an immediate success as Rehab was embraced not only by Las Vegas residents looking for a party to end their weekends, but by out of town visitors as well. They developed lines of customers waiting to get into the pool that the trendiest nightclub would envy. People began delaying their flights home until late Sunday night to go to the newest hot party in Vegas. It has gotten so successful that the Hard Rock now sells Sunday night rooms (which include 2 tickets to get into Rehab without having to wait) for the same price as weekend rooms, something nearly unheard of in Las Vegas prior to Rehab.

As always, the success of Rehab has spawned imitators at other pools, such as The Venetian’s Tao Beach and The Mirage’s Bare. The phenomenon has even moved to other days with The Palms launching a Ditch Fridays and Hard Rock itself expanding to Mondays with Relax. The pool party trend has revitalized the Sunday night club scene as well, with parties like Hard Rock’s own Sunday School doing great business on what had been a traditionally less busy night.

What we can learn from this is how an unused resource can be converted into a major asset. The Hard Rock took a day which had limited value and turned it into a major revenue source for the company. This is something that we can all apply to our business interests. With a little originality, an old or underused resource can be a huge success.