PPI #13: How to Create a Powerful Brand

Maybe you think the concept of branding is too difficult to understand. Perhaps you just don't get it or think that we'll get around to it at some time in the future. If you're thinking about branding in that way, you're leaving some serious cash and growth on the table. Hi, my name is Eric Partaker, and today I want to share with you a few stories, a few pointers around branding. I how you can make it simpler for yourself and the results that you can expect to achieve as a result. One of the things that I first picked up about branding came actually through my experience at Skype. I joined Skype in its very, very early days. We were about 30 or so people in a small office in London, and it was just an absolute rocket ship of a journey. We grew from that 30 people in the London office all the way up to over 500, and we had an exit to ebay during that time for $4 billion. Now, VoiceOver IP had existed for 10 years prior to Skype's arrival. So what was it about Skype that made things different? I thought often about that while I was at Skype, and I distilled it down to two things. One, that they had superior product quality versus all the competition that we were against. And two, we wrapped up the brand in a tagline that people really loved. So the tagline for Skype at the time was the whole world can talk for free. And that brand identity created this revolutionary spirit in the company and also really resonated to all the people that we were in contact with, our customers and our partners and our suppliers. Following Skype, following that exit from ebay, thought, well, what should I do next in life? And then I decided to go into Mexican restaurants, because why wouldn't you go from technology to Mexican restaurants? The truth is, I was actually missing the food, having grown up on it in Chicago. And I thought it might be fun to create a chain of Mexican restaurants. Now, I knew nothing about Mexican restaurants, but I thought if we just applied the same two core tenets that we had learned at Skype to this new business, we'd get good results. And this is the first thing I want to make sure that you understand when it comes to branding, you don't have a chance to brand anything unless you have a quality product. It starts with a quality product, and the branding is a layer on top of that that will allow you to capture even better results. That's what really made Skype work. And that's the philosophy that I took into building the Mexican restaurant chain. So the first thing we focused on was let's get that product quality right. We networked our way with some of the best chefs out there, some of the best recipes out there, and really made sure that the food tasted great. But it wasn't still branded yet. And I'll get to what I mean about that in a moment. It was just great tasting food. The second thing that we did was we decided to sum up Chilango, that was the name of the Mexican restaurant chain and in a single word. If you look at some of the world's top brands out there, they can sum themselves up in single words or thoughts or phrases such as, Nike screams competition. Disney is all about happiness. And for Chilango, our one word distillation was vibrancy. We literally wanted to brighten up the world, make it a more vibrant place, put a smile on people's faces when they came in and ate with us. And that single one word distillation, summing up our brand in that single word, allowed us to get on to the next step to create a powerful brand, which is deciding what are all the touch points in the guest or customer experience that you need to brush with that brand. It's almost like you're dipping your brand brush in the paint of whatever your brand is. For us, it was vibrancy, and now you have to decide, well, what is it that I'm going to paint? So the first thing that we did was we made sure that our food was even more vibrantly flavored than it currently was at that time. We also made sure that the flavors were more robust and, you know, they pop more. And then when it came to the people, we ended up adding an audition element to our interview process to uncover the vibrant personalities that naturally occur, but that you won't find unless you're specifically looking for them. And then, last but not least, taking that vibrancy, we brushed it across all of our sites, whether online or offline. So the restaurant interiors really popped with an electric color palette. Lots of neon lights, lots of, lots of bright lights. It felt like a very vibrant atmosphere, you know, something that would literally brighten up your day. And even online, all the social media, the website, you know, @chillango.co.uk, all of that was very, very vibrant and really pop to communicate that sense of, ah, this is a place that really brightens up your day. We wanted people to really feel that and feel it by seeing that we were living it right. The next thing that we did to preserve a powerful brand was that we always hunted for misalignments. And so what this simply was is on a quarterly basis, we would have a misalignment meeting where everybody was required to come up to the team with what's one or two or three things that are inconsistent with our vibrancy vision are inconsistent with our vibrancy mission. And that's a constant process because things are always kind of falling off the track away from whatever you decide the brand is and represents and, and that you want to be. So you have to constantly hunt for those misalignments. Now, there's also some really nice stories that emerge from having this intense focus on the brand, right? And just to summarize where we are so far, so it begins with having a very, very strong product, right? You have to have great product quality. Next, what is that single organizing principle, that single thought or word that relates to your brand? For Nike, it's competition. Disney, it's happiness, Apple, maybe it's simplicity. For Chilango, that one word distillation for us was vibrancy. What are the touch points? Where are you going to take that brand brush? What are you going to cover in that brand Paint? And make sure that those touch points, especially from a guest or a customer experience, really communicate and represent what that brand is all about so that the person experiencing it really feels it. And then last but not least, make sure you're hunting for misalignments regularly, having those quarterly meetings and tasking everyone who's going to attend to come to the meeting with one, two or three suggestions about what's not working, what's misaligned. Now, let me tell you about a few stories where things, magical things that start to happen when you really not just identify what your brand is all about, but really commit to it and start living it. The first relates to flavor. So I'm going to go back to the Mexican restaurant chain here. That quest for vibrancy that made us do it led to us doing things we would have never considered doing. So I'll give you an example. I remember putting an ad in a newspaper when people still put ads in newspapers. I know we don't do that anymore, but I literally put an ad in a newspaper in the US I was living in London at the time, but put the ad in the newspaper in the US to try to find a chef who could help us with a really great, vibrant braised pork recipe. I got somebody who responded to the ad. He lived in Cleveland, Ohio. I hopped on a plane. He picked me up from the airport. He had made the pork overnight, I tasted it. It was as vibrantly flavored as he had described it to be. I gave him, I think it was $500 at the time. He handed me the recipe, drove me back to the airport, I jumped on a plane back to London, and then we started cooking up the pork the next day in the restaurant. So that kind of that passion for trying to find vibrant flavors in that instance was fueled by really understanding what the brand was all about and really subscribing to it and searching the world for where can I get that vibrancy when it comes to that pork recipe as an example, I'll give you another example. So in our interview process, we introduced this audition element to allow vibrant personalities to reveal themselves. And one of the questions that we used to do in our interview process was ask people to bring their favorite T shirt to an interview, and then during the interview, ask them to reveal to us or to simply tell us, well, tell me about your favorite T shirt. Now, some people wouldn't bring the T shirt, so that's easy. Interview. Right. They're not following instructions. But those that did, some wouldn't have much to say about it, but others would have lots to say. They might sing a song or tell a vibrant story. My favourite of all time was I was interviewing this guy and got to the point in the interview where I asked him, well, did you bring your favorite T shirt? And he kind of shook his head. And then he had this hoodie on with a zipper, and he proceeded to unzip it. I thought, oh, gosh, I hope he's got clothes on underneath. But he proceeded to unzip it, and underneath his hoodie was a T shirt. And it simply said, I didn't have a favorite T shirt, so I had this one made, and I was like, awesome. He didn't have a favorite T shirt, but he responded to it still in kind of like a vibrant and a fun way. And so obviously, he definitely got the job. And then the last story I'll tell you is about what this did for us culturally with the restaurant chain. So we thought about vibrancy, and we thought, well, how do we make our staff as vibrant as possible? And then the vision I had in my head was that it's almost like each member of staff is a star in the universe. And so how do we want to light up the universe? And rather than prescriptively asking people, well, do XYZ so that you portray vibrancy to those you meet, I thought, well, what if we could get each one of them, a star to shine as brightly as possible. And what if we could help them become the very best version of themselves? So help them not just with things that would help them professionally, but personally help them, for example, with their productivity, with maybe how well they're sleeping, or their fear of public speaking, in addition to all the tasks related to the job, such that they would think, wow, this place is really investing in me. This place is really helping me. And if we, our theory was, could help our staff literally become the best version of themselves, then they would naturally shine as vibrantly as possible, and literally their mere presence would brighten up those around them. And so that, again, was all a result of really focusing on the brand, what it meant for us, and making sure that it was represented in everything that we did and even in that instance, influence our whole approach to culture. And we created all these programs and courses and partnerships that allowed our staff to do exactly that, to start becoming the best version of themselves. Now, the ultimate result of all of this was we took all of this branding and we applied it to our first pilot restaurant. So our first pilot restaurant opened up as Mucho Moss. It was no brand. It was just focused on product quality, as I said, to begin with. But then we applied this brand. Not a bland brand, but we applied the brand to Mucho Moss. So Chilango, nothing, you know, nothing really changed other than that brand, right? So we installed that into that single restaurant, and within six weeks, the sales at that restaurant doubled. So, same location, new brand, and the sales jumped 100%.

So I hope this gives you some encouragement and some insights and how you can demystify what's essential for, you know, building a good brand, how you can go about it, and some of the results and the benefits that you could experience if you proceed with that whole branding mission. And if you'd like more insights like this, please head over to my website@ericpartaker.com where you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Better.