Restaurant branding tips- Appy Pie

5 Restaurant Branding Tips to Create a Unique Brand Identity


Abhinav Girdhar
By Abhinav Girdhar | Last Updated on April 5th, 2024 10:19 am | 5-min read

A unique brand name helps your customers remember you from the second they search you online to the moment they walk into your restaurant. Your restaurant branding helps your business communicate to the potential customers about what you are and what to expect from you. Your restaurant branding reflects everywhere, from your restaurant to your website and your social media accounts. It lets you deliver a memorable experience to the users. Everything including the taste of the food, the style of decor, the attitude of the staff, etc. work together to create something memorable.

Your brand identity is one of the most valuable aspects of your business. It helps you make valuable decisions in your restaurant, making sure you’re staying true to your restaurant’s values, mission, vision, and purpose. In this post, we will take you through the major tricks that you can apply to build a unique and stable branding for your restaurant business.

How to Develop Your Restaurant Brand Identity?

To define your restaurant brand, you must first know how to build your brand identity. Try to find the answers to a few common questions like who you are as a restaurant, what you are doing, and why you are doing it to define your brand in a better way. Recall the story of how you started, think about what matters the most to you, and how your restaurant operates in the market. With the help of the answers to these questions, you can set up the foundation of your brand. You can come up with an excellent restaurant branding strategy once you get the answers to these questions. Here are the effective tips to help you build your own restaurant brand identity.
  1. Create a Brand Personality: Your brand identity helps you connect with your customers in a better way. Begin with imagining your brand as a person and figure out how they look, how they speak, what they are interested in if they are excited or calm, and much more. These traits help you build a unique brand personality that helps you fill in all the facets of your restaurant.
  2. Create Mission Statement and Brand Values: Make sure you have a list of core values and a mission statement to define your restaurant’s goals and finding an answer to all the ‘WHYs’ of your work. The core values of your brand help recognize your central beliefs that act as a guide to help everyone work towards a defined mission. A mission statement, on the other hand, not only helps you in the initial stage of your brand-building but also takes your business to all-new levels. Total adherence to your mission statement can help you stand apart from your competitors and leave them far behind you. It helps you create a constant brand and build trust with your customers.
  3. Discover Your Target Audience: You need to figure out what your target audience would be. The people that you are hoping to have at your restaurant. To deliver a better experience, you must already know what these people would want from you. Here are the three major things that you can do to build and maintain your brand experience.
    • Provide an engaging customer service
    • Pay attention to reviews (particularly Google reviews)
    • Learn from your patrons
    By doing this, you can get acquainted with your customers and have a continuity that helps you make your brand. Before we go ahead and learn how you can position your brand in the market, let us first understand the importance of branding for the restaurant.
  4. Understand Your Market and Position Your Brand in It: Ask yourself the most important question – what makes you different? Make sure you get to know the market, your competitors, what they are providing, and what you can provide that hasn’t been provided yet. This research helps your brand become unique among many others. You can also take a look at similar restaurants. Try to know more about their experiences and use them as an inspiration to develop new creative ideas to help set your brand apart. Here are a few questions to help you perform better research over your competitors.
    • What are their mission and values?
    • How do they look like? (including their menus, website, social media business pages, etc.)
    • How do they sound?
    • How they interact with their customers?
    • What is their target audience?
    • How are customers responding to their brand?
    The answers to these questions help you observe the performance of your competitors and help you establish a better brand.
  5. Develop the Look and Feel of Your Brand: You need to create a unique look and feel for your brand if you want it to be memorable. You can create an excellent first impression on your customers by enhancing the way your brand looks. It helps you catch the attention of your target audience before they even interact with you or read what you want to say. The brand’s look is way much more than just a logo and a letterhead. It should be visible on your walls, in your menu, your décor, and much more. Here is the list of elements that you can keep in mind while communicating your restaurant brand identity.
    • Typography: The typography of your brand covers the fonts you use in your designs and how you use them. It helps you send a message to your target audience about who you are as a brand and what they can expect from you. The fonts that you use should define your brand’s personality.
    • Color Palette: You can use colors strategically to inspire specific emotions, thoughts, and reactions with your target audience. You can’t of course tell your company’s entire story just with a logo or storefront. The right brand colors provide you a shortcut to your audience’s hearts. Various color theorists have predicted that colors are psychologically connected with emotions. The color theory goes a lot deeper. Let’s not go down to that road. However, if you want to learn how color theory works and how colors can help you connect with your customers, you can go through this post - How Colors Can Shape Your Brand. You must learn how colors associate with people and select the right color combinations for your brand.
    • Images: You must use the right images to establish a better connection with your customers. The brand visuals help you represent your brand’s identity and convey your emotions clearly to the users. You can create new images for your brand or edit the existing ones to make them more expressive. You can use any graphic designing tool available online to create images for your brand. Appy pie Design is one of the most popular graphic designing tools that you can use to make the images that represent your brand.
    • Brand Voice: Your brand voice is a tone that helps you speak directly to your customers. It helps you keep your customers happy and connected with your brand. The brand voice of your restaurant answers all the ‘HOWs’ like how you will interact with your customers, how you will serve them, and how you will try to enhance their experience with your brand. To develop a brand identity, you can describe your brand’s voice in three words – Fun, Bold, Authentic.
    Branding is not a done deal. You must keep on updating your brand elements to help it shift along with your customer base. You can think of branding as a relationship that you need to foster both with your brand and your customers

How to Design Your Brand Elements?

Now that you have defined a clear identity and voice for your brand, you can start designing your brand elements. Here are the three major brand elements that you can design and make a creative restaurant branding stronger.
  • Logo: The logo is one of the major elements of the brand and all the other elements are organically born from it. The best part about designing a logo for a restaurant is that through the right colors, you can let your customers have the taste of what is yet to come. Not just that. A unique logo can help you bring your whole brand personality to life.
  • Website: Most users first search for you online before they visit your restaurant. To make sure that they find you, you must create a website for your restaurant. You can either hire a website developer to create your own website or you can also do it all by yourself. There are various website building platforms available online that can help you create a website in just a few clicks. Appy Pie Website is the most recommended one. The software comes with various effective features to help you make your website engaging. You must include your story, restaurant menu, interior photos, reservation options, your restaurant location, etc. in your website to make it more useful for the users.
  • Social Media Accounts: Your social media accounts provide your users with a platform where they can interact with your brand. This is where you can make the best use of your brand’s voice. You can make a team that keeps your users engaged and asks for their feedback one-by-one. Or you can just use your social media accounts to market your restaurant and show your target audience what you are offering. You can go through this post to learn how you can make the best use of social media for engaging your users - How To Leverage Social Media For Customer Engagement: 8 Incredible Tips?

Conclusion

We hope the post helps you in creating excellent branding for your restaurant. Follow the tips and take your business to all-new levels of success. You can also go through this post to learn more about branding - What is Branding & How to Create a Strong Brand Strategy?In the article, we have already mentioned that you must create a website for your restaurant. You can also create an app to keep your users connected to your brand. A mobile app provides your users with everything that you offer right at their fingertips. This helps you build better relationships with your users and stay connected with them almost forever.

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Abhinav Girdhar

Founder and CEO of Appy Pie