How too many chefs ruin the brand

I have seen my fair share of cooking shows during my life time. Now the hot chef is Gordon Ramsey but my personal favorite is Julia Child. The reason I always liked Julia is that you were able to see the art, and science, of creation. I always found it amusing that she seemed to find her own cooking did not taste terrible.

One thing I find interesting about Julia Child and chefs in general is that there is a direct analogy between cooking and building a brand. In each case there are unique elements which need to be created, proportioned correctly and then executed in order for the right blend to produce a wonderful bounty. Also, not everyone can do it right and few have the patience to take it to a level of excellence.

Let's stay on the cooking analogy for a minute. While we make like our lemon sole or maybe just a cheeseburger and fries , the final product represents a long journey involving many hands. We seldom think of the farmer who grew the lettuce or the grapes for the wine. Nor do we think of the truck driver who drove the produce to market. But what we do know is that once the products get to the restaurant, the chef and his or her kitchen staff know what to do with them and how to turn them into the incredible edibles we all love to eat.

Ideally this would be true with marketing and branding. Ideally the marketing department would develop copy, work on PR strategy, coordinate design components and be allowed to build a brand. Sadly, as we all know this is rarely the case. More often than not, CEO's and other senior executives like to stick their noses in and order direct changes to the product with little or no input regarding how the marketing team feels regarding the decision. The inverse is just as sad, they don't care enough about marketing to properly fund it and as such instead of buying the fresh lettuce for the salad or the top choice meat, we have to pick through what is left and try and make do.

Let me continue with my chef analogy, could anyone imagine the owner of a restaurant coming in and say, you know we need to keep costs down so from now on everyone gets their meat one style so we need not run extra ovens or in the bar advocate putting apple juice in some of the mixed drink containers arguing that the customers aren't going to notice. Surprisingly that happens to some degree in business. Not that there is active attempts at deception but rather micro-management by people who do not understand the field and think that they know the brand best or even worse don't think in terms of the brand but rather in short term, quarter-to quarter periods.

Of course one problem with being a chef is that someone will always criticize the cooking. That is true with marketing and branding and needs to be taken as part of the job. However the only type of criticism that works is to offer constructive criticism. Saying this is wrong, or not what I had in mind is totally wasteful and useless in development. Rather saying something like, "I would prefer we focus more on the technology as opposed to the design," is a concrete and workable brand criticism. Sadly, this is very rarely heard.

So what is the conclusion to take away from this? Well, I hope it is that marketing and communications people, just like chefs, need to be allowed to work. By doing this we can create a brand which will be stronger and ideally assume market leadership. All good chefs, like good marketing people, value constructive criticism and see it as a means of improvement. What we need from external audiences is the freedom to do our jobs with some feedback both good and bad but most importantly the opportunity to do our jobs!