How to Create a Brand for Your Restaurant
The hospitality industry is full of restaurants and bars that are always to attract customers by any means possible. If you plan to open a restaurant in the near-future, customers may have difficulty setting it apart from the numerous other eateries in the area. This is where strong branding can end up being useful.
What is Branding?
Many people assume that branding is limited to just creating a recognisable logo for your restaurant. However, it encompasses several other aspects such as building a strong identity for your restaurant and helping it stand apart from competitors who offer similar menu items and services.
Restaurant managers who do not have prior experience with marketing may have difficulty creating a brand for their establishment and promoting it properly. This guide can teach you how to create a brand for your restaurant and help it grow.
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Understand your Target Audience
It can be easy to assume that your restaurant will cater to all types of customers. However, the truth is that every restaurant attracts a certain type of patron. This preference could be due to factors such as the customer’s age, interests, income level.
Before designing the brand for your eatery, marketers should develop an understanding of their target audience. This can be done with the help of user personas.
Businesses can create user personas using many different methods. Some prefer to carry out surveys to understand customer preferences, while others may choose to interview people in-person and gauge what their ideal restaurant is like. Whichever route you choose, the end goal remains the same: learning your customer’s likes and dislikes and constructing your brand accordingly.
For example, marketers for a vintage American-style diner may learn that their target audience is couples between the ages of 40 and 60 from middle-income backgrounds. The restaurant can then price its menu items according to this income level and offer table seating that is ideal for two people. How to Define Your Target Market here.
Research Competitors
Before creating a brand for your restaurant, it is also worth identifying who your competitors are and how they have branded their establishments. A bit of research can go a long way in helping you learn what branding tricks work for the style of your restaurant.
However, this research can also help you avoid copying the branding that competitors are using. After all, people may not be interested in trying a new restaurant that looks and feels similar to an existing restaurant on the same street.
Researching your competitors enables you to create a brand that is truly unique and draws in customers from an untapped market. Marketers may need to get creative to craft a brand that stands out from the rest while pulling in a large number of customers.
Create a Mission Statement
Once you have researched your potential customer base and competitors, you can start on creating your brand. The most fundamental component of a brand is its mission statement. This statement is meant to convey your reason for existing to customers, investors, and anyone else who is interested in learning about your eatery.
A well-crafted mission statement can help drive business and aligns all the components of your operations under a single banner.
McDonalds’ mission statement is simply “to be our customer’s favorite place and way to eat and drink”. This short statement is easy to remember, but it also conveys many different things about company values. The company is focused on offering an eating location that customers will want to frequent and also delivering products that align with customer preferences.
Your restaurant should follow a similar approach by crafting a mission statement that is memorable while still conveying brand values.
Create your Logo
The logo is one of the most recognisable aspects of a brand. A well-designed logo immediately grabs customers’ attention and convinces them that your eatery is worth trying. People can often tell when an advertisement or promotion belongs to McDonalds simply by recognising the yellow arches on a red background.
Your restaurant should strive to create a logo that stands out from other competitors, but is also easy to print onto various assets. Simple shapes and symbols are great for this purpose, but it is possible to create a great logo that features only stylised text with your restaurant name.
Elements from this logo can then be used in different parts of your restaurant, such as the color of walls, menus, and signs.
Find your Brand Personality
The next step is to find your brand personality. This refers to the style and tone with which you will be addressing customers in communications. A well-made brand personality can draw in new customers and encourage them to return in the future.
A great way to craft your brand personality is to imagine your restaurant as a person. Depending on the type of restaurant you intend to run, this person could be an upbeat and charismatic individual, or they could be a dry and sophisticated character who strives to keep others pleased.
The first character in the aforementioned example could represent the brand personality for a fast food restaurant that sells burgers, while the latter may be a better fit for a sit-down restaurant that serves gourmet cuisine.
These personality traits should be carried over when designing your menu and promoting the restaurant in advertisements.
Final note
Once you have crafted your brand, you should ensure that all restaurant staff are familiar with it and the values it stands for. Maintaining brand consistency is important for restaurant marketing, so you should strive to ensure everyone is on the same page.
It is also worth noting that brand creation for restaurant can be an on-going process, and many establishments do update their brand over time. So don’t be afraid to review your choices and make changes accordingly. Check our blog for more.