How to: Brand Identity Checklist for Restaurants

What is brand identity? It is basically a way to identify your business. It includes the impression your business leaves on your customers, your business icon and logo, the ambience and décor of your restaurant or bar, the fonts and colours you use on all your business touch points, and so on.

Your brand identity will give your brand a certain style and personality, and make sure that your brand is consistent when communicating with your customers.

Why branding is important in the hospitality industry

In my opinion, having good food and drinks is the prerequisite of an F&B business. If you don't have that, your business will not last in this cutthroat industry.

The real competition amongst restaurants, bars, and cafés is something so much more - experience. Through a good brand identity, you can communicate what type of experience your customers can expect while your services fulfil those expectations.

For example, if I were to visit Wolfgang Puck's steakhouse, CUT, I would expect top notch service, beautifully plated food, and an elevated overall experience. But how did I know to have these expectations when I have never been to CUT and neither do I personally know anyone who has?

I have formed a set of expectations through their brand touch points. Let's break it down, shall we?

The CUT logo is a wordmark with a light sans serif font, using only black and white colours. The restaurant's website similarly uses the same colours, and makes use of whitespace for a more minimalistic style. Colours mainly come from images of their food and beverages, which highlight their beautiful plating and high quality ingredients.

(If you want, you can see my version of CUT by Wolfgang Puck's website home page here.)

The voice of their text content is consistent - welcoming yet boastful about their ingredients. So far, the brand identity exudes sophistication, quality, and elegance. The restaurant's interior, menus, and even cutlery are consistent with the brand as well. So, if I am looking for a great fine dining experience, CUT will be one of my to-go establishments.

Your brand identity can land you on somebody's to-go list as well, if done right and executed consistently.

How to design a brand identity for my restaurant?

If you do a quick search on Google, you can find many different types of processes, guidelines, and strategies to design a brand identity. Engaging a brand specialist or marketing agency are viable options as well. But one crucial element that will make or break the brand identity design is the participation of the founder.

No one knows the brand better than the founder. A designer can only map out and visualise the brand identity for them.

In the next section of this article, I will be sharing with you my methodology when designing brand identities for my clients. For the purpose of this article, I will be using the case study of an actual client - The Jungle Boy, to better illustrate the process for you.

Discovery Session

I will have face-to-face meetings with the founder(s) at their restaurants and use a series of questions to guide myself towards the meaning behind the brand. Please note that the answers are my summaries and reinterpretation of the founder's dialogue.

Q: What is the brand, The Jungle Boy?

A: The Jungle Boy is a restaurant concept that serves fresh meat and produce that is cooked in a natural and fuss-free manner - over an open flame.

Q: What is the brand about?

A: There's just something beautiful about simple cooking. If you've ever been on a road trip or gone camping in the forest, you will never forget the smell of the wood burning and the sounds from the environment around you. In the morning, you sip coffee and admire the majestic forest while sunlight seeps in. At night, you munch on the juiciest bratwurst that were grilled over the naked wood fire while laughing at your friend's jokes. The simplicity, nature, and good vibes are what we're about.

Q: What is the purpose of the brand?

A: The Jungle Boy is focused on bringing people together to have a good time, much like a campfire or bonfire. We believe that the city is in need of an avenue that cuts through the fast-paced life and stress.

Q: What makes the brand different from competitors?

A: In the midst of the hustle and bustle, you get washed away by the noise very easily. Some establishments out there may feed into that and offer you fast, processed, or even pre-made food. Others might attempt to impress you by complicating the cooking process. But at The Jungle Boy, we let fresh ingredients dictate the heat that is needed from the fire. We aim to bring nature to you.

From the conversation, I first identify the characteristics of the brand identity. This is similar to finding out what a person is like without interacting with them but only hearing about them from their mother. And who would know them better than their mother, right?

So, how I do this is by answering the following questions using one or two keywords. This ensures that I use the most suitable words only. If I am unable to answer all of them adequately, I will have to clarify with the founder before I proceed.

Q: What is the culture like working there?

A: United and friendly (from my observation at the restaurant)

Q: What is their dream customer like?

A: Good vibes

Q: What kind of voice do they use to communicate?

A: Welcoming

Q: What is the benefit of patronising them?

A: Fresh and uncomplicated cooking

Q: What value would customers enjoy if they patronised them?

A: Have a good time

Q: What is/are their X-factor(s)?

A: Communal, nature, wood fire cooking

Based on the answers, I then come up with a phrase that described and encapsulated the character of the brand. The phrase I came up with was “welcoming wilderness tribe”. This phrase will be my mantra for the rest of the brand identity design.

Here's how I came up with “welcoming wilderness tribe”:

• “Good vibes” and “good times” gave me a very welcoming feeling, hence the word “welcoming”
• “Fresh”, “uncomplicated”, “nature”, and “wood fire” reminded me of the wild, hence the word “wilderness”
• “United” and “communal” together with the first word “welcoming” made me think of “family”, but it wasn't quite right with the second word “wilderness”. After some research, I settled with a better term, “tribe”.

Visual Direction Confirmation

Next, I would source for visuals that resonates with “welcoming wilderness tribe”. At this point, I do not limit myself to how many visuals but the more the better. These visuals will help you create points of references, but most importantly, it will be used for the founder to confirm that I am on the right direction before any design work commences.

For The Jungle Boy, I wound up with over 100 imagery which consisted of murals, interiors, liquor bottle labels, graphical illustrations, etc. The sky is the limit here. I then filtered them and categorised them by theme, feeling, and style before presenting them to the founder.

Rather than asking questions like “Which do you like best?” I ask questions that require an explanatory answer, such as “What do you like about this one?” or “You seem conflicted. Why is that?”. This allows me to spark a conversation and better understand the visual direction.

After the conversation and some refinement, we went ahead with a balance of the second and third direction.

Style guide design

The next and last part of the brand identity design process is creating the style guide. A style guide is a set of guidelines that the brand should abide by in order for the brand to communicate consistently. But why is consistency so important?

Familiarity grows brand equity - Sagi Haviv

The style guide will dictate the brand’s mission, logo, typography, colour palette, restaurant interior, etc. It will also specify what is allowed or not allowed, what sizes to use, and even when to use certain elements and not others.

Tip: If you're having a tough time with designing the logo, consider engaging a logo designer or a graphic designer. A logo created by a designer vs a non-designer is more obvious than you'd think!

Simply head on over to Google and search for some free style guide templates to start with. Of course, working with a brand identity designer will provide you with a more comprehensive and specific set of guidelines, since they do brand design for a living and are experts in their field.

But at the end of the day, every designer will produce a style guide that varies. Some are more restrictive while others may lack sufficient guidelines. I believe that a good brand identity designer will provide a good set of guidelines but simultaneously allow the client enough flexibility to experiment and stay excited about their brand.

Visual Design

Once you have a style guide, you can then move on to designing specific components of your business, such as the restaurant interior, paper bags, food containers, cutlery, coasters, websites, and signages.

At this stage, you can engage separate designers who specialise in certain fields of design. For example, engage an interior designer for the restaurant's interior; a UI/UX designer for the website or mobile app; a packaging designer for paper bags and containers. Though, a specialist will charge a lot more than a general practitioner as they are experts in their domain. If you are not financially ready to invest that much into your restaurant, you could evaluate your priorities and decide on which design component you'd like to invest in first by engaging a specialist, and then engage a generalist for the areas with lower priorities.

Alternatively, you can engage an industry-specialised designer instead of a skill-specialised designer. What this means is to engage a general designer specialised in the F&B industry rather than a designer specialised in brand identity design for all industries. It's a great way to find a long-term design partner who knows the F&B industry, design wise, better than you do!

How to evaluate my brand identity

What I've learned is that there is no magical formula to design a brand identity. Everyone may do it differently but still produce great brand identity designs. At the end of the day, the success of the brand identity boils down to 3 things:

1. Creativity (is it unique and special to your brand?)
2. Clarity (does it represent your brand clearly and accurately?)
3. Memorability (is it easy to remember and recognise?)

Unfortunately, these things take time to be measured effectively. Many restaurant owners realise this much later on and the time that would have grown the brand equity has instead passed in vain.

Tip: Once you have registered your business, think about your brand identity and get a designer to formalise it for you. Do not create a logo and print them on napkins, menus, and paper bags. Most importantly, do not get your restaurant's signage done yet as they are pretty expensive!

Conclusion

Brand identity is probably the most important thing to have designed. It paves the way for every other visual aspect that will be seen and experienced by the rest of the world.

So, before you design anything, you have to understand the importance of your brand identity and get that done first. Otherwise, your logo, restaurant interior, your website, etc. will evoke different feelings in your customers and they may not have a good impression, or ANY impression of your business, which will result in lost business.

P.S. please remember that a $500 logo is NOT branding.

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