The Eyelet.

When I finished my second stint of college in 1996, I needed a part-time job to pay the rent while I looked for my “career” position (which ended up being field marketing for Boston Market). I applied to Borders (RIP) and was surprised, but eventually impressed, by a battery of questions on their application. I was required to complete a quiz that delved into my knowledge of various genres of literature. The message was clear – if you want to work here, you better know and love books and literature.

Living the Brand at The Front Line
A previous boss and mentor of mine would have referred to this as “living the brand.” In the retail and restaurant categories, as well as other industries where customer service is crucial to sales and brand loyalty, all your associates, especially your front line, need to be engaged in the brand they represent and everything that brand stands for. Much later in my career while I was working to turn-around an ailing sports-related retail brand, I attempted to work with the VP of HR in the front-of-house employee application process to include questions that measured the applicant’s engagement in key spectator sports (the ones our patrons cared most about). My position was this – if you just wanted a paycheck, and didn’t really care about sports, then you probably shouldn’t work for us. I didn’t put it in such blunt terms, but that was the gist.

Living the Brand in the Home Office
This applies to the home office support folks too. Even if they don’t ever come face-to-face with a real customer, they’re supporting the people who do and are creating programs and processes for the field associates who do deal with customers. In my previous example, how can the brand be faithfully delivered at the customer experience level if the home office isn’t also on board with the brand purpose, promise and positioning? That sports-related brand suffered from about 10 years of brand disengagement at the home office level and it trickled down, no – it gushed dow — to the store level. The home office closed themselves off from the brand and now two-thirds of their locations closed down with them.

Restaurants that Get it Right
A couple of my favorite restaurant companies get it right. Cameron Mitchell is a nationally recognized restauranteur based here in Columbus that specializes in upscale casual concepts. He and his support staff focus on one of the crucial brand delivery components which would seems obvious for a retail setting but is often overlooked – take care of your associate and they will in turn take proper care of your customers. Cameron Mitchell Restaurants recognize that their associates are their primary customer. In addition to competitive wages and a strong training program, they infuse their associates with brand knowledge and values which in turn empowers them to faithfully deliver the targeted brand experience. By-the-way, it’s been working quite well. A couple years ago they sold two of their main concepts to Ruth’s Chris for quite a handsome chunk of change.

Another restaurant concept, whom I’ve mentioned in a prior blog post, has spent a lot of time and resources on getting their culture set appropriately so that as they can actively engage their associates and keep their brand experience consistent as they grow – and they are growing aggressively. Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers has a simple mantra – “One Love”, which is shorthand for their brand promise of quickly and energetically serving the best, fresh hot chicken fingers you can get anywhere. And they do it very well. How else can a concept who only serves three other food products other than chicken fingers (slaw, Texas Toast and crinkle-cut fries) be so successful? They realize the importance of engaged associates to be able to consistently deliver the best chicken fingers around. In fact they get it to the point that internal communications is the responsibility of marketing. Not HR like most places.

What Should Associates Know About the Brand?
We, at Mlicki, believe there are three crucial components to a brand for which your associates should have a clear understanding:

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In a conversation with one of our clients in the A/E/C industry a week or two ago, I commented on the remarkably ineffective naming practices of most engineering firms. It seems everywhere I turn, I run into a collection of letters masquerading as an engineering practice — RJN, FJM, H+L, G.E.C. The list goes on. I have to believe the majority of these brand names just sort of run together for prospects and clients. Going a bit further, it would seem almost completely unlikely that any could really be top-of-mind for a specific skill set or service offering.

90% of Engineering Company Names are Indistinguishable
So, with my curiosity peaked. I decided to take a closer look. I asked an intern to review the names of all 500 A/E firms listed in ENR, and classify them by naming convention. Not surprisingly, the results were unremarkable: Read more

One of my favorite restaurant industry conferences I have attended is Technomic’s Trends and Directions that is held in Chicago every June. As a previous member of their Advisory Council, I always looked forward to the useful and insightful information they present at this event – even if the news wasn’t so good. And this June it wasn’t. Apparently consumers are losing faith that an economic turnaround is going to happen. They haven’t seen any decent signs of it yet – not in the media and not in their own lives. According to a recent Technomic survey, the number of respondents who believe the economy will get worse is more than those who think it’ll get better. This is a reversal in what they found in the same survey conducted just a half a year ago.

How Should Your Restaurant Respond?
Obviously the impact on the beleaguered restaurant industry looms large. If 2010 gave us a glimmer of recovery hope, the light is quickly fading. But it’s not all gloom and doom, there are some brighter spots. Some segments continue to have more than their share of SSS growth – fast casual particularly. Also, while consumer’s projections of their own behavior indicate that average check and frequency won’t rebound anytime soon, further curbing of their dining out patterns is not expected. We don’t have to sit back and continue to wait-out this era in hopes of the return of better times. Here are four measures we can take to confront it:

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As many of us learned a couple years ago, a tsunami isn’t necessarily the huge tidal wave that consumes an entire coastal city in just seconds as the movies of previous decades depicted. It often comes slowly with its overall height slowly decreasing but with an increasing width that produces a wide breadth of unstoppable destruction. This week the foodservice associations provided their final input to the impending menu labeling by the FDA. After years of fighting this movement on two fronts in NYC and San Francisco, the restaurant industry has succumbed to the fact that required nutritional information is coming and the best it can do is make it more palatable. We saw this wave coming for years and it’s finally about to hit us. It won’t be stopped, so why not ride it to our best advantage? Here are my four suggestions to best ride this wave:

1. Embrace and incorporate the regulations sooner rather than later. As the regulations are currently proposed, chains with 20 or more locations have 6 months to incorporate the changes. It is likely that your locations will have a menu reprint or menuboard revision coming prior to the FDA’s deadlines. Don’t wait until you absolutely must to respond. Nobody does their best work under these conditions. Start thinking about it strategically now and incorporate as many of these changes as you can in your next pricing or menu line-up change – prior to the deadline. Analyze your resulting menu mix and total contribution margin so you can adjust and improve results for your next set of changes.
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Anyone who’s ever been through a Mlicki BrandLibs™ session (or read this blog) probably knows that we view brands and culture as being intrinsically aligned. In fact, when I picture the two concepts I see them as a strand of DNA — wrapping in and out of eachother in a thread that tells a story. The most successful brands manage to connect us to a set of compelling beliefs through a system of iconic brand assets.

Often in brand workshops, we talk about how the United States of America is an example of an iconic brand based on this philosophy. So, with Independence Day just around the corner, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to dissect the brand that is the United States of America, and share a little history of the brand assets that represent it:

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