Listening to the Wrong Customers

Owning a restaurant or a bar is a hard. Honestly, I don’t know how even the owners of successful places can sleep at night, because it’s a terrifying business. Long established ventures close up shop all the time.

When one is in the thick of grinding out a living amidst an increasingly competitive landscape and shifting consumer tastes, it has to be incredibly difficult to keep your eye on the ball.

I’m terrible at sports metaphors. In this case the ball is the brand. It’s the thing that sets a business apart from its competitors. Without some kind of brand identity restaurants and bars would effectively be a commodity – one would be just as good as another. But almost every place has a brand identity, whether they know it or not. This isn’t something that a business has to cultivate. Even without a strategy in place, over time a brand will emerge organically.

“The dirty one that’s really cheap”
“The swanky one with the hot servers”
“The one that’s been around forever and is filled with regulars”
“The place where all the jocks hang out and drink Budweiser, loudly”

There is an advantage to getting ahead of this and crafting a specific brand identity. It helps to provide a consistent image for an establishment, and doing this effectively gives the owner a yardstick by which to measure a myriad of difficult decisions.

Today, I want to talk about an established business which recently made a decision off brand.

Why do I care? Really, there are two reasons. The first is ideological. For some reason it just gets under my skin when a brand turns away from its own established identity. Maybe that comes from spending too long in the advertising and branding trenches. But it’s a palpable feeling that I just can’t shake, nor can I simply let it go. The second is more pragmatic. There is only one German beer bar in the Capital Region. It would be a shame to see it become just another bar with a German name.

Wolff’s Biergarten opened up with no immediate competition nearby in a strip of warehouses on the north side of Albany. They were doing something different and bringing in kegs of German beer that nobody else in the area had. The place looked like a German beer hall and it had a simple menu of wursts and other well themed foods. It’s still a place to go to watch international soccer matches, celebrate Oktoberfest, and play darts on real dart boards.

Is it my favorite place ever? No. But I am most definitely a fan.

It was successful from the start. So successful that other bars started to open up in the neighborhood and now that warehouse strip is a bar hopping destination.

Given that Wolff’s is a beer hall, there have never been any spirits.

The bar hopping crowd finds this a drag. I understand how frustrating it must be to watch customers leave your bar to go to the one across the street for a round of shots. So. What do you do? Do you “listen” to your “customers” and create a shot program? Or do you stay true to your brand and maintain your identity?

I’m not saying that established brands cannot change and adapt to marketplace conditions. They can and they should. Like anything else, brands can stagnate and get stale. But the evolution of a well crafted brand should be carefully managed.

The new shot menu at Wolff’s includes Jim Beam, Cazadores tequila, picklebacks and more. Sure, there are some Germanic sounding spirits like Jagermeister, Black Haus, and Rumple Minze. But the lost opportunity was to bring on a spirits program in line with the brand’s identity.

Yes, German schnapps may be unfamiliar to the bar hopping crowd. But so were the German beers at first, and those have been a smashing success. Plus you can’t tell me that those who are able to choke down a pickleback or a shot of Jager are going to flinch at the taste of real schnapps.

One could argue that despite this change, the character of the place is going to remain largely the same. Perhaps. But where does it end? If customers start asking for Budweiser or cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the bar has already demonstrated a willingness to make sacrifices to the brand.

Providing your customers exactly what they ask for is more perilous than it may seem. People are notoriously bad at knowing what they want. Plus, they don’t have a long term vision of your establishment in mind when they are making such suggestions. Things like pickleback shots may fill a short term need, but if it means that Wolff’s becomes “just another bar” in the warehouse district then it will invariably have been a long term loss.

These decisions are not easy. But this one looks like it was made carelessly, which is surprising given how much work has gone into the place overall. I wish Wolff’s all the best and hope to see its spirits program rise to the level of excellence the brand represents.