Whether you are a restaurant, a distributor, or a tabletop manufacturer, have you ever noticed how there's a lot of attention focused on selling stuff - whether it's a steak off from a menu or dinnerware from a catalog. All the attention is focused on how to get to a higher level of sales.....and, ideally, profitability. In today's economic environment, selling stuff is hard....often very hard....to do. Many times, when the sales effort gets as intense as it is now, what gets lost is the vision of why we got into this in the first place.
Restaurateurs didn't open a restaurant simply to sell more steaks, fish, or wine, they typically started their business to serve guests in a certain level of quality and ambiance. Dealers and distributors started to serve restaurants and hotels with certain types of products.....some specialized in food, some in non-foods. Manufacturers of tabletop products often started because they believed that they had a product that offered truly unique attributes that others had not previously provided. The common thread among these startups is the vision of what the product or brand would be. It is this brand vision - and the commitment to it - of what the brand is to be that gets us through the early stages when money is tight (ok, real tight), when you make mistake after mistake in refining the brand and its message, yet keep on going forward....and seemingly you are the only one who sees the future while others keep telling you that "you could get more sales/customers if you just changed this....or that".
One of my favorite examples where a great brand started to veer off track is Starbucks when, a few years back, tried to become music stores along with being cathedrals of caffeine. I'm sure some bright, well-minded MBA had some research that since Starbucks customers liked music, that music cd's were a natural for increasing sales...and Bam! Just like that, Starbucks was launching McCartney cd's and selling music like crazy. Only one problem - at least to the stores I had a habit of frequenting - Starbucks began to look like a music store that sold coffee.....rather than a coffee store that had a few cds. The music had gotten too prominent in the product mix, too slick in its presentation, and the artists we a little too mainstream. No doubt overall sales went up... for a while. But, I wonder what happened to coffee sales....and especially coffee sales to the original die-hard Starbucks drinker? My guess is that same store sales started to fade. (despite my continuing to invest on a near daily basis!) Certainly, the brand identity was blurred in my opinion.
I'm sure there's a bunch of folks in Seattle that would take issue with some of this, but the bottom line is Starbucks decided to go return to being local cathedrals of coffee.....i.e., rebuilding of the original brand vision. Yes...they still sell a little music - but it seems rather secondary in the scheme of things going on in a Starbucks store. Sort of like the cups, mugs and accessories they sell....all rather secondary to what the real game is all about - and that's coffee. The Starbucks brand is about coffee. What's your brand about?
Remember.....brand vision isn't about selling stuff.....it's about changing the world.
Are you chasing sales? Or building a brand?
Dave Turner is the Editor of Foodservice Tabletop Journal www.tabletopjournal.com, an online publication that focuses on America's restaurant tabletop products, people, and places. F/S Tabletop Journal's readership includes chefs, owners, purchasers, manufacturers and salespeople involved in products used on restaurant tabletops.
Turner has over 25 years of experience in the industry and offers insights into products, branding, brand positioning, and marketing in addition to profiles of products.
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