Birth of a brand
The development of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. brand began in 1995, when Paramount Pictures was looking for a way to stretch the success of its 1994 movie Forrest Gump. Paramount approached Barnett, then-proprietor of The Rusty Pelican in Newport Beach, about a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.-branded restaurant.
For Barnett, the timing couldn’t have been better.
“We were obliged under our lease to remodel the restaurant, and at the same time, we had made a strategic decision to get into mid-scale casual dining in terms of seafood, which we felt was an unexploited niche,” says Barnett. “Just in hearing the name, we felt that dovetailed well with our own strategic direction.”
Barnett and his executive team worked closely with Paramount to come up with a branding strategy and licensing deal.
“We had a vision in our mind about what this restaurant would feel like, about what it would look like, sound like and so on. (We asked ourselves), if Forrest Gump and (Bubba) had actually created a restaurant, what would it be like?”
Another important step in building the brand was ensuring that the idea was something that actually appealed to customers. Barnett and the Paramount executives had a feeling that the idea would be a success — “We felt that there would be a very strong name identification, in terms of the name and the notoriety attached to it from the movie,” says Barnett — but instinct and hunches don’t guarantee business success. And the fact that the concept worked on the big screen didn’t mean that it would work in real life.
So Barnett and his team did their homework.
“We did exit interviews (from the Rusty Pelican) and focus groups and what they call in the market research business nose counting, which means getting a relatively statistically significant sample, and then asking the same questions in as objective a format as possible, and then tabulating the results, cross-tabulating them and getting an understanding of the demographics, psychographics, makeup of the customer and their preference,” Barnett says.
The market research showed that the Bubba Gump name had the makings of a successful brand — there was a 92 percent unaided awareness of the name, meaning that people knew what Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. was and associated it with the movie, without any help from new advertising or marketing. In addition, says Barnett, there was an unforced translation between the movie and the restaurant concept.
“Now, if I told you I was going to make a restaurant and it was going to be based on a movie, let’s say it was going to be the Pink Panther Restaurant. Well, there’s no real unforced translation there, there’s no reason to assume there would be a restaurant associated with that movie. (There was the) Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in the movie, which was a shrimping company, and it makes sense that such a restaurant would exist.
“You’d be surprised to know how many people come into our restaurant saying, ‘Now, I never knew that you guys had a restaurant, too. I knew that you had the shrimp company … ‘ They really do confuse the reality with the fiction.”
Based on the research, Barnett and Paramount were confident that the brand would make sense to consumers, and they knew they had a head start on name recognition. But while the close tie to the movie was a huge advantage, it also posed a significant challenge.
“We wanted to create a brand called Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurant,” says Barnett. “We did not want to create the Forrest Gump Movie restaurant. … The biggest branding challenge is to not be identified as anything other than a good casual dining restaurant and not to be pigeonholed as some sort of entertainment concept that doesn’t have credible food.”
To make that distinction, says Barnett, the restaurants had to focus on two goals. First, while the name and movie tie-in would bring customers in for a first visit, it would be the experience that would bring them back. To ensure that happened, the restaurants had to offer a superior dining experience.
The second goal was to establish the restaurant as a unique and individual brand, a separate entity from the “Forrest Gump” movie.
“The restaurant itself had to have a standalone brand and had to stand alone as a place where people could come and get hot food hot, cold food cold, service with a smile and pleasant, clean and authentic surroundings,” Barnett says. “Then you’ve established a brand that has legs of its own.”
But those brand elements are impossible to achieve without the right people.
