Client: Star Thai & Sushi
Location: Siesta Key, Venice, Sarasota, FL
11 Fun Ideas To Build An Effective
Restaurant Branding
1. Set Your Goals And Write Down Your Mission
Fall of 2017, I left a design agency and took on a project as a Director of Marketing for a new venture at a friend's restaurant franchise. I was hired to help build their brand development, advertising and brand strategy. I work closely with the owners, share holders and vendors on their marketing objectives to craft our brand strategy, campaign and ensure the right messaging is delivered to their target customers.
2. Think Outside Your Comfort Zone
At the ad agency, I would hand over the project back to the client once it's done. Here, as a creative brand director, I handle many aspects of the business. My responsibilities is a continuous on going project. I also oversee our brand development strategy, advertising and design, identify our target market, research on target group, setting our brand positioning, and social media content marketing. I monitor their advertising and marketing activities to ensure the right message is delivered for our products and service. I plan and analyst how our brand is perceived in the market and developing a good relationship with the target market in all touch points. This forces me to constantly learning, developing and adjusting myself all the time.
2. Think Outside Your Comfort Zone
At the ad agency, I would hand over the project back to the client once it's done. Here, as a creative brand director, I handle many aspects of the business. My responsibilities is a continuous on going project. I also oversee our brand development strategy, advertising and design, identify our target market, research on target group, setting our brand positioning, and social media content marketing. I monitor their advertising and marketing activities to ensure the right message is delivered for our products and service. I plan and analyst how our brand is perceived in the market and developing a good relationship with the target market in all touch points. This forces me to constantly learning, developing and adjusting myself all the time.
"If You Find A Path With No Obstacles, It Probably Doesn't Lead Anywhere..."
3. Sell The Experience, Not Product
Here, I get a chance to bring my skills and experience to the table. This project gives me an opportunity to tell an unique brand story. This restaurant brand has amazing products right of the bat-excellent Asian Fusion and Thai food, superb sushi. This is what sets them ahead from their competitors. They're certainly set a high standard for their product. StarThai definitely puts their heart and passion into their culinary standards. I had the opportunity to watch their chef at work one day. I truly admire their attention to details, the art of preparation, the decor, their overall presentation and of course the quality of the sushi itself. These are the qualities that set them apart from their competitors. I knew then I had something great to work with.
4. Tell A Really Good Brand Story
I'm building this brand Identity the way I think it should be. After the meeting with owners, I was intrigued by their original concept. StarThai & Sushi restaurant patterns after the popular Japanese after-hours hangouts called Izakaya. A concept that I have never heard until then. But once I did extensively looking into it, I immediately felt in love with the idea very much. We wanted StarThai brand to be the place where the customers get to see something unfamiliar they haven't really seen. When entering in, they will be captivated all the senses of the place, the art on the wall, the color schemes, the energy of the place, the vibe people, and of course the greetings at once from our staffs.
We want everyone to be captivated by everything from the sight of the traditional Japanese fabric dividers hung on the ceiling, Japanese art mirror, our iconic bridge over our sand garden into our Japanese dinning room, the exotic lanterns in doorways, our retro sake bar as if you're taking a journey through the back alley in the streets of Japan. This is truly an awesome place to be hang out or be seen.
"Set A Goal That Makes You Want To Jump Out Of Bed In The Morning..."
5. Build A Good Brand Experience Around Your Product Or Service
Good brand sells experience and tells stories. I'm treating this venture as a branding project. This restaurant is like another one of my clients in brand building. I want to build a good brand experience around it rather just another restaurant project. By winter 2017, I began to build this brand from defining its objectives/goals, establishing its target market, creating brand identity, building brand awareness, and brand loyalty building. More over, we want to create a positive yet memorable brand image in our audience's minds about who we are and why they should come to us instead of our competitors. The more consistent our messaging is, the more consistent our branding will be. I have to ensure our brand consistency and message is delivered in all customer touch points. After all, the objective of creating brand consistency is to build awareness and developing trust and loyalty with our customers.
6. Your Value Reflects Everything You Do
Do things that inspire you. Your value is a reflection your believe. Similarly, brand core value is your message that speaks everything about you or your product. Through strong branding, we want our message to tell story of who we are, what we're offering that others don't, who we are targeting and why we're different. Our core value is our message. Our brand identity must reflects our brand core value. Our core value is our message. And our message is StarThai loves to delight our customers with the idea of "This is a place of discover". This is a place of a foodie type of people, a food explorer, a story teller and a place of celebration.
7. It's All About Consistency
First you have to love what you do. You're also have to be consistent at it. As a Brand Specialist, I'm passionate about building good brand experience. It's the first thing I'm thinking about and the last thing on my mind. I care about the brand and our customers can see that. And in order for people to understand our core message, we want to ensure that the consistency of what we believe appeals to our target audience through every channel necessary.
I'm personally overseeing that our message must be translate to all consumer touch points from our visual branding, customer experience, person to person, our online presence to online content marketing. It's because building good brand experience can lead to satisfying customers, future customers and ultimately repeat customers. It's fairly to say that don’t leave your brand open to a variety of interpretations and customization.
- Building Brand Identity That I'm Proud To Be Apart Of
We offer the overall complete experience in 3 keys areas - the unique scenery, our super friendly staffs and of course our amazing Asian fusion food experience. Collectively, we're serious about building strong brand identity which also means we have to set ourselves apart from competitors in many areas like how to make our brand visible, relevant, and of course unique. Without a firm understanding of the competitive landscape, it’s easy to blend in.Knowing our target consumer is critical when establishing our branding process. Building brand identity is a reflection of your brand personality. What is brand personality? Your brand personality is your brand vision. Brand vision is a specific characteristics of imagery or personality that a company wants to project to your audience. Your brand image could be varied from fun, playful, adventurous to what have you. In other words, if your brand were a person, what personality does it has?
- Building Brand Emotional Connection Is A Big DealKnowing who are we targeting, is critical during a concept development. Finding way to build a strong emotional connections with our customers matters and to make them to be more engaged with our brand. We believe that building emotional connection is personal. It builds on a consistent positive customer experience we provide. We want every single one of our customer to feel like they're V.I.P customers. Our food, our presentation, our superb customer service should reflect our sense of pride and passion of what we do. We want to be the place where our staffs know our customers so well from their names, what they likes and dislikes to their favorite drinks.
"In Brand Marketing, consumer is always a center of what you do. This is one of the reasons why I'm passionate about what I do."In many cases, some regulars don't have to order anything when come in because we have build bond with them. They come in and immediately identify our staff by names or vice versa. We would prepare special meal sets ready for them based on their liking. Collectively, we know how much emotional connections provide more value about who we are and what we're providing to our customers more than any marketing plan can. Through superb restaurant experience, we're building a strong emotional by the locals and new comers.
- People Want To Be Connected At A Personal LevelStrong emotional connections means increased customer loyalty and increase in referral for future customers. Getting to know our target audience allows our brand identity and brand personality to be finely tuned. From visual perspective, we have to choose specific right look, imagery, language to attract our target market. Our brand promise should speak to our target market, addressing their specific needs in a language they can relate to. In this way, our message can cut through the noise of competing brands.
8. Set Your Standard High
Everything I do I set my standard pretty high for myself, my brand, my work ethics and of course passion of what I do. In the restaurant business, our competitors determine many aspects from where we are, their price point to where the industry is going. So we frequently monitoring what others are doing. However, I think, it's also important for us that we must focus on how to set our standard so high that they [our competitors] have to look at us as a role model. Everything we do have to have a high standard because our brand reputation is depended on it. Our brand identity is defined by how our audience perceives us. By defining our audience is the first step to building a successful visual brand identity. One thing I'm certain a brand drives shareholder value.
9. Time Will Always Be Your Challenge As Well As Your Greatest Asset
Time is precious. It goes by very quickly if you don't learn to manage your time accordingly. I believe that every new challenge of your life will demand a different you. By doing so, I'm handling both roles consistently. I'm a restaurant GM;I'm also a brand manager (BM). It requires the best out of me. From brand point of view, I'm the gatekeeper of the brand’s reputation in all touch points. It's an on going project.
Internally, I ensure our brand promise message is carrying through all customer point of contracts from online, customer experience, B2B to our reputation. Online, I keep a close eye on who is talking or writing about our organization by constantly monitoring social media and leveraging online marketing tools alerts when anyone mentions our name, our products, reputations or service. In addition, I'm managing all online reviews. I handle all customer's questions and finding solutions for their specific requests and needs. Time is your asset as much as your challenge.
10. Reap What You Sold
In the first quarter, we received so many wonderful feedback from our customers both from online reviews, through our social medias and walk-in customers about our product and service just a few months of opening. We maintain our 5 stars grading and caught the attention from Sarasota Magazine. They contacted us for an interview their magazine article. Later we were named us an "Editorial" choice award for best new restaurant in town. A few months later, we were in the article for "Food and Wine" magazine as well. A month later, we won "Best of 2018" by Sarasota Magazine. We felt so thrill!
"The Quality Of Your Thinking Determines The Quality Of Your Life..."
Knowing who your consumer is, is critical when establishing a brand, let alone a good strong brand. We first looked at the basic fundamental level from who we are, what type of experience we offer, why we are doing better than our competitors and our goals and objectives were. And as far as our marketing strategy goes, it's very important that we want to be where the conversations are. By understanding of consumer needs and behavior gives me a clear direction where I'm going with this.
- My Impact:
We got to be there when our customers search for us. Based on my customer analysis insight and survey..... - We saw an increase of attendance from various online destinations.
- After our online social media identity have been set up, we began to see the increasing in walk-in customers from online review yelp, google search, TripAdvisor and other social medias as we had hope for.
- Based on our web analytics, we're also seeing the significant increase in online web traffic, call-to-actions to specific web pages, newsletter sign up, restaurant inquiries, to online to-go ordering.
In additional, through our website, the website analytics give us the information about our audience behavior that we needed to achieve many future goals. At the ad agency, companies are investing heavily into their marketing budget to produce specific results. In my case, I'm using everything I know and daily learning to produce similar results with the budget we had. Small budget was my biggest challenge but I had to make it work.
11. Constantly Thinking Outside The Box
In order for our business to relevant, we have to constantly think beyond what's normal. Knowing who our consumer were, gives us an important insight to establish our marketing plan and budget. Our marketing budget is made of two components time and money. In addition to digital marketing strategy, we also use unorthodox tactics called "Guerrilla marketing" to increase our sales, monthly revenue, build connections and of course exposure. Marketing is a fundamental ingredient for growth and profitability. Sometimes you have to think outside the box. With budget in mind, we came up with various tactics and plans. To attract our passer-by customers, we focused on different in-side promotion ideas, word a mouth referrals, ways to increase foot traffic strategy, traditional signage, corner stance personals, a sign-guy, car's windshield flyers within local community, media coverage exposure and some public relations. The results were quite significant improvement in our attendance. They fill in tables.in a slow day.
"The Future Belongs To Those Who Believe In
The Beauty Of Their Dream."
The Beauty Of Their Dream."
Following My Passion Is More About My Personal Freedom Than Anything
Life is short. It’s fragile and its delicate. It’s here one moment, then gone the next. It’s never okay to just settle because we aren’t here for a long time. Following my passion in life gives me a sense of purpose to exist in this world. Following my passion in life and doing what I love for a living won’t feel like work for me. Although I started my early career as a visual graphic designer & merchandising, but I've always set my sight as in Branding and Marketing.
Slowly but surely, my dreams and goals manifest into reality. Taking on many projects builds my character and skills as leader. It takes true strength to go after what is I truly love to do in life. In addition, my following my passion, time gradually becomes my greatest asset. I've learned that if you are waiting for the right opportunity to happen, you will be waiting a very long time. Sometimes you got to take that next train when it comes. I now have more financial freedom and time to enjoy what is important like enjoying life on my own terms.
"There is no greater motivation than seeing their leader working alongside everyone else. He shows it whether it's resilience, initiative for action, integrity, emotional intelligence, passion for what he does, and extremely creative in his field. A self-driven GM who works hard to make everyone better in what they do. It's an honor." - Venice, FL
About Brand Designer:
"As a brand manager, I play a role who helps define the way that consumers think about your company's goods or service. The over all strategy involves building brand position, brand core value, brand identity, online presence to your advertising campaign." - Chez Boodparset
Phone: 813.965.1866
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