Before you launch a brand building campaign for restaurants, it is important to have complete clarity about what restaurant brand is. Unlike many other products that are central to the brand because of its direct relation to it, the brand of a restaurant does not comprise of the product alone. Although food is the product that you market through restaurants, many other elements constitute the brand. The food is as good as the place where you consume it – so goes the saying in the restaurant industry. It means that the atmosphere of the restaurant and the ambiance together with the quality of food constitutes the brand. While these are the major components of the brand, other elements like the level of hospitality and employee behavior, the interior decoration together with furniture, fixtures, and furnishings, everything has a part to play in creating the restaurant brand.
Competing in the restaurant business in the US is quite challenging because your business is one of 600,000 eateries of the country. Unless you can create brand equity for your business, you will never be able to make the business survive. Once you can establish the brand, you stay at an advantage because it would become easy for customers to identify your business and relate it to the mouth-watering dishes. Brand recognition is essential for ensuring a steady stream of revenue that keeps the business afloat. How you can handle the tricky business of restaurant brand building will become clear as you keep reading this article.
Brand positioning
Before embarking on the brand building exercise, you must carefully assess how customers perceive your brand. This way, you can ascertain its position among many other brands. Do customers consider your brand worthy enough to recall at the first chance or would they find it fit for placing somewhere in the middle of their list of brands? For determining the brand position as accurately as possible, you have to rely on the parameters of price, place and promotional needs linked to revenue generation. Once you know the position that the brand occupies, you can chart out the brand building campaign accordingly. It would be clear to you, how much of emphasis you must attach to the different aspects of the brand building exercise to ensure that the efforts bear fruits.
Focus on developing loyal customers
The value of any brand depends on how strong is the base of loyal customers. The wider the base of consumers who are willing to go along with the brand is, the more will be its value. Therefore, you must focus on attracting people to the brand and take measures to ensure that they find enough reason to stick to it, no matter what may come. It would ensure that customers remain loyal to the brand and spread the good word about it that helps to create brand value. There comes a time when the consumer loyalty pays back in the form of sharing its goodness across the internet by using different media and platforms.
The process of creating a community of loyal customers can begin by setting up a business page on any chosen social media platform. Special business promotions through discounts and special offers help to win consumers who stay loyal to the brand. Spreading the brand through professional and social associations such as sports teams and local schools are other ways of ensuring customer loyalty.
Brand promotion
Having gone through the above process, you should be able to create brand awareness and start the process of building brand equity. However, you have to reinforce the position that the brand has earned, and make efforts to push it up the ladder. To generate the impetus necessary to make the brand move upwards, you must arrange for its quick to recall in the minds of customers through aggressive promotional campaigns. By using the technology of digital signage, you can create a close connection with consumers that help to leave a lasting impression of the brand in their minds. Make the brand identity unique by using attractive logo and tagline that resembles the brand and facilitates its quick recall.
The better you are in using the interactive features of digital signage, higher will be the impact of the brand building campaign. Proper use of videos and images reinforces the brand message that takes into consideration other aspects of the brand that helps in creating a profound impact on the minds of customers.
Create the right noises
Use high-intensity advertising that reminds customers of the brand together with the ambiance and hospitality that awaits them at the venue. Byusing the TV menu board to display well-designed promotional content, create a constant buzz about the brand. Ensure that customers would become so familiar with the brand that the slightest mention of anything in relation to it would flash the brand name in their minds like a spark before they can think about any other brands.
In addition to the use of digital signage for the brand building exercise, you can adopt any other appropriate advertising means that you deem fit. Depending on your budget, you can choose anything from television to radio and from the print media to online campaigns to augment the advertising campaign. Cover all aspects of the brand in the advertisements so that the mere mention of any one helps customers to co-relate it with the brand.
Use the right proportion of resources
You cannot achieve the desired results in brand promotion by depending on digital signage only. Although it is a major weapon in your armory, the use of other resources of promotion in the proper way contributes together in creating a vigorous promotional campaign that upholds the brand. Create the best strategy for placing the brand at the right position, and direct all efforts to derive the best results. How well you co-ordinate the resources would determine the rate of success in brand building.
Monitor the campaign closely and evaluate the campaign data to gauge whether it is moving in the right direction.
Author Bio: Karen Anthony is a business tech analyst. She has been working on the digitization of businesses, use of LED signboards, including TV menu board in restaurants and the rise of out of home advertising for the last 5 years.