What a Family Cruise Taught Me About Brand Positioning
Recently my family and I took a Caribbean cruise. We are not new to cruising — this was our seventh. But the first six were with Royal Caribbean, making this our first experience with the Carnival brand.
I will save you the suspense: it will also be our last.
What I found genuinely fascinating, though, was observing how dramatically different the strategy of each brand is — from the website and customer service to the ships themselves and the shore excursions. I was not expecting the same standard from Carnival as I had come to expect from Royal, but I was not prepared for the differences to be quite so stark.
Fortunately, it was not a complete loss. I still enjoyed time with my family, and the experience gave me a vivid, real-world lens through which to explain five critical brand positioning decisions that every business owner faces.
Table of Contents
- 1. Mass Market or Premium?
- 2. Do You Cater to the Special Needs of Your Clients?
- 3. How Do You Use Technology?
- 4. Do You Put Yourself in Your Client's Shoes?
- 5. Pricing: Brand Image vs. Sales Volume
- The Surprising Bottom Line
- What This Means For Your Business
1. Mass Market or Premium?
Royal Caribbean differentiates itself on exceptional service, ship quality, and variety of itineraries. They describe themselves as "maniacal about innovation and continuous improvement" — and the product reflects it. Consider the capsule on their Quantum-class ships, inspired by the London Eye, that lifts guests high above the ocean for a bird's-eye view. Or the skydiving simulator. Or the zip lines.
At Royal Caribbean, the ship itself is the destination. There is Vegas-style entertainment, Broadway shows, luxurious spas, well-equipped gyms, cinemas, and on some ships, ice skating rinks. The quality of the finishes rivals the Four Seasons: high-end art, beautiful furniture, and an obsessive attention to detail. There were days when we chose not to go ashore simply because the ship experience was that compelling. Royal is able to generate 28% of its revenue from onboard upsells, compared to 25% for Carnival — a direct result of having more to sell.
Carnival, on the other hand, is clearly a mass-market brand. The ship is not the destination — on our trip, we genuinely could not wait to get off it and find something to do in port. The finishes felt like an aging Holiday Inn. The food was theme-park quality. The amenities included a miniature golf range that was falling apart, a shuffleboard court where the pucks would not slide, and a pool that was uncomfortably cold. The spa was plain, the gym was barely functional due to old equipment and poor ventilation, and entertainment outside of the nightly main show was extremely limited.
The entertainers themselves clearly gave everything they had. The brand just did not give them much to work with.
Check Your Brand: Does your physical presence reflect your brand positioning? Does your website? Do the services you offer? Every detail, from your waiting room to your invoice design, signals whether you are premium or commodity. Pay attention to all of it.
2. Do You Cater to the Special Needs of Your Clients?
Our Carnival cruise had a notably large Asian and Indian passenger population. Yet everything on the ship was entirely Americanized. The main dining room offered one vegetarian option per night. The buffet was dominated by fried food. Hot sauce for breakfast eggs was nowhere to be found. As a non-smoking family, we discovered that the only way to cross the ship was either through the wind on the upper deck or through the smoke-filled casino — which was also the only entertainment option between dinner and the show.
The strategy at Carnival is clear: keep costs low by making everything one-size-fits-all.
Royal takes a fundamentally different approach. The buffet at Royal offers a genuine variety of international options — I had no idea wonton soup was a breakfast staple until I cruised with them. Their loyalty program rewards frequent guests with priority embarkation, free internet access, and private areas of the ship. The dinner menu is extensive, with options for multiple dietary preferences, including genuinely healthy selections.
Check Your Brand: Put yourself in the shoes of each of your target client profiles. How does your service address their individual needs? Where are you defaulting to "one size fits all" when a small investment in personalization could create a significantly better experience? How do you train your staff to deliver a WOW moment?
3. How Do You Use Technology?
Royal Caribbean continues to invest seriously in technology: an improved website, mobile apps, touchscreen ship maps with real-time activity schedules, better internet connectivity onboard, and a technology-assisted embarkation process that flags agent availability to keep lines moving.
Carnival's website, by contrast, was not just slow — it was actively misleading. A significant reason we chose our specific ship was the photos of amenities and restaurant selections shown on the Carnival website. When we boarded and discovered that most of those featured amenities were actually on a different ship entirely, we were stunned. That kind of misrepresentation does not just disappoint customers — it destroys trust.
Check Your Brand: Do you use secret shoppers or user testing to ensure your website answers your clients' questions clearly and accurately? At which client touchpoints could technology improve the experience — and where is outdated or misleading technology actively damaging your brand?
4. Do You Put Yourself in Your Client's Shoes?
I have a sharp eye for process — when it works and when it does not. Here the contrast between the two brands was extreme.
Royal's embarkation is smooth: separate lines by deck, staff guiding guests to the next available agent, wristbands for children issued before boarding. The in-room TV is a functional tool for checking your bill or booking excursions. Guest services, in the rare event you need them, are friendly and efficient. Bartenders work to remember your drink. "My Time Dining" guests are seated with the same waiter where possible, building a relationship with someone who knows your preferences.
Carnival's embarkation was chaotic and, critically, it was the guest's very first exposure to the brand. Everyone converged in one long line. Agents at either end held up paddles when available, requiring guests to carry their luggage across the full length of the room, creating collisions and bottlenecks. After boarding, we were sent to an empty room for a child's wristband, then failed to get attention during the safety drill, then struck out at the kids club, then joined the first of what became many long visits to guest services — which functioned as the central hub for every possible question on the ship, always understaffed, always with a line.
I spent far too much of my vacation standing in that line.
Check Your Brand: Where are the bottlenecks in your service delivery? The time between a client's purchase decision and their receipt of the product or service should be as short as possible. If you deliver a service, speed of response and attentiveness are not luxuries — they are brand signals. Map your client journey and look for where the friction lives.
5. Pricing: The Balance Between Brand Image and Sales Volume
At list price, a comparable 4-night Bahamas itinerary on Royal Caribbean costs roughly one third more than the same cruise on Carnival. As sailing dates approach, deals can narrow that gap — but the baseline pricing reflects the positioning.
Both brands manage occupancy aggressively. An empty stateroom is perishable inventory. Royal and Carnival report occupancy rates of 104.7% and 105.1% respectively, meaning both are effectively full. But here is the more nuanced point: a premium brand must be careful about how aggressively it discounts, because accessibility erodes premium perception. If a luxury product becomes too easy to attain, the high-value clients it was designed for may quietly lose interest.
Noticeably, the sophistication and tone of the crowds on each ship were markedly different.
Check Your Brand: Most business owners aspire to a premium positioning, which leads naturally to the question: what price will your market actually bear? Start with your target price point and work backwards to the cost of delivering the experience you envision. If the math does not support the margin you need, you have a choice: rethink the positioning, reduce delivery costs without compromising quality, or build a plan to educate the market on your value so they will pay the premium.
The Surprising Bottom Line
Here is what most people do not expect: Carnival is a far larger company than Royal Caribbean — 100 ships compared to 41 — and it is also more profitable, with a 6.9% net income margin compared to Royal's 5.9%.
So why is the luxury brand less profitable? Because delivering a premium experience costs more, and Royal has not yet succeeded in communicating that value gap clearly enough to justify the price differential in the eyes of first-time buyers browsing online. A potential customer comparing the two brands through a website sees artfully photographed amenities on both sides and concludes that Royal might be a little nicer — but probably not that much nicer.
As a result, Royal competes more on price than its brand positioning should require. Families like mine, who had experienced Royal six times, still did not fully appreciate the gap until we experienced Carnival. That is a brand communication failure as much as anything else.
What This Means For Your Business
Every business faces the same fundamental question these two cruise lines illustrate: Are you building a brand that commands a premium, or are you competing on volume and price?
Neither answer is wrong. But you need to be intentional about which one you are choosing, and then make sure every element of your business — your website, your service delivery, your technology, your pricing, your staff training — is aligned with that choice.
If you are trying to build a premium brand but operating with Carnival-level processes, your pricing will always feel hard to justify.
If you want help defining your brand positioning and building the marketing infrastructure to support it, let's start with a marketing plan. Or contact our team for a no-pressure conversation about where your brand stands today and where you want it to go.
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