Article
How to create a super brand
Just about every new restaurant chain would love to become a super brand.
January 8, 2006 by Janelle Barlow — President, TMI US
Just about every new restaurant chain would love to become a super brand. It's easy and fun to dream big. We all aspire to occupy that top-of-mind space in the consumer's mind so that his or her first choice is our brand. Dreaming is easy. Achieving super-brand status is not easy at all.
It would be best if the DNA blueprint for super-brand status were built into the design of your brand right from the very beginning. Unfortunately, most restaurant brand concepts aren't sufficiently capitalized to make that happen. In fact, most owners struggle to ensure that their first restaurant survives its initial year. The challenge for most brands is to take a successful organization with lots of habits in place and convert these behaviors so they align with the design of a super brand.
When Jim Collins' first blockbuster business book, "Built to Last," came out, discerning readers pointed out that the companies he identified were well-designed companies from the get-go. They certainly weren't franchise operations, which is the case for most fast casual restaurants. Collins took up the challenge, and in his second best-selling book, "From Good to Great," he looked at what is required to take an already successful organization and move it to stratospheric greatness. Not surprisingly, it's a lot easier to make the move from good to great if your culture is initially designed for greatness. Yet, according to Collins, it can be done even if that is not the case. There are numerous options for taking a brand such as Starbucks that already has a strong reputation in the marketplace and moving it to icon status. Many of the same requirements laid out in "Good to Great" apply to brands. Another way to approach the pathway to super-brand status is to focus on what Paul Stewart and I in "Branded Customer Service" call the three brand power tools: likeability, consistency and reinforcement. These brand-building blocks are sufficiently broad, yet they are easy to understand and have the scope to impact almost all customer touch points.
Likeability
Likeability is an easy concept to grasp. The moment you hear large numbers of consumers say, "I don't know why, I just don't like them," you are in trouble. At the same time, just because customers can't define why they like what you have to offer isn't so important. Most of what attracts consumers to brands works at a subconscious level. The most likeable brands are those that are narrowly defined. A fresh-Mex fast casual, for instance, shouldn't start offering pizza just because a handful of customers really like pizza. In addition, every element of the brand presentation doesn't have to be likeable. Components of the brand that are likeable, however, have to make up for the brand components that are not. For example, Southwest Airlines' engaging and humorous cabin crew go a long way to make up for the lack of assigned seating on their aircraft.
Consistency
The most powerful brands in the world are almost all narrow in their focus. The outstanding brand identifiers of super brands are readily knowable in the consumer's mind, in part because they don't cover a huge amount of ground. These brand identifiers (for example, fresh-Mex food that is served quickly in a slightly spicy style at value prices) are delivered over and over again in a consistent fashion.
A few tightly controlled brand elements make for the most powerful brands in contrast to those restaurants trying to be everything to everyone. I cringe every time I see signs posted that read, "Our goal is to achieve 100-percent customer satisfaction."
It's not going to happen. There will always be that person craving pizza who is brought into a fresh-Mex restaurant by a friend.
Reinforcement
Finally, those few essential and likeable brand identifiers must be continually repeated so that consumers will have them reinforced every place they look when they see your advertising or every time they visit one of your restaurants. If one of the dominant brand identifiers is friendliness, then the consumer must see it in your store décor, your logo, your colors, your mascot and your staff. Unfortunately, you'll find that getting your service staff to reinforce your brand is the most difficult part of brand management. Consistency in the concrete aspects of a brand, such as logo presentation and color choices, is fairly easy to manage. Humans, however, are wireless, in effect, and it isnot so easy to control them and how they interact with customers. That is another reason for making sure your brand position is narrowly defined. If you are going to succeed in getting thousands of front-line staff to deliver your brand message in their behavior, that message needs to be simple. Simple does not mean dumbed down, as people so frequently like to talk about with regard to large food chains. Simple means easy to understand, easy to engage with and easy to deliver. It doesn't mean simplistic. There's nothing simplistic about friendliness and speed. Simple means a handful of service delivery standards rather than the dozens I so frequently see posted on restaurant walls, which are rarely delivered. It means exploring with staff what it means to consistently deliver in such a narrowly defined brand experience.
Once that brand promise is defined and communicated to both staff and consumers, there is a chance that staff will deliver to reinforce your brand promise. Then the consumer has the experience of consistent reinforcement of what drew them to your brand in the first place, and you're on your way to super-brand status!
This article originally appeared in the Dec./Jan. issue of Fast Casual. The writer is co-author of "Branded Customer Service: The New Competitive Edge."
Likeability
Related Media
Subscribe
Get the latest news and resources from Fast Casual.
