vive la difference
Here's a scenario. You open a concept - let's call it Bar-Cum-Restaurant - and it works. The customers come and keep coming back. The staff and clients get to know each other's first names. What's more, the profits are good and the idea of turning the new business into the first in a chain of Bar-Cum-Restaurants suddenly looks realistic. At that point, the temptation to replicate BCR1 exactly, right down to the banquettes and mirrors, must be huge. After all, you want people to recognise your style wherever they see you. You want a brand.
Go back five or 10 years and everyone would have said you were dead right, providing win-win-win solutions for operators, customers and investors. Indeed, talk to Steve Wilkins, managing director of the five-strong Lewis & Clarke chain of gastro pubs (rising to eight by the end of this year), and he will tell you: "Brands were the rage because they were easy to replicate, with certain economies of scale in terms of design fee and the speed with which you could roll them out.
"From a consumer's point of view, they built in a degree of predictability and safety - and the City loved them. They're not interpretive. Once they understand what the core values of a brand are, you're just regurgitating that. It's cookie-cutter. The City loved it because you could say, ‘I'm going to do 20 this year' and you're not reinventing the wheel every time."
That, however, was then - and if a week is a long time in politics, five to 10 years is an age in marketing. Customers change, get older, move on, and suddenly what seemed like a sure-fire route to health, wealth and happiness in all matters financial just doesn't work any longer. In this case, it seems that customers reached a point where they began to look for something a little different, a little more adventurous - and, most of all, a place that reflected their own individuality.
The history of the Pitcher & Piano chain is an almost textbook example of how bar brands have had to change. In the early 1990s, Pitcher was a fresh new brand, young and - this was really new for bars - women-friendly. Then, towards the end of the '90s, the City was promised 50 bars by the year 2000.
The race was on and, says marketing manager Tristran Hillier: "Growth was key." Competition was also fierce, as this was the time when other bar chains, such as all Bar One and Fine Line, were expanding. The result, as Hillier explains, was that "in the late '90s, we had a pretty average design offering that was not really challenging ourselves or the customer. But we had an incredibly strong culture, so we got away with not doing much to inspire our customers."
In 2001 - after a 1999 takeover by the Wolverhampton & Dudley brewery - Pitcher began looking at its changing customer profile and started the move away from traditional, branded interiors to something more bespoke. "That led to what we call Project Darwin - the evolution of each bar to fit its environment," says Hillier.
It also meant evolving the bar to fit the wishes of the local clientele - which meant, simply, asking people what they wanted. Random customers are shown design concepts, while others are invited to formal and informal focus groups.
Ed Turner, operations director of the Geronimo Inns bar chain, also stresses the importance of environment. The bars are in what he describes as "the villages of London," all of which have their own character. So, when moving into a new pub, they always look at the character of the building, but they also ask what it is that people like about living in an area. The area then governs the style.
Turner suggests that, were they to open in London's Notting Hill, the style would be "minimalist, with wooden floors and light-coloured walls". Move south to Battersea and the style would be "nice carpets and thick sofas in front of the fires, and it's warm and homely".
Joanna Clevley (creative director and co-founder of Geronimo 10 years ago) and her team scour local second-hand shops for the kind of things people put in their houses. For instance, there's a kissing seat in the Haverstock Hill pub because that's what customers in that area might have at home.
This obviously takes longer than merely opening catalogues, but Turner says it means the pubs feel warm and homely as soon as they open, while some of the other, larger branded bars feel new and shiny. It's a matter of making it feel right and keeping it feeling right. So, go into the Duke of Cambridge, which opened eight years ago, and the colours have been through a number of changes - earth colours to cooler and back again.
While there is a temptation here to start thinking about style and individual taste, Andrew Waugh, of architectural practice Waugh Thistleton, points out that the branded look is closely linked to spend per head. He says: "If it's a convenience food operation, like Giraffe [Waugh Thistleton designed its interiors], then you have a branded look because people are looking for brand security. They are not going to be spending to the level where they will have done some research on the place. So you position your brand, then you make your brand style loose enough to fit with a lot of places."
That's all very different to the company's approach to designing the Waterway, the Ebury, the Farm and the Wells for client Tom Ettridge. For them, Waugh insisted that the only link should be quality. As all the buildings are different, so are the interiors. Only the graphics links them.
Other chains, however, are looking for a more definable brand image. Wilkins, at Lewis & Clarke, says its strategy is to work in harmony with each building while keeping to a framework of 12 to 15 principles. These include using old English colours, wooden floors, a mix of old and new furniture, oak bars and an open-plan kitchen.
Both the Geronimo and Lewis & Clarke pubs have their own names and therefore a unique identity. This is in sharp contrast to a brand such as restaurant chain Nando's, where having the same name above the door tells you that they are providing the same product. Walk in and there are standard messages. The instructions, tableware and crockery are always the same, as is the grill presentation. There is also artwork from Nando's South African homeland.
Nonetheless, in spite of apparent similarities, the sites are very different - and they, too, attempt to meet the needs of local markets. They also, of course, have to deal with the nature of the space - whether it is long and thin or narrow and deep.
Philip Harrison of Harrison Design says space, as much as anything, drives the individuality of the site, whereas a lot of brands try to shoehorn an identikit design into all spaces.
Underlining everything, of course, is the niggling issue of cost. Is it notably higher if you personalise each outlet rather than go for a cold-blooded corporate rollout? Wilkins is confident that isn't the case. "Our development costs are not dissimilar to someone like All Bar One," he says, because they are better able to adapt buildings as they go along.
Harrison adds that unless you really are using templates for your bars, there are few economies of scale to be had. So the answer is that it has more to do with spend per head than cost. That and location, of course.