How images work to brand a quick-service restaurant

More than just a place to eat

Editor’s note: Charles Young is CEO of Ameritest, an Albuquerque, N.M., research firm.

The late sociologist Erving Goffman pioneered a place-based theory of human behavior. In a famous example he used a theater model of place - contrasting “backstage” places with “frontstage” places - to describe the rules of social behavior in a fine restaurant.

We can use Goffman’s simple theater model to describe the kinds of brand experiences a quick-service restaurant (QSR) might choose to focus on in communicating its brand image to the public. In particular, we can use this conceptual framework to understand how different types of experiences within the restaurant itself contribute to the overall image of the brand.

A fast-food restaurant, unlike a fine-dining establishment, should actually be described in terms of three places where the consumer can have a memorable experience: the dining room or eating area; the kitchen or food preparation area; and the boundary between the two, the counter, where the menu is presented, orders are placed and food is served (see Figure 1). Each of these three places defines a different kind of brand experience for your customer - and each requires a different type of image to promote the brand.

For a restaurant, the dining room is the place where the restaurateur must maximize the social appeal of the brand experience. As Goffman pointed out, the dining room is a frontstage place of the restaurant theater, governed by well-defined rules of social interaction. One primary goal of a restaurant operator who wants to build a strong brand, therefore, is to make the dining room an emotionally-inviting place where a group of fast-food consumers would want to spend time with family or friends.

At minimum, the atmosphere of the restaurant should avoid conveying the impression that this is only a place to go to when you are eating alone. Some years ago we conducted research for a national fast-food chain that was trying to understand a contradiction that kept showing up in other research it regularly did among its customers. When it did taste tests or when it asked customers to rate their food preferences, our client’s products were overwhelmingly preferred to the comparable products of its closest competitors. Moreover, its stores were rated as clean and attractive and just as conveniently located as its competitors. And its prices were considered competitive. And yet when you looked at tracking-survey data, the same customers who said they preferred our client’s food reported that they went to competitive stores more often for the same type of food. What was going on?

We did some simple observational research. We went into a number of our client’s stores and those of its closest competitors and counted customers. We found a consistent pattern over time that revealed a fundamental weakness in our client’s brand image.

Compared to the competition at almost any time of the day, a higher number of customers in our client’s restaurants were eating alone and a lower number were eating in social groupings. From a behavioral standpoint this is what was going on. When a regular customer was by himself and needed to eat, he followed his personal preferences and chose our client a high percentage of the time. But when that same customer was part of a group, and as groups tend to make a “negotiated decision” about where to eat, that customer would not lobby for our client. We uncovered the reason for that with qualitative research: the image of our client’s restaurant was that of a place where lonely men go to eat by themselves.

By doing simple math we calculated that if our client won only an average number of the negotiated decisions about where the social group should eat, sales would go up 38 percent! As a result, the social attractiveness of eating in these restaurants became the basis of a new brand communication strategy.

Sensory appeal

In contrast to the dining room, the kitchen can be thought of as the place where a restaurateur must maximize sensory appeal. To elevate perceptions of food quality in brand communications, the goal should be to excite all five senses. In fine-dining restaurants the kitchen is normally a backstage area, but in the case of fast-food restaurants, the work of the kitchen is, by design, highly visible to the customer. For a fast-food restaurant the goal is to convince the customer looking at the food preparation that this is indeed a real kitchen and not a food factory.

Food cues are visibly different in a real kitchen than a mass-production food prep area. The food the customer sees is “real” in terms of sights, smells and textures. Temperature cues are important for conveying fresh-from-the-oven. Branded ingredients might be on display to convey a sense of quality.

The boundary between these two places, the dining room and the kitchen, is the countertop in a fast-food restaurant. This is a third place that is important for the brand experience. This is where the service event takes place. While true waiters are missing from fast-food restaurants, the smile and the greeting by the counter staff take their place.

The counter is also important from an information processing and decision-making standpoint. This is the place where the menu presents the customer with verbal and visual descriptions of the variety of food choices that are available. This is where prices are displayed and in-store promotions are most highly visible. This is where the food orders are communicated and received. And this is where financial transactions take place. In other words, the counter is where the rational part of the brand experience occurs.

From a strategic standpoint, each of these three places in the restaurant contribute distinct experiential components - emotional, sensory, rational - to the total experience of the restaurant that a fast-food marketer might choose to focus on in building its brand.

Clarify the relationships

One way that cognitive scientists have of studying how the mind forms concepts, such as the concept of a particular brand, is to construct a semantic network of how different ideas are linked together - how close together or far apart they are. The value of semantic networks is that they clarify the relationships between the various selling ideas operating in a category and therefore can provide critical insights for marketers into how a brand is positioned in the marketplace. One way of thinking about semantic networks is that they describe the different “places” in the mind where the consumer stores the different ideas and images they associate with your brand.

The quick-service restaurant business in the U.S. is a fast-moving, highly-advertised category. Every month approximately 30 new commercials debut nationally from the top 20 QSR chains as each brand tries to defend its positioning and knock the others out of theirs. Our firm tests all of these new commercials as part of a syndicated tracker. Last year we interviewed about 26,000 fast-food consumers and one kind of data that we collect is a set of ratings of brand images for all the different QSR brands.

Using this data we construct a semantic network for the QSR category by examining the correlations across all the variables and brands in the category. The semantic net in Figure 2 shows us the brand messages that are important drivers of the overall ad performance index or API, which is a validated predictor of in-market sales performance.

The three most important ideas in the category are shown on the top tier of the semantic net, and these can be identified with the three brand places in a QSR restaurant that we discussed earlier. “Good value,” for example, can be identified with the menu of choices that we look at as we are standing at the counter deciding what to order. As we look back into the kitchen and take in the sights and sounds and smells we think about how these products “taste good” and which ones make us hungry. And as we carry our tray of food into the dining area we form an impression of what an “enjoyable place” this restaurant is to eat in.

As they are driving down the highway the consumer can sort through the various restaurants they come across based on their personal ratings of each restaurant on these primary dimensions of performance. Importantly, we can also use this same language to understand how the consumer sorts through the various brand images they are bombarded with every month.

Visual promises

Still photographs are one of the best inventions ever created to capture and store our memories of the exceptional experiences in our lives. From a research standpoint, we can also use still photographs to retrieve the visual promises of exceptional experiences that QSR brands make in their advertising.

As part of our tracking service we use Picture Sorts to identify which images in a television commercial are: 1) memorable, 2) highly charged with emotion, and 3) communicate an important brand value. Importantly, for this third picture sort, which we call the Flow of Meaning, we use the same 10 brand values from the semantic network we just discussed to tag the meanings of the visual imagery in QSR advertising.

In 2008 we tracked approximately 350 QSR commercials and for each of these commercials we rated an average of 25 still photographs taken from each ad. This gives us a visual dictionary of nearly 9,000 images for which we have consumer-based ratings of brand meanings. We can use this dictionary to describe in pictures what enjoyable place, good taste and good value mean to the consumer.

The average QSR commercial produces four branding moments. We know from the picture sorting that the respondents do that these are the most memorable, most emotionally-charged and most meaningful images in fast-food ads. We also know, from experiments we have done for other clients, that these are the images that get recorded in consumers’ long-term memories, as part of their “virtual experience” of the brand. Branding moments are the only ad moments that consumers will remember and associate with the brand months and even years after an ad has gone off the air.

The 350 commercials that the QSR category aired in 2008 produced approximately 1,400 branding moments for these advertisers. These vivid memories represent the essence, distilled through consumer perceptions, of what these brands were selling. If we look at how consumers themselves rated these moments in terms of the three categories of good taste, good value and enjoyable place to eat, we can see (Figure 3) examples of the consumer’s choices of best branding moments of 2008:

Good taste : McDonald’s takes the top spot with its Southern-style chicken biscuits and its highly tactile, hot-biscuit pull shot. In second place, the dripping fudge, moist brownie and lip-smacking topping of the Dairy Queen sundae looks like 3,000 calories of pure sin. And in third place, Pizza Hut’s payoff shot of a man biting into a crunchy crust filled with gooey cheese reminds us how much Americans love cheese.

Good value : Sonic’s 99-cent banana split scores as the best value of the year. With many sub sandwiches costing north of $5, Quizno’s “only $2.99” offer, coming right after a shot of the sandwich in a toaster, focuses viewer attention squarely on the value of this sub. And in third place Sonic builds up the notion that its brown-bag special has lots of food and it slaps the price on the screen. The viewer doesn’t know if they are getting six items, two dozen or somewhere in between, for less than $7.

Enjoyable place to eat: McDonald’s wins again with a mom-targeted image as an older brother helps to care for a younger brother, in spite of the younger brother messing up, so that the reward in the end is a trip to McDonald’s, just him and mom. In second place, a unique moment shows Harvey Brownlee, COO of KFC, shaking hands with an employee at the counter who just won the Finger Lickin’ Good award. The implication? KFC takes care of its people, so they take care of you. And finally, another spot from McDonald’s makes two young girls “feel like a Disney princess,” by transporting them to a Disney castle as they enjoy their McDonald’s food.

Represents a key

In these branding moments we see different moments of truth for each brand experience. An appeal to the head, an appeal to the heart and an appeal to our senses each represents a key to the total fast-food restaurant experience. By communicating that a restaurant is an enjoyable place at which to eat, offering good taste and good value, each of these branding moments is designed to ring the cash register today while making a deposit in the image bank for the brand’s future sales.