Jeff Bezo’s quote “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room” reminded me of an insightful conversation I had with a restaurant owner about the longevity and success of his business.
Being a long time customer, I mentioned to him that meals have been consistently great and that my favorites tasted the same as they did twenty years ago. I noted that tables were full and customers waited in line to get into the restaurant throughout both the bad and good economic times. His response: he stressed the importance of maintaining the service, quality and price that their customer expected. He provided me with a specific example,
“We were planning to offer a lamb dish special. To get the quality our customers expected, we would have needed to charge above our typical price point for the entrée. We could have offered the entrée within our price range, but the quality would have been below our customer’s standards. So we didn’t offer it at all.”
This told me a lot about how him and how he runs his business. He clearly knew his brand, his customers and was committed to established quality standards. My take-aways:
- Understand who you are – your brand and value offered – “why you exist”
- Live the brand promise: consistently deliver what you promised to customers
- Know who your customers are and what they want
- Establish customer experience standards and have all employees familiar with them
- Customers will remain customers when they value their relationship with you – by you consistently working to understand and address their needs