Halloween Tricks and Treats

Happy Halloween!

In honor of Halloween, I thought I would follow up last week’s post on great restaurant branding with some of the scariest restaurant branding ideas I’ve recently come across.

1. The worst restaurant name.

Humuhumunukunukuapua’s, located at the Grand Wailea Resort in Maui, Hawaii.

This terribly long and totally unpronounceable name is the worst I’ve ever seen. The restaurant has a nice view, good food and benefites from being in a popular hotel, but what a missed branding opportunity. Never underestimate the power of a good name.

My husband and I referred to it as the huma-huma restaurant. I was too embarrassed to call for reservations or tell anyone where we ate because I had no idea how to pronounce it. Not a good idea for generating word of mouth.

The name means Hawaiian Triggerfish. Triggerfish would have been a whole lot better.

2. The worst line-extension restaurant.

It is a mistake is thinking that a popular brand in one category will translate into another.

Tommy Bahama, the hot men’s resort ware brand has gone bananas. I saw a Tommy Bahama restaurant in Maui. And see advertisements from Tommy Bahama Rum almost daily in the New York Times.

What are they thinking? Obviously they must be drinking too much of the rum. Just because a brand is successful doesn’t give you carte blanc to take it anywhere.

It is one thing for a famous restaurant to sell t-shirts, it is quite another for a famous shirt maker to sell cheeseburgers.

3. The worst menu addition.

When you build a powerful brand by focusing on a core attribute it is best to stick to that attribute. It is unwise to introduce menu items that are the opposite of your position.

Subway owns fresh and healthy sandwiches in the mind. Jared’s weight loss and the new fresh fit menu reinforce that position in the mind.

So what do they do next? They recently introduced personal deep-dish pizzas! How unhealthy could you get? No much in my opinion. Let’s hope Jared doesn’t go on a pizza diet.

4. The worst company naming strategy.

Luckily this one is just a ghost story. Using current marketing thinking at most companies today, you can see how Darden, founder of The Red Lobster chain, could have named their other restaurants:

Italian Lobster, Steak & Lobster, Bahama Lobster, Lobster Grill and Healthy Lobster.

Instead Darden went with Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse, Bahama Breeze, Capital Grille and Seasons 52 to give each its own brand identity. Good move.

Think the fake names were funny? Well think again, it is a strategy countless companies continue to use. Because most companies prefer to launch line extensions than new brands.

It is exactly what Toys R Us did. They launched Kids R Us and Babies R Us. A strategy that has left the company in trouble. Even though the Babies R Us concept has taken off, it has succeeded in spite of its lousy line extension name because it was first in a new category. And its success has come at the price of Kids R Us being shut down and Toys R Us losing its toy leadership position to Wal-Mart.

5. The worst steal.

Everybody has watched with envy the success Starbucks has had in coffee. Starbucks has single handedly elevated the lowly .50 cup of joe to a $3 experience and obsession.

Instead of launching their own brands early on before Starbucks was firmly established, they waited and now everybody is jumping on the upscale coffee bandwagon.

McDonald’s is serving “premium” coffee along with lattes and espressos. Wendy’s is launching a Javaccino’s menu in an effort to become a beverage destination. On the Javaccino’s menu: Rainforest select sustainable coffee, iced pomegranate green tea and confused turtle Frosty-chinos.

6. The worst Halloween candy idea.

Snickers Marathon energy bars. Sounds like a great idea, take the best-selling candy bar and make it into an energy bar. Because really, what is an energy bar anyway, but lousy tasting candy bar.

The Snickers brand is known for great taste so they will rule the energy bar market. Right?

Wrong. These treats are unlikely to trick any kids or adults. There is nothing wrong with the bars, but there is everything wrong with the brand. Or should I say brands. Snickers Marathon bars come in many different varieties including: energy, nutrition, multi-grain, low-carb and protein. Just to totally confuse you.

Snickers is a candy bar, they would have been better off telling people to just enjoy a Snickers. One bar only has 273 calories and almost 5 grams of protein, not much difference from the Marathon bar. Selling energy bars undermines the candy. It tells people the candy is bad, when in fact they are not much different.

* Snickers: 273 calories, 14 g fat, 33 g carb, 5 g protein.
* Snickers Marathon: 210 calories, 8 g fat, 26 g carb, 14 g protein.

Snickers satisfies because it tastes great. Snickers Marathon is a poor tasting substitute. Remember you taste in your mind not your mouth. A Snickers energy bar is never going to taste good up there. Want energy? Grab a PowerBar.

Halloween warning:

On Halloween, kids play dress-up, act silly and scare people by catching them off-guard.

None of these are strategies you should use for marketing. Dressing up as something you aren’t, acting silly and scaring people are all bad branding ideas.

So Marketers, leave Halloween to the kids and keep your brand true, authentic and focused. No tricks allowed.

Comments

[Sunil S Chiplunkar]

In India we have a brand Kingfisher - one of the world's largest selling beer; and now the owner of the brand Mr. Vijay Mallya has successfully launched an airline - a classy and leading one in India - called Kingfisher airlines. He is successful at both the branding efforts. So what say you?

[Cam Beck]

Not sure I agree with #1, although ordinarily I would.

The name is a staple amongst people who live in Hawaii. Even if the clientèle are tourists, the name of the state fish gives the restaurant a distinct and authentic Hawaiian flavor. It falls in line rather well with everything else a tourist will have to mispronounce during a typical visit.

There are lots of street names and restaurant names, for instance, that fall back on the Hawaiian vernacular, which are immediately unpronounceable by "the haoles" (a racist but generally well-known and oft used term in the islands). I used to work on King Kamehameha Highway in Kaneohe, and frequently called on vendors outside of the state who always seemed to be flabbergasted when I had to give them our street address. :)

However, although I've been wrong before, I have little doubt that a restaurant by that name would find little success outside of Hawaii. The necessary frame of reference would be missing.

[Branding Blog]

As a branding agency I like to go out and scour the net for really great articles. It’s tough to find one that’s right on point and yours is. Thanks for the read and keep up the good work.

Scott White
The BIG Kahuna

[Scott Miller]

Another great post.

Looking forward to a follow-up post on the iPhone, too, seeing that it seems to be gathering steam after it's relatively slow start. Plus, Google and others will soon join the fun with similarly highly integrated phones (which are really just sophisticated, highly-intuitive improvements over the Blackberry and other integrated communication devices).

[deedeecus]

humuhumunukunukuapua's is not so randomly and stupidly chosen as you think. humuhumunukunukuapua is the guy in the FANTA ads aired all over Europe. so if you would many people around here about humuhumunukunukuapua they would know who you're talking about and would probably want to go and visit his restaurant. Maybe that commercial was not aired in the US... i'll try to find a link if you want to see it.

This is just like that catalog in the US , "The J. Peternam Catalog", which was named and made exactly after the catalog in "Seinfeld", for which the character Elaine worked.

I'm not saying it's a good brand strategy, but it might get you a little buzz and maybe that buzz is just what a new brand needs to get the chance to convince the customers to "come again"... standing by the principle "can't like it if you haven't tried it".

[Dileep]

Again one of my favourite blogs :) but in this halloween.. i would like to say:- ghosts say althrough our life- as depression, hunger, pollution, exhaustion, and war and worst- lack of freedom and separatism !..

So while enjoying halloween- let love, happiness and companionship to see a better world stay in our minds. we can also make some of our fellow beings happy and let them smile for a while :)

[Gabriela Govea]

At this moment I am reading your book, "the origin of the brands", an it's kinda good. I meant, I'm 19 years old, I started with the marketing carrer in Mexico, but I left to come here (OR) and study in the SOU or OSU. This is my first marketing book in english, and I thing it is great, honestly. In the past two months I've been creating anidea (in my mind) about a new clothes biz... and after read some pages of your book I'm not so sure about it, so I've been started to develope another idea a little smaller tha the other one... divergence... right?

But I still love the hybrid sony ericsson w960i.

Thanks!

pd. I put my URL just if have a chance to write something to me, if have the chance to let me know that you read this. (www.expontanea.blogspot.com). It's kinda old, but I really like the name.

[Laura Ries]

My 5 year old son was a Ninja and my 2 year old son was a lion. Me? I dressed up like a stay at home Mom and took them trick-or-treating. My husband works in San Fran. :)

[Greg Gillispie]

So what did your kids dress up as for their Halloween candy grabbing excursion?

Better yet, what did you and your husband dress up as to accompany the kids and hand out candy at your house?

Answer required - booo!

[Laura Ries]

Love the "Lettuce Entertain You" restaurants. I went to Northwestern University, so I lived in Chicago for four years and ate at them all the time. My now-huband wined and dined me there.

[Martin Calle]

Great piece on restaurant marketing. I was good friends with Blaine Sweate of Pillsbury's Restaurant Group when he spun it into Darden. I last visited with Blaine on a trip to Santa Monica. He was talking about spinning the old Pritikin Institute (The Pritikin Diet) into a restaurant concept.

I introduced him to America's premier and still standing restaurant entrepreneur of the day, Chicago's Rich Mellman. Rich and his Lettuce Entertain You restaurant group started with a 60's hippie hamburger place called R.J. Grunt's in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Then he opened Lawrence of Oregano down the street on Diversey west of Clark on the north side of the street before opening Shaw's Crab House, Maggiano's Little Italy and scores of now regionally and nationally located eateries spanning every conceivable theme. His formula for success and popularity is great food, served hot and lots of it at reasonable prices (even at Chicago's Pump Room). His restaurants always have great seamless decor and themes. Next time you are in his neighborhood check him out. I think he's personally responsible for putting my favorite Chicago restaurant (a great restaurant town) Crickets (Chicago's 21 Club) out of business. I had to move over to Gene & Georgetti's. I don't hate that either!

Halloween thoughts courtesy of Emily Dickenson: "One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing material place."

[Damir, Serbia]

8)

Great text!