You have a beautifully designed restaurant, pleasant staff and delicious food, but what if with all the effort and good organization it is not enough that your restaurant is operating with full possible capacity?
Every restaurant owner is aware that building a brand is the one of the important elements of a successful business.
The brand ‘s name, logo, design, message or anything else that will emphasize your products and services from others. Your restaurant must be recognizable.
Each day competition is increasing, there is no place for mediocrity and your guests have much higher requirements. Today it is not enough to have a distinctive design and to bombard clients with various promotional materials. Every day marketing is more focused on each customer and becomes more personalized. Your restaurant must be personalized too if you want to get closer to your guests.
How to maximize the value of your restaurant in the best possible way? Of course, by branding your chef!
Why You Should Invest In Chef Branding?
Some of the reasons why you should decide to brand your chef :
- Because famous chef increases the value of restaurant .
- Because you put in professional services and creates experts in the restaurant business.
- Because you have ” live ” advertising, if you promote people and their skills and put them in front of the restaurant offer you will blow up the interest of fans.
- Because food in your restaurant has been prepared by people to people. Identification of the person who prepare food ( your chef ) personalizing the offer and bring it closer to your guests.
- Because in this way you will attract the media to write about your restaurant.
- Because you are openning a new channel for communication with your guests .
One thing is sure, people will come back to your restaurant if you offer great food and service is good. Beyond the good food there is always a good chef and his team. Your chef is a live person who makes small pieces of art for your clients. Discover who is that person to your guests.
Take the opportunity to make restaurant branding by branding your chef. With a little planning and by following these tips this goal can fit into your business strategy. How to brand a chef and add the value to your restaurant?
Your Chef Can Become Famous Too
When I decided to write about restaurant branding and how to brand a chef I start with doing research about the best once in class about how they became popular. While reading the biographies of the most famous chefs, I came to some surprising data. Believe it or not, they have not attended some famous culinary schools and have not came from some famous restaurant or culinary family. For example, Jamie Oliver, who is according to research conducted by the Zimbio.com team keeping the first place at the list of the world’s most popular chefs for a while. His culinary career began cooking in a family pub and after he had been noticed by the BBC in a documentary movie he becomes favorite chef at culinary tv show. Now he is the author of several books, becomes proponent for healthy food for children ( Food Revolution), and owner of several restaurants. There is no man or woman on planet Earth who does not recognize this guy.
What I want to say. To become a famous it is undisputed that your chef needs culinary skills, but it is not the only thing that is required. The restaurant chef is a complete person with personality, a human with strengths and weaknesses. Here is the list of most famous chefs regarding information found at zimbio.com.
Focus on Your Kitchen Staff
Okay , your objective is to improve the performance of the restaurant through the branding of your chef. But what if you do not have a candidate for this job? Or maybe you have a potential candidate but you need to” work on him /her ” ? Focus on your staff, select interesting candidates and analyze each one of them individually.
Follow the way they work, the way they look, their movements, speed, how they use imagination and creativity , their approach to work – cooking. Don’t forget that your chef you’re going to choose for restaurant branding needs to be open and communicative person.
After a while, I’m sure you will discover your future celebrity, your restaurant star.That does not have to be the best chef / cook in your restaurant, but this person has to be someone who has charisma and energy, someone who primarily loves his job and has been fully devoted to it.
If you have in your restaurant chef with these characteristics, then he or she certainly deserves a chance for improvement and you should use him /her for restaurant branding.
Secure Your Investment
Once you have chosen the chef for branding who has enthusiastically agreed with the idea of becoming your restaurant icon you will need to invest some money to improve his culinary skills.
It would be the best to attend classes or culinary school with some already well-known chefs. They will be able to learn how to cook from them but also how to behave as a popular chef, regarding the fact that he or she will become one of the most important instruments for your restaurant promotion.
It is certain that these courses require a lot of money and many days off for your chef, and all together costs a lot, so be sure that this chef will stay in your restaurant for a certain period, or other words, make a new contract with your chef.
Use Your Chef’s Personality
People need more then great skills of individuals to be attracted by someone. That person must have strong personality that provide full experience. Your chef must have its own distinctive style. Whether this will be his charm, sexy body, smile, sense for humor, passion, interesting hobbies, fashion style or something else, that does not really matter. It is important to recognize and highlight the existing attributes. Use these qualities to create a recognizable and unique personal profile of your chef.
Enrich your chef biography with completed schools and courses, experience in other jobs and goals for the future.
Discover his story, his personal life, favorite music, sports, his favorite food or places to go for holidays. Offer the whole personal package.
Do not forget that people were often attracted with some our characteristics that we actually do not like by ourselves, like a big belly, bald head, big nose or unusual gestures. You do not have to be perfect and beautiful to be interesting, in a fact, today , perfection has somehow become easily accessible, expected and almost boring.
Open The Door of Your Restaurant Kitchen
What is going on in your kitchen ? Your guests will have the opportunity to meet your chefs in the best way if they see how he cooks. Bring him directly among restaurant guests . This can be done in two ways .
By preparing specialties of the house directly in the restaurant so that your guests have the opportunity to see your star or recording short movies how your chef prepares a popular dish from your restaurant . Upload your promotional videos on youtube and wide audience will have the opportunity to meet your chef but also your restaurant offer. Use holidays for this activities. and enjoy the results of video marketing.
Take Advantages of Restaurant Fairs, Food Festivals and Local Media
Any form of public speaking, interviews, presentations, communication with experts from culinary, hospitality and food industry will be very useful. For restaurant branding it is necessary to make a lot of contacts,spreads friendships or even be eccentric if you want to attract media attention.
Take advantage of the fairs and festivals for presentation of cooking. Your stand host should be definitely your chef who will be able to demonstrate his skills and himself to visitors.
Chef’s Story on Your Restaurant Menu
Every restaurant should have its own story. This story can be also life or interesting events from the life of your chef. People like to know something about other people’s lives so this will be an interesting text to read for guests while they are browsing your restaurant menu and making orders. Do not forget to include a picture of chef in the restaurant menu. In this way, the relationship with your guests becomes intimate .
Do not be surprised if your guests ware asking to meet the chef personally. Meeting and exchanging thoughts with restaurant chef creates confidence, your chef directly receives suggestions from users of his services and the number of loyal guests increase.
Cookbook or Column?
Almost all well-known chefs have published some book. Does your chef have talent for writing? He can become the author of cookbook or not ?
Publishing a book with recipes and culinary tips will help to increase presence in the media and give a kind of emphasis on the quality and expertise of your chef. That would certainly affect on your restaurant traffic.
If writing and publishing the book is too much for your chef, writing a columns about cooking in a local newspaper or on some popular Internet portal is also a very interesting way of personal branding.
Participation in Culinary TV Show
Last few years tv shows about cooking become very popular. Conceps of these reality shows is based on ordinary people and chefs from small restaurants who have participated in show to show to people what they know and what they can do when it comes to art of coking. TV show could be a branding tool and create a lot of opportunities for the chefs involved with it. These television shows have very high ratings and that is also excellent way to become famous and create image of your restaurant chef in the culinary world. This is also great opportunity to learn from the best as famous cooks are often in jury.
Popularity of your restaurant, where the guy from tv show who become celebrity prepares food will grow for sure. Many of your guests will visit your restaurant just because their curiosity. But hey, provide good food and great service and they will come again!
Restaurant and Chef Branding on Internet
Building a unique identity on the Internet is unavoidable, effective and accessible to everyone. I will mention a few advantages of online branding of your chef.
Restaurant website. Your website is place where people will find all the information related to your restaurant such as restaurant offer, the look of the restaurant, online booking and ordering but also a place where you can share interesting content and facts about your restaurant staff .
Give a special place to your chef, you should write more then chef’s biography. Include interesting content like photos and recipes for certain dishes. Go one step ahead and let your chef write a blog. If he is not crazy about writing and you have in your budget money for online marketing, you can pay to someone to write it.
Personal Web Page. You can invest in creating a personal website for your chef. This will certainly affect on public interest and creation of professional chef image.
Create a profile on social media networks. Activity on social media networks like Facebook or Twitter is ” must have” for any business. From my own experience I can say that activity of profile of the person who represents business instead of profile of restaurant increases the interaction with the fans almost by 500 %. It seems that people prefer to interact with real persons, and would rather comment and share their content than just deal with the logo of restaurant even they know that person stands behind it.
Tips : Do not forget to use a personal photos and full name of your chef for social media profiles.
Personalization of business reinforces the connection with potential and existing guests, bring you closer to users of your service, discover their needs and suggestions, gives you opportunity to get know them and give them the opportunity to get know your chef.
If your chef provide interesting content on social media networks that will build relationships with your customers, increase the number of your website visitors, make him well known and make a lot for your restaurant advertising and branding.
Are you ready for this business adventure ? You will agree with me that it is a real challenge.
Conclusion : Building a personal brand and brand for your restaurant with mentioned activities will surely enhance the restaurant business. By creating a detailed strategic plan for achieving these goals you will minimize costs for branding and insure the best success.
Do you have any experience with restaurant branding by creating brand for your chef ? I would be very happy if you share with us your best tips in the comments below.
