Restaurant Branding Requires Hardware + Software
The importance of brand guidelines in hospitality marketing
Since becoming my own boss, offering marketing and branding strategy consultation for food, beverage, and hospitality brands, I've noticed a troubling trend: not one of the clients I've onboarded to date have had a complete set of brand guidelines. Moreover, when discussing this observation with others in the hospitality marketing space, it appears that comprehensive documentation for bar and restaurant brands is largely nonexistent. Yikes.
Brand guidelines are to a marketer what a recipe is to a chef.
Just as it only takes too much of one thing or too little of another to completely throw off the balance of a dish, the same is true for a brand: Without guidelines, a brand can become distracted, imbalanced, and ultimately diluted. But when those ingredients come together thoughtfully and "per the recipe," the results can be delicious.
But what are the 'ingredients' of a brand? Many think a brand is simply a logo. Spoiler: it is not. While a logo is a key component of a brand platform, it is not your brand. Let me repeat that: your logo is *not* your brand.
So, what is it?
A brand is the total experience your business provides to customers, and the story you tell about that experience. It's the emotional connection, the values, and the alignment between the brand's promise and its experience. In short, your brand is what people think or tell others about you.
Ok, then what are brand guidelines?
Ubiquitous in higher education, corporate, non-profit, and many other industries, brand guidelines govern how all the elements of a brand are to be used—individually and in concert.
This, of course, includes rules around what colors can be applied to a logo, and how the color palette, graphic elements, and even typefaces get used (elements I call the "hardware"), but it also includes important guidance around the "software" of a brand: the elements that you can't see, but you can definitely feel working in the background.
So, what key elements comprise the "software" of a brand?
Positioning
Brand positioning refers to the ownable "white space" in the market. It’s the space your brand can occupy in the hearts and minds of your customers that makes it distinct from your competitors. Positioning means understanding what makes your brand different so you can communicate that consistently. Whenever possible, positioning should be based on data - landscape analyses, competitive audits, and other assessments that can confirm or influence brand positioning decisions.
Personality
Brand personality refers to the traits and characteristics that make a brand relatable, memorable, and relevant to its target audience. Brand personality is a critical component when developing marketing strategies and tactics in that it is one of the first potential points of connection with a customer. The advantage hospitality brands have over many other verticals is that the personality extends well past marketing collateral. It reaches deep into the brand experience itself, through staff and environment.
Tone of voice
Tone of voice is the way a brand sounds. It's the language, style, and sentiment your brand communicates. Knowing how you want to sound to your audience will help you create meaningful and approachable marketing that resonates.
Brand strength begins at the intersection of hardware and software: hardware is what people recognize; software is what people remember.
Why the software matters
Brands without software are like homes without furniture. Sure, you could live in it, but it won’t have the warmth, energy, or impact that other fully furnished brands possess. Brands operating with just the hardware can feel hollow and disjointed, which makes consistency in messaging all but impossible. And without consistency, we can't create an emotional connection with guests.
Here's a real-life example of why the software matters: In August of last year, my husband and I visited a new neighborhood restaurant within a week of its grand opening. Because the menu was so eclectic, I was curious how the staff might describe the cuisine. At various points during our meal, I asked four different staff members for their take, and received four completely different answers: "We're globally inspired with California flair," and "Where Mediterranean meets California-fresh," there was one about the “coast of West Africa” and one other I can’t recall. While the food was indeed good and the service decent, I still don’t have any idea how to describe it, which not only gets in the way of making a connection, but also makes it difficult to recommend to others. Clearly communicating to guests what your restaurant aims to achieve is one way to create connection - and that's what the software helps to do.
Volvo: A Case Study
While some of the most well-known brands are powered by enormous marketing budgets, it is their masterful use of software that actually creates a lasting impact.
Take, for instance, this ad from Volvo (3m45s). As a brand long associated with safety, this ad takes the promise of keeping you and your family safe (understandably, one of the most critical decision points when purchasing a vehicle) and amplifies it. While the car is only visible for a fraction of the nearly four-minute cinematic short, the message is clear: Volvo prioritizes safety so you can preserve the moments that matter most in life, before they ever even happen. Here is how Volvo breaks down its brand, taken directly from their brand guidelines:
Volvo’s Software
Positioning - "For those who value safety above all else."
Personality - Genuine, thoughtful, human-centric
Tone of Voice - Progressive, trustworthy, and competent
Did you feel these ideas come through in that ad? That’s the power of a fully realized brand. One that intentionally uses both hardware and software very effectively.
Building a brand that resonates
Sure, buying a car is a far greater financial investment than going out to eat or drinking at a bar (for most of us!). But consider the exercise of selecting a spot for an anniversary, a birthday outing, an engagement, or a simple date night: it might cost less than a Volvo, but the intimacy is likely far higher - and the way we spend our time, especially with loved ones, has a value of a different kind. Whatever the investment - time, money, emotion or something altogether different - a well structured brand experience might be the very thing that brings people to your bar or restaurant over another. And a well structured brand experience starts with comprehensive guidelines.
In a recently posted video from the former World Class Global competition and education initiative, Shelley Tai of Singapore's Nutmeg and Clove shares lessons learned during a recent rebranding exercise commemorating the restaurant's 10th anniversary. "I thought a rebrand would be changing your logo to freshen it up a bit," she says. "But it was so much more complicated than that. We had to figure out what we wanted to give to our guests and what we wanted them to experience before actually going into the brand to look at logos and colors."
Approaching hospitality branding and messaging from a strategy-first perspective, rather than a logo-first point of view offers far more opportunities to tell the stories that will make your brand resonate. Think of it like rush hour traffic and you have somewhere to be: you can’t just think about the destination, you have to decide how to get there. The same is true with branding: what experience do you want your guests to have and what is the best route to delivering that? The result will be a more cohesive and articulate brand that strengthens through consistency.
Speaking of experience, The Haflington in Hanoi, Vietnam, certainly does it well. Its concept is clear and remarkably tight: a fictional explorer named "Sir Haflington" uses the space to archive treasures collected from far-flung expeditions. The narrative is expansive and reaches in every direction to reinforce the experience: from the interior aesthetic to the cocktails to even finding the front door (which feels like an adventure all its own, to be sure). The menus are extraordinarily well written and weave an exquisite tale of discovery, with every fable backed up by archaeological bric-a-brac - including a gigantic faux dinosaur fossil hanging from the rafters - displayed in jars, on shelves, and in precious little boxes. The staff is dressed in docent wear and offers casually scientific recitations of the bar menu and flavor profiles at muted volumes that punctuate the tableau. Bars and restaurants that pay this kind of attention to the details of an experience are the ones that get remembered.
(Author’s note: I'm stopping myself from going down the other rabbit hole having to do with the history of colonialism and cultural pillaging that this concept props up - a history that Vietnam knows all too well from its own colonization by France. Just know I clocked it.)
Brand = Experience
Regardless of the type of bar or restaurant you're operating, it already has its own unique personality and voice. You can see it in the decor, the people you hire, the language used with guests, how you provide service, and above all, the experience you give your customer. There are rich opportunities to create a connection with your brand throughout an entire meal or even a single drink. Volvo knows it makes a high quality product, which is why the car doesn’t need to be the focus of that ad. Its the story that is built around the product that creates the connection. The same can be true with restaurants: if the product is excellent they will come, but when the experience that is constructed around the product is also excellent, they will come back. And that experience you deliver begins with hardware and software.
From dive bar to Michelin star and everything in between, it's crucial to construct and document your entire brand—the hardware and the software—to build consistency in messaging and affinity with your customers that will create an experience that will bring them back for seconds.