This is an awesome way of driving home a point of differentiation. Moe’s doesn’t use microwaves because microwaves ruin everything. They figured they’d just show it instead of say it. This is a great way for a restaurant to send home a marketing angle.

Thanks to @ZacCoffman for the tip.

How to you let people with handicaps know you’ve thought of them and have made it easy to serve them? Why not market your food with Braille for the blind?

When designing any brand touch point, be it an advertisement, a menu, whatever, there’s a knee-jerk tendency to want to fill it all up with content. Designers usually bulk at this for good reason. Instead of ranting about the use of white space and readability, I want to take a step back and discuss the negative effects of “And.”

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Today saw a huge uproar in the designer community. Moleskine, a company long known for classic note/sketchbooks, launched a “competition” for designers to design a new logo for their blog. Many of you may think, “so what?” The problem is that the design profession has been plagued by companies devaluing design and demanding “spec work.” Roughly defined, “spec work” is when a designer is asked to design without promise of compensation. Imagine if you were allowed to take home 50 cars, then only pay for one, but keep the rest. It’s exactly like that. Again, “so what?”

Moleskine successfully pissed off it’s primary audience (designers) by blatantly devaluing their profession. People are currently posting links to purchase competing journals. They’re pissed. They’re denouncing the product and brand. Judging by the 180+ comments on their facebook page as well as the buzz generated all over the internet, the damage is a PR nightmare. There’s a lesson to be learned here: Do not bite the hand that feeds.

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Kolachy Co restaurant branding by REThink is an exploration into iconography. The logo is simple, strong and memorable. The color palette, inviting. But the logo is extending through icons that support the items on the menu in such a creative way adding a unique design element that sends this brand out of the park. They describe the client as such:

Kolachy Co. is a Vancouver-based grab-and-go food shop. They produce healthy, handmade food at all three of their locations. The restaurants serve delicious handmade breakfasts, lunches, soups and snacks.

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High contrast. Limited color palate. Very effective and bold. This restaurant brand identity was designed by Michael Croxton.

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A lot of restaurants are concerned about whether or not daily deals like Groupon, Living Social and various others actually encourage repeat business, or if they’re just a great way to throw away food. EMarketer just posted some statistics on the subject that break down the results you can expect. Click here for the full article on emarketer.com

We’ve had a number of our clients on our system, BRIO for quite some time. Now, I’ve finally made it formal with the launch of the “face” of BRIO. I’ve tailored the system to focus on restaurants, cafés, bars, and the like as I think that market is completely underserved when it comes to email marketing in general. The fact is, there are many nuances to marketing via email that most places just don’t explain to restaurant owners and chefs. BRIO is different. It’s turnkey. Read more at www.blastwithbrio.com

This nods back to when gin was made and tubs and Jazz was at its prime. Men were men and women were women. A simpler time when if you got caught sneaking a drink, you’d be arrested. What an amazing study in classic, retro design. The Landing’s marketing and advertising were designed by Jamie Stolarski. In his words:

Playing loud Dixieland since 1963, The Landing is one of the oldest jazz clubs in the US and a San Antonio institution. I used to go to the Riverwalk to hear Jim Cullum and his band with my grandfather when I was still in short pants. I had the good fortune to get to update the brand when the club changed owners recently.

When you start talking to a social media guru it’s easy to get lost in the jargon. The epicenter of any social media marketing effort lies with Facebook. It’s proliferation is immense and not up for argument (although some try.) Just posting your facebook page for your restaurant is the right move, but, like anything else, you can always do better and more to interact with your customers. And that’s exactly why you should be using social marketing: to interact with your customers.

Beyond commenting and posting, facebook has other ways to kick up the marketing a notch or two. One of my favorite is based on FBML which stands for FaceBook Markup Language. It allows you to create custom tabs on your facebook page for promoting different items. These tabs can be used as landing pages to do many things. First you have to install it. Here is a great tutorial on installing and using FBML.

Once installed, you need to figure out what to promote. Here are a few suggestions on promoting your restaurant and its features using FBML and other facebook apps.

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