06.02.2010
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Going Green When Dining Out
6 Strategies for Building a Better Restaurant Brand
With hints of organics, locally sourced products and ingredients, health and wellness, and sustainability tossed into menu options, food retailers are trying to take advantage of a cultural shift toward higher quality experiences. While this has significant implications specifically for fast casual restaurants, opportunities abound for purveyors across all segments of food retailing.
Based on the intellectual capital at The Hartman Group as well as our learnings on quality, health and wellness, and sustainability, we offer the following strategic recommendations for harnessing your sustainability halo:
1. Great community space
Consumers are always quick to comment on the easy availability of public meeting space and see this as a critical element of the brand’s image. It may not seem intuitive, but consumers are as interested in how companies take care of them as they are in how companies take care of the environment or the planet.
Free Wi-Fi and meeting spaces, for example, are a means of engendering community and building social engagement. This fact should not be forgotten in future brand strategizing. From the consumer perspective, this is a real win.
2. Purveyors of fresh and quality
Call it a lucky match made in heaven, call it painfully obvious, but the association between a company’s stance as
a purveyor of fresh, high-quality food alternatives amid a sea of “factory style” QSR offerings should not be forgotten when it comes to driving future sustainability initiatives. Put another way, do not ever lose sight of the fact that one of fast casual’s strongest sustainability claims is its ability to provide higher quality food alternatives to the local community on the go.
3. Establish strategic partnerships with key artisanal providers at regional levels
Brand and operational teams working on streamlining the brand experience and dealing with issues of scalability are often reluctant to envision a strategic future that includes a series of complex arrangements with regional specialty food purveyors. As challenging as this prospect may be, we believe it is integral to the future success of fast casual brands. Such partnerships demonstrate a continued commitment to a)quality food experiences, b) local food experiences, and c) locally sustainable business partnerships.
Some restaurants leverage local and regional connections are already utilizing such products as Point Reyes blue cheese, Niman Ranch meats, Beecher’s cheddar cheese or Cypress Grove coffees in this capacity — it is only a matter of time until such practices will become mainstream.
4. Work diligently to ensure a consistent, yet local and unique brand experience
Related to the point above is a tension that pervades all successful retail and fast casual brands with a stake in the food business. Namely, how to grow as a brand and offer a consistent, high-quality experience without becoming homogenous, predictable and “soul-less.” Whole Foods Market has dealt with this tension with a fair degree of success by allowing regional and store team leaders wide latitude to customize the brand offerings of each retail space to meet the needs of its local constituency. We are well aware that such freedom can prove maddening in the face of corporate strategic objectives, but we reiterate that such latitude is critical to long-term brand success. Like it or not, food has always been a local thing. And now that the logistical means are in place to deliver “local” (vis-à-vis The Long Tail), consumers will increasingly demand this attribute.
Besides, one of the big learnings we discovered from our years of research with health and wellness consumers is this: consumers are much more forgiving of
occasional missteps, miscues or inconsistencies in the retail or restaurant experience if these shortcomings arise as a result of genuine efforts to deliver a unique, local experience. The bottom line is that it is better to be imperfect and locally oriented than homogenous, predictable and slightly closer to some sort of “idealized perfection.”
5. Nurture brand evangelists by taking care and fostering expertise
Consumers consistently tell us that Starbucks is one of the most highly regarded brands in terms of sustainability. And the chief driver of that belief are the stories consumers hear from the team members themselves in their local communities — the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and so forth who are employed by Starbucks. Remember, the most effective stories come not from PR machines but, instead, are spread indigenously via word of mouth — or, increasingly, the Internet — throughout communities.
Interestingly, the stories are not about Starbucks commitment to the environment, shade-grown coffee or corporate philanthropy, but rather the fact that the team members all speak highly of how much they (traditionally) have been well treated by the organization.
This “treatment narrative” itself stems from two key factors: a) the fact that Starbucks offers certain material perks (e.g., health insurance to part-time team members) and b) the fact that the team members come to view themselves as “experts” in a domain (i.e., coffee experts).
A great way to foster brand evangelists within your organization would be via promoting specialized training opportunities in culinary arts. Offering low-level food service workers the opportunity to become more “certifiably knowledgeable” in the culinary arts gives them a profound sense of respect for both the job as well as the brand. It is this larger sense of pride, respect and belonging in one’s occupation — when shared and spread outward to the local community via homespun narratives — that drives the strongest sustainability halos.
6. Stress truly local, relevant philanthropic efforts
Sometime during the 1990s it became important that philanthropic activities be able to justify their existence by pointing to efficient bottom lines. Consumers, however, remain largely disinterested in such efficiencies. Instead of giving to national and formally recognized local charities (i.e., food banks), consider a goal of having 50% of philanthropic efforts go directly to local or individual causes of a highly specific nature — perhaps even at the store level.
Donating leftover product to food banks is a fine and worthy cause in and of itself, and should surely not be discontinued. But unfortunately, (most) consumers are simply too preoccupied to award retailers or restaurants “extra bonus points” for such efforts. But imagine the goodwill if a local establishment staged a local event to help a distressed family in need?
Related, do not become over-focused on the need to explain, document or promote such philanthropic efforts. Very often the best returns from such actions will arise from the inherent brand halo communicated via word-of-mouth narratives from the participants and recipients.
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