Taste & See.
We are passionate about restaurant branding, beverage branding, packaging design …and more
A Pervasive Sameness
Restaurant & Catering Australia says they’re 33,000 food and catering businesses in Australia. Growing at less than three percent annually, competition for clientele is ruthless, each trying to differentiate itself from the other guy.
Despite the ferocity of restaurateurs chasing after the same clientele, have you noticed the sameness in the visual presentation of restaurant brands?The logos look the same. The interior spaces look the same. The exteriors look the same.
True, restaurants change by the cuisine served. But beyond the cuisine, there remains a pervasive sameness in the restaurant business. This raises a provocative question. How adept are restaurant brands at breaking out from clutter to differentiate one from another? We dare say, not many. What to do?
A Relative Proposition
Differentiating in the restaurant business tends to be a relative proposition that’s focused on besting the competition! The downside to playing the besting game is that it’s short-lived. The vagaries of time and the competitiveness in the restaurant business will certainly catch up with you. Another competitor will eventually appear to claim the title as its own. Then, you’re in a no-win contest jostling over who’s the best.
We do not play the besting game at Daniel Sim Design. It’s a losing proposition. We create restaurant logos and designs that communicate your restaurant’s singular uniqueness – the only restaurant that does what you do. When you’re the only, you can dominate a market niche as the sole-source provider. Because this is an indubitable truism, we do not create designs according to current trends. Your longevity within the competitive milieu demands that we define trends to keep you several steps ahead of your competitors.
The Branding Imperative
Your restaurant brand persona is the emotional attachment people have with your restaurant. It is the collection of associations –ideas, experiences, and feelings– in the minds of your guests and prospective guests. Your restaurant brand equity comes from your brand persona’s ability to predispose people to choose your restaurant over others and to pay more for the dining experience you deliver. Your brand equity is a commercial asset that has real monetary value. Its value comes from the preference patrons have for your establishment and from their willingness to pay more for the dining experience you deliver, both now and in the future.
Dear Daniel, your professionalism and creativity has stood out for itself through the Onyx Logo, Website & Menu design. We have had a lot of good comments from people regarding the designs. What I liked the most was your enthusiasm to support us especially at short notice updates. Keep up this good work and we wish you all the best to win many awards for your hard work. Good luck.
Brand Strategists – The Core of What We Do
Our approach to restaurant design necessitates that we wear two hats. We’re students of social phenomena that study how the restaurant experience affects human behaviour. We’re likewise brand strategists who translate those human insights into creative executions for a consistent restaurant brand persona that’s communicated across all consumer touch-points.
Brand strategy is the core of what we do. That’s because there’s an intimate relationship between a brand’s persona and the strength of the consumer relationships it generates. From a plethora of independent research and from our own personal experience, we know that winning brand personas produce intensely loyal emotional bonds between patrons and their restaurants. In turn, strong emotional bonds generate enduring brand equities and higher profits for you.
We develop restaurant brand strategies that tap into human emotions with irresistible brand personas to produce the intensely loyal patrons you need to grow and prosper.
Emotionalising Your Brand
When people think about their favourite restaurants, the thinking is emotion-based, intuitive and rapid. Basically, people make restaurant decisions like most other discretionary buying decisions, they buy with the hearts and justify with their brains.
We know from accumulated research that successful restaurant brands share the following attributes:
- Preferred restaurant brands occupy premium space in people’s minds when making buying decisions.
- People have an intuitive liking for their restaurants, which requires no thinking.
- People see their restaurants as unique – one of a kind.
- People believe their restaurants more than satisfy their expectations.
- People see their restaurants as dynamic – trendsetters.
Arousing the Emotions
Though choosing a restaurant is mainly an emotion-based process – with the heart and justified with the brain, it’s the five senses that provide the sensory data, which drive emotions. Emotions wield the power to persuade. Successful restaurant brands persuade by arousing the emotions through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.
Our playground is visual stimuli. Daniel Sim Design creates visual stimuli that arouse the emotions as the first step in defining your brand persona and creating brand expectations of pleasurable dining experiences.
What We Do
Our restaurant branding services include:
• Branding and marketing consultation
• Branding and re-branding design
• Logo design
• Website design
• Graphic design services – stationary, business cards, gift certificates and other collateral
• Menu design
• Uniform design
• Signage and other environmental graphics
• Mobile app design
Logo Design
Your logo is usually the very first touchpoint people have when choosing a restaurant. Daniel Sim Design creates compelling restaurant logos that visually communicate your one-of-a-kind uniqueness. We design logos to arouse the emotions with outrageously pleasing visual stimuli.
In fact, our logos are visual foreplay. We push the envelope, exceeding the bounds of moderation in creating the anticipation of good things to come.
Website Design
Everything we know about restaurants tells us it’s all about the user experience. People expect great food, world-class service and a pleasant ambiance. If you fall short in those departments, shame on you. However, isn’t it amazing that restaurant websites are notorious habitual offenders when it comes to abusing the user experience?
We don’t play that stuff at Daniel Sim Design. Our entire focus is the user experience when it comes to designing restaurant websites.
You may notice that many restaurants are developed with flash software. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, most especially because flash trashes the user experience. Internet users loathe flash-based websites. They’re slow to load, terrible for search engine optimization, the material is distracting, the website layouts can be cramped and hard to read. Moreover flash-based content is not visible on mobile websites.
We design restaurant websites using WordPress exclusively. WordPress is SEO friendly and gives you full control over your content — your online menus, pages, blog, contact form, online reservations, events calendar, and anything else relevant to the user experience. Furthermore, WordPress is readily optimised for mobile devices.
As a substitute for quality content, far too many restaurants stuff their websites with pictures. Pictures, yes. A surfeit of pictures, no. Too many pictures hinder your ability to communicate a winning brand persona and adds more abuse to the user experience on flash-based websites.
You need quality, persuasive content on your website. Great content sets the tone of voice, creates expectations of pleasure and allows you to be passionate about the reasons why the dining experience at your restaurant is a one-of-a-kind experience, unlike any other restaurant in this quadrant of the galaxy. This is what your brand persona is all about.
We also encourage you to launch a blog. Not only do you need killer content, you need to continually refresh your killer content. This is precisely why blogs are invaluable in the restaurant business. If you don’t have the time or resources to do a blog, no problem. We’ll be delighted to do your blog for you.
Among the myriad issues you must address when building your restaurant website, do not overlook the mobile device imperative. A recent comScore report says 60 percent of all Internet traffic now comes from mobile devices, up from 50 percent a year ago. Rather than designing websites that are already obsolete from the get go, because they’re not compatible with mobile devices, we build mobile device compatibility into our restaurant websites from the very start.
Rebranding Your Restaurant
Clearly, it’s far better to get it right from the start. But, it’s never too late to get it right if the alternative is closing the doors. However, rebranding involves far more than changing your name and logo. Rebranding communicates your restaurant is embracing a new way of engaging your guests. Rebranding signals you’ve moved beyond good food and comfortable seating to embrace a new way of engaging guests with an experience that more perfectly aligns with their passions.
Because rebranding is a very big deal, it’s best to do it with deliberate care and consideration. Moreover, your current restaurant brand enjoys some recognition, which you likely want to keep even while you’re gutting what’s bad.
We fully understand the complexities involved in successfully rebranding restaurants. That’s why we employ the identical process and procedures we use to brand restaurant startups.
How We Do It
“What’s your passion?” This is the first question Daniel always asks of his new restaurant clients. Our creative juices start flowing once we know your passion for being in the restaurant business. Absent the crucial element of passion, branding your restaurant is no more than pretty visuals and words without meaning. That’s why our entire branding process is passion-focused.
Knowing you passion helps up define your brand persona, which we must have before we do the first sketch of your logo design. Ever meet a person who did not have a persona? Good, bad or otherwise, all brands have personas like all people have personas. Even the seeming absence of a persona is itself a persona.
Defining your brand persona as a manifestation of your passion lets up move to the second phase of the branding process. Your brand promise, often called your value proposition in today’s jargon-rich techno-babble environment, is just as crucial as your brand persona. Your brand promise communicates in all of your marketing materials the precise nature of the experience your guests can expect to enjoy when dining at your establishment.
The final step in the branding process is your brand positioning. Your brand positioning indelibly imprints in the minds of your patrons and prospective patrons the reason why your restaurant is the only restaurant in our quadrant of the galaxy that does what you do [or at least in Australia or planet Earth if you’re not current about off-planet restaurants].
If you’re starting a restaurant, expanding or rebranding a restaurant contact us for a free, no obligation consultation. Expect to personally meet with Daniel Sim himself in addition to his design team. Daniel wants to meet you as a prospective new client and personally learn about your restaurant branding goals and design requirements.
Our invitation extends not only to restaurant owners. Call us if you’re an interior designer or architect working in the restaurant/hospitality space, or a shopping center operator serving high-value tenants. You also require high-level aesthetics and brand presence for your clients and tenants. We have extensive experience satisfying your demanding requirements. Call us today.
Companies We Have Worked With
