Cultivating consistent restaurant branding is critical. Your brand may be the only differentiating factor customers can identify about your restaurant.
According to ClearVoice, “Brand consistency is the pattern of expression that affects what people think about your company. The more consistent your messaging, the more consistent your branding — whether via words, design, offerings or perspective. Your brand should build awareness and develop trust and loyalty with customers.”
Creating a consistent brand experience starts with finding designs elements that best communicate the values of your restaurant. Then, you have to consistently use those elements throughout all channels and mediums.
If your branding and design lacks consistency, it will communicate a lack of consistency in your business. Inconsistent brand experiences can confuse customers, cause them to misinterpret your company values, and lose trust in the company.
So, it’s critical to create a brand design that you can consistently execute in all forms, making your message perfectly clear.
Develop Restaurant Branding Guidelines
Developing brand guidelines with regards to style and usage will help ensure consistency in your branding. This will not only serve your customers well, but it will keep all members of your team focused and on the same page. You can do this by taking the time to develop a foundation that guides your messaging and aligns with your restaurant’s goals.
You can see some examples of brand style guides here.
Brand as a Culture
Your branding is how you communicate your restaurant’s vision and mission.
But, it shouldn’t stop with logos and brand copy. Your employees should embody your business values and deliver them to your customers. Employee training and internal brand loyalty can help empower your team to act as brand ambassadors. When your internal audience understands and embraces your brand, the more consistent your brand experience will be to your customers.
Leverage Data to Optimize Branding Efforts
“Ultimately, restaurant branding ideas are just that—ideas. Starting points. The real work – and sometimes the most exciting work – comes from paying attention to how your customers respond to your marketing efforts, then taking calculated risks to reach them more effectively.”
Tracking your business’s performance and customer data is easier than ever. And, if you take the time to decipher this data, you can precisely understand who your customers are and what they want. This will help you optimally adapt your branding strategies to best serve your business and its customers. As such, data aggregation and analysis can have profound impacts on your restaurant’s performance. It should be an ongoing practice to evaluate them and act accordingly.
How Consistent is Your Brand Experience?
“As our ability to create and send marketing communications increases, it becomes easier to make a few missteps when crafting brand identity. The desire to be immediate can result in immediately confusing, distracting or detrimental communications that detract from the brand you’ve worked so hard to establish.” – ClearVoice
Social media and other restaurant tech-based marketing platforms have made it faster and easier than ever to deliver your brand to your customers.
But, as we’ve seen, branding effectively and consistently is not always easy and making mistakes can be very costly. So, it’s really important to develop branding strategies that are coherent and function efficiently, before reaching out to customers. Not only will this create consistency in your delivery, but it also makes quick work of your marketing efforts.
