While building out concepts we usually encounter tough questions that yield often times cloudy responses. The most frequent question I encounter is “what do we really need?” My answer is almost always, “everything.” The bottom line is there is no magic bullet or bullets that guarantee a successful concept. Everything adds to its ability to succeed or reason for failure. But, when push comes to shove – read: budgets wane quickly – what do you really need?
An architect working on our latest concept, Seven Hens, put it in terms of spreading peanut butter. In some spots you glob it on and in others you go thinner, but the trick is to cover the whole piece of bread. (Thanks Mike Hug) However, this gets tricky when speaking about restaurant branding. Main reason for this is because EVERYTHING is EVERYTHING.
A restaurant’s brand is the aftereffects of the culmination of every touch point. When you stop to think about that, every piece of that puzzle matters and therefore needs as much peanut butter as possible. Every piece of the puzzle should be thought through with a focus on “how will this element not just feature my brand identity, but how will it bolster and boost it?”
I hate sounding like a broken record when explaining this to clients, but when asked, “What do we really need?” the answer is not cloudy, but quite definitely: EVERYTHING. Spread your peanut butter wisely kids.
