Episode 189: What can restaurants teach us about branding?
Would your customers come back time and time again? In today's episode, Fiona points out that there's something wonderful about the branding that comes with restaurants. Tune in to learn more!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
On overall customer experience
Examples of amazing restaurant brandings
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Paul Dara
Marion
Pink Aubrey
Maggie Mae
Josh
Genevieve Bailey
Hello and welcome to episode 189 of the My Daily Business Coach podcast. My name's Fiona Killackey. I'm your host. Today you are listening to a quick tip episode. So those come out every single Tuesday morning, Australian time, and it's really a tip tool or tactic that you can implement immediately in your small business or in your journey to start a small business. So before I get stuck into today's quick tip episode, just my own reminder, marketing for your small business course and coaching program is available now to buy. So that will give you instant access to marketing for your small business, a self-paced online course, going through every single thing that you need to know about marketing. And then if you want to, you can join a nine-week coaching program. So that happens live single Tuesday for nine weeks from April the 26th. If you're interested in that, please check out marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com or you can go to mydailybusinesscoach.com/marketing. Both of those things will take you to the same place. This second thing I want to do point out is just to, of course, acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on this beautiful land in which I record this podcast, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The My Daily Business Coach brand is actually having a little bit of a refresh and I'm excited to show everyone that in a little while it won't be too much longer, I will definitely do an entire coaching episode about how we went through the process of rebranding branding is definitely something that I work with people on all the time. I've worked in branding for 20 years alongside marketing, they go hand in hand, but I wanted to talk to you today about something that came up when I was looking at the rebrand with one of my good friends. So one of my great friends is Paul Dara, AKA B Modern, an artist living in New Zealand. He's also an art director. He's worked and lived all over the world, but predominantly in New York for 11 years and now he lives back in New Zealand. I can't wait to visit him soon, but he's one of my closest friends.
And we were talking about the rebrand and talking about inspiration and I always make Pinterest Boards and I can be inspired by all sorts of things. I'm always taking photographs of book covers that I love, little ticket stubs that I've seen, or just things I find in op shops. I am constantly sort of pulling these things together because something about them resonates with me. And I was talking to my friend Paul, about this whole thing. And he said, “Have you looked at restaurants?” And I was like, “Yes, that is such a good idea.” Not yes, as in I had, but yes, that I totally get where you're going with this Paul. And what he meant was that restaurants live and die by their branding. Even if it's old school, dodgy, divey, really bad, like mom and dad got their six-year-old to kind of do it on a computer, but there's something wonderful about the branding that comes with restaurants.
And if you think about the restaurants that you may have been lucky enough to go to in the last couple of years, especially with the pandemic and so many things closed, every single one of them has to stand out, look at their branding and their whole brand experience. And so I thought today I would just sort of touch on a couple of ways that restaurants teach us, regardless of what kind of business you're in about branding. And there might just be something in this that resonates with you, makes you look at your own brand, and maybe just cuts through and kind of gets you to amend things, change things, freshen things up from a different perspective. So obviously I don't work in the restaurant world. I have a couple of restaurants that I work with as a coach, but I don't have my own restaurant.
It's not always something that I look at. I should also say that despite the fact that I live in Melbourne, I actually don't go out for dinner that often or lunch or breakfast. I have two young children, but I live and I choose to live out in North Warrendale, which is a good 45-minute drive from the Collingwood Fitzroy area. However, when I do go out for dinner, it is pretty much always in Collingwood Fitzroy, or it's out here in Warrendale or surrounded with my amazing book club. So I was thinking of the restaurants that I've frequented recently, and they are places like Marion Wine Bar, which is absolutely beautiful. Shout out to Marion, builders arms, which are, I think, owned by the same kind of group, a Hotel Jesus.
I don't know which way you pronounce it, which is on Brunswick street, maybe it's on Smith Street, Fitzroy, such a good one, such a good brand in terms of the branding and the service and everything else. And so I was thinking about these restaurants and I was thinking about what is it that enables them to really build brand loyalty. And I kind of put together a couple of notes and I'm just gonna riff off of them in the hope that one of those might resonate with you and get you thinking about things a little bit differently, whether you're in the hospitality world or whether you might not. So the first is the customer experience, and this is relevant regardless of whether you have a store, whether you're a service-based business, whether you have a physical shop or whether you have a restaurant or some other kind of event space or venue, the customer experience is absolutely key.
I'm sure we have all been at restaurants where the service is incredible and other restaurants where the whole experience was just horrible. So a poor restaurant, it really lives and dies by its reputation and it lives and dies by its last meal. They often say you're the unhappiest child. I feel like you're only as happy as the happiest customer sometimes. So you can go to a restaurant and this is where branding really comes into play and brand loyalty. If you go to a restaurant and it's usually pretty awesome, and then you go, and it's just horrible. I think a lot of people would maybe let that slide and be like, “Okay, one time, not so great.” The second or third time, wasn't so great. You'd just give up. You wouldn't go to that restaurant anymore. And I think that we can see that very clearly when we look at things like restaurants, but we don't necessarily see that with our e-commerce site that has had these things that need to be fixed.
And we've just put them on the back burner. And we're not realizing that things are really slow page speed times or anything elsewhere, maybe the checkout is really hard to access, or maybe it doesn't take a certain payment gateway that we are used to having like PayPal or another one. And so we give up and what we don't see is we are not a restaurant. We don't open every single night necessarily and see tables that are either full or not full. But what we will see after a while is a slow down in either traffic, conversion, or both. And so that is one of the key things that restaurants do really well. They are so concentrated on the idea that we are only as good as our last serving, our last dinner service, our last lunch service, our last brunch, whatever it is, they live and die by that. And by the reputation that comes with that and the overall customer experience.
So that's one thing to think about if you're a service-based business. What's the onboarding and off onboarding like for your clients or customers? What is it like when you show up if you are a photographer? What's the energy that you're putting into showing up? What information to give people ahead of time. So they feel super comfortable when they're turning up to get their photo taken. If you have a shop, are you making sure that people just have the best experience when they come in there. I am gonna shout out Pink Aubrey because I have been there and they have been a client as well, but Pink Aubrey, they just make it an experience. When you go in there.
I see it all the time. Sometimes I'm on the phone with Maggie Mae and I can hear her talking to customers and there's just this engagement and this lively nest that comes from her and Josh and everybody else that works there. And they're really engaged in wanting you to have a great experience, whether you walk away with something or whether you do not, they want that experience to be really good. And I think that is often missing from particularly service-based businesses where it's online. I'm raising my hand, I'm in that industry. And sometimes it can be that the website is really hard to navigate. Sometimes there's no correspondence when you contact people on Instagram or emails. And so you wanna be thinking about, if we were a restaurant, would people keep coming back night after night or week after week?
Are we giving them a certain service that maybe makes coming back, not that exciting and not that enticing. Another thing that restaurants do really well, a lot of them is they're bringing their brand to life. So branding in terms of like visual branding, it's often just the tip of the iceberg of the actual brand. What does your brand stand for? What are your beliefs and values? What's the personality, all these sorts of things. What does the business function do? But what we often see and what people often think about when we say the word branding is the visual elements. So what does it look like? What does your logo look like? What's the color palette, What's the typography? What's the type of photography that you're using? Is it bright? Is it dark and moody? And restaurants are incredible at bringing that branding to life.
So what you see on social media, there needs to be a reflection of that in person. So say you looked up a restaurant that somebody had told you was really great and on social media, it's all like poppy fun colors and great captions, really like awesome and fun and out there. And you feel like you're kind of being transported to the early nineties or something. And then you go to the actual restaurant and there's nothing on the walls, the staff for really quiet and reserved their uniforms. Maybe they're just all wearing black and it does not reflect what you had been hoped and sort of promised on social media. So most restaurants have a really good consistency between what you see on social media and what you can see when you actually come into the venue and you and get the service.
And that can be something where I've seen so many people focus on what their social media looks like. And then when you go to their, their website, doesn't look anything like it, different brand colors, different typography, maybe the website hasn't been updated in like five years. And I totally get it. Websites can be hard to update, I know, ours bit updated that often, but we try and ensure that we are using the same typography, the same logos, the same sort of style of imagery, the same color palette. And these are just small things or seemingly small things, but they can really create a distrust when your audience is moving from one connection channel, like social media through to, you know, another connection channel, like an actual venue or your website. So it's another thing that restaurants do. In turn with that, they really create this physical manifestation of what the brand is for.
And that is from the decal through to the menus, through to the bathroom. So often a bathroom in a restaurant is really reflective of how far the branding and the experience goes. Quite often, you'll see these beautiful restaurants. And then when you go into the toilet or into the bathroom, it is sort of tucked away. It's at the back. There might be like a whole bunch of brooms. There are boxes of toilet paper. It doesn't reflect the rest of the restaurant. And of course, the cost is a thing there. And I know, often that's an afterthought, the bathrooms, but in other places that you go, the bathrooms completely expand the brand experience. And it just makes the whole thing really consistent, really considered. And it gives you so much trust in the brand because the branding that you've seen elsewhere really is reflected on every single part of the restaurant.
So there is a restaurant in Collingwood that my lovely friend Genevieve Bailey brought me to for my birthday, a very delayed birthday because of the lockdowns. And it is called Shurestaurant in Collingwood. And it plants only modern Sichuan cuisine. I don't know if I've pronounced that correctly, but I went there and what was really interesting is that they had really considered every single touchpoint. So from the bathrooms through to the tables, through to how the food is actually displayed when it comes out, but also a whole bunch of little things that you wouldn't necessarily notice, but when you did, and when you sort of heard the story, it was like, “Oh, that is so cool”. And it's all these small elements that can really make you feel like you've had a great experience. So at Shu, they have glasses for drinking water or whatever else that you're buying.
And I noticed that the glasses had like a lipstick mark on them, but a permanent part of the design was a lipstick mark. And I asked the owner about that and he said, “I wanted to kind of give a kiss to every person who comes into my restaurant.” And so he had actually created a kiss graphic from his own lips and then worked with somebody and then put that on every single glass that came in. And I just thought that story was really interesting. These are the kind of things that people share and look at me, I'm sharing it now, but also share on Instagram and kind of prolong that brand experience and project it out into the world through things like social media. So those are just a couple of ideas that might get you thinking about if your business was a restaurant, if you were to take the branding that you have currently and put it into a restaurant, would people come back, would they love the customer experience?
Would they come back time and time again? Is it a great quality of service? Every single time is the brand really being brought to life across various different touchpoints? Is there some sort of physical manifestation of the brand, especially if you have a store, If you have a venue, but also think of your website as a venue as well, it is all brought to life? And then how might people review your restaurant or your brand if they were to look at it as an entire experience. So I know that's a little bit left of center, but I remember having this conversation with Paul and thinking, I really wanna share this kind of conversation out into the world. And hence I am, today's quick tip episode, although it's not that quick. It's little. I can see the time is going over 10 minutes.
So I just wanted to share that with you. If you are somebody who owns a restaurant, I would love to know what you thought of this. And if it's given you any kind of ideas for your restaurants, or if you could send your DM to me about what you do in your restaurant and how you've brought your branding to life. And then if you don't have a restaurant, I would love to know what resonated with you. So don't be a stranger. I'm @mydailybusinesscoach on Instagram, or you can email us hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. So that is it for episode 189, you can find the full transcript over at mydailybusinesscoach.com/podcast/189. And just a reminder, if you are interested in the marketing for your small business course and coaching program, you can find out all the information@marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com or mydailybusinesscoach.com/marketing. Thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you wanna get in touch, you can do that on mydailybusinesscoach.com, or hit me up on Instagram @mydailybusinesscoach.
