Setting the tone

Food stylists say people ‘eat with their eyes’, so you’d better pay more attention to your visual merchandising.

For would-be customers, the look and feel of your restaurant is a heads-up for what’s on offer, even if there’s little connection between the quality of the food and the beauty of the room. First impressions don’t tell the whole story, but they do have a lasting impact.

Visual marketing is about making sure your restaurant looks the way the food tastes.

It’s important to look good, but it won’t do to just spruce up the place with mood lighting, fancy tableware and random artwork. Before committing to a distinctive visual statement, you need to know who you are. Bold and adventurous? Quiet and reliable? Quirky and cool? The worst thing to be is not sure. In a business sector under increasing pressure to stay nimble and responsive, that can be as big a problem as not having the right things on the menu.

According to a couple of well-seasoned visual marketers we spoke to, knowing who you are is a prerequisite for tying your food and setting together into something like a brand. In today’s restaurant world, the marketers say that failing to have one can be fatal. Danielle Visione, a director at the long-established Sydney-based firm, Design Portfolio, says restaurateurs need to understand what works from a visual standpoint and why. To this end, she has developed a tough-love approach to finding out what makes a restaurant tick. According to Visione, that information has to be etched in stone before any visual branding gets under way.

“Once they sign up, we ask them to fill in a 20-page questionnaire. It’s pretty in-depth. One of the main things we want to find out is what they think their ideal customer base looks like and how they’d like to be perceived. We narrow those thoughts down to the length of the average Tweet, and start building a concept from there. Essentially, we find out what’s different about them and concentrate on that.”

Visione and her team also get well acquainted with the actual space to make sure the restaurateur’s vision is a good fit for the room. If not, they negotiate. Generally, though, restaurateurs stick to the business strategy, Visione says, and leave the creative duties to the designers. If there’s an occasional hiccup, it’s quickly smoothed over. “One client said they wanted ’80s, and we went ’80s Wham! instead of ’80s Beat Street. There are always little tweaks to get things just right.”

Design Portfolio has been around since the early 1990s, long enough for Visione to witness a revolution in customer expectations. “Quite a bit of change has been happening and it’s quite interesting from a design perspective. The food world is more cutthroat than ever. You can’t get away with a shabby fit-out or old laminated menus anymore. With the growing media fixation on cooking and eating, customers are becoming more and more critical. You have to get everything right.”

One current trend, digital menus, may not be right for every-one, but they can offer practical benefits without chucking aesthetics out the window, Visione says. Among other things, they allow for coordinated time-of-day price changes via the internet, a major convenience and potential boost to the bottom line for franchises as small as two or three venues. It’s something Design Portfolio is asked to do more and more, and the results can be surprisingly artful.

“You can frame it out with timber or build a bulkhead around it so it doesn’t look tacked on,” says Visione.

Getting your head straight about who you are appears to be a universal theme among visual marketers. Adam Flynn, a client manager at Melbourne’s Visual Unity, says the firm steers clear of potential clients in the throes of an identity crisis. “Our clients generally have a very good offer to begin with. They come with a strong ethos and philosophy. We really just look to add some visual touch points that don’t override the space.”

Since individuality is the overarching goal, Visual Unity avoids sticking to a formula, but one common thread is a hand-built feel. The firm contracts out the physical demands of the job to craftspeople skilled in mediums ranging from wood, glass and metal to painting and etching. Whatever the project, the end result has to embrace the vision of the restaurateur and the room itself as well as have enough depth and subtlety to reward patrons who are paying attention.

“We don’t want it to end up looking like a giant sticker,” says Flynn. On the whole, the failure to communicate effectively with current and prospective customers may have reached epidemic proportions in the restaurant business, at least according to the analysis of these design gurus. Both have seen what Flynn delicately calls “missed opportunities”. His message to one client looking to carve out a niche on the health-conscious end of the spectrum was, “you’ve got the product, and it’s fun and healthy, but you’re not saying that anywhere.”

Like Visione, Flynn thinks the demand “to create more interesting environments” is on the rise but emphasises that the fit-out isn’t everything. “We’ve seen some beautiful places close because they didn’t tick all the boxes. The place may have looked great, but maybe the food wasn’t so good.”

Source: Restaurant & Catering Magazine, 26 June 2013