Be consistent
Once your core philosophies and values are clearly defined, the next step in building a successful brand is holding fast to them — in every little detail.
“Be true to yourself. Stay focused,” Mitchell says. “It’s easy to get going on all these different tangents.”
Mitchell knows of what he speaks.
“Look at our Fish Market, for example,” he says. “We opened those in 2000, 1999, 1998, and we were very, very profitable. We’d done a good job. But we started to not be true to ourselves. The concept was built on fresh fish, a daily menu, doing creative presentations of fish. We started to change, slowly but surely.”
The company, for instance, found it could save money by doing away with daily printed menus. Then someone noticed how many complex items were on the menu and it was simplified.
“Then we went and got too pricey,” Mitchell says. “Before we knew it, our profit was in the toilet. We went on this way for two or three years. And then we finally looked at the Fish Markets and said, ‘What are we doing here?’ We pulled out the old menus and we kind of got our way back. Now we have our profitability back, and the business is growing.”
Mitchell’s Fish Market, which already has a presence in 12 cities outside Central Ohio, is slated to open four more locations this year and a fifth in 2008.
Mitchell was lucky he caught things when he did, though. That rolling snowball of simple, well-intentioned missteps could’ve spelled disaster.
“Quality is like a path through a dense forest,” Mitchell says. “If you step off that path very far, before you know it, you have no idea where you started. You’re lost.
“In the case of the Fish Market, we were breaking the brand promise left and right. We broke it for not having a daily printed menu. Fresh fish, fresh market, fresh daily — that was the whole concept. I just want to kick myself for that blunder.”