Never overlook the importance of visibilityNever overlook the importance of visibility

A number of years ago, we did some research for a bank client of ours. One of the questions we asked bank customers was, “What was the No. 1 reason for choosing the bank you are currently doing business with?”

The No. 1 reason: location.

If consumers pick banks to handle their financial assets based primarily on where they are located, what does that say about their reasons for choosing a restaurant to handle a meal?

McDonald’s: No. 1, No. 97

That helps to explain the paradox of McDonald’s, America’s leading restaurant chain by a wide margin. In the United States McDonald’s generated sales in 2011 of $34.2 billion. The No. 2 chain, Subway, had sales of $11.4 billion that year, according to Nation’s Restaurant News’ Top 100 survey.

Yet in this year’s Consumer Picks survey — which measures how diners feel about chain brands — NRN ranked McDonald’s fourth from the bottom among 100 limited-service restaurant chains. The No. 1 chain was In-N-Out Burger.

At any given moment, the average consumer in America is closer to a McDonald’s than any other restaurant chain except Subway. At the end of fiscal 2011, McDonald’s had 14,098 domestic units. Subway had 24,722 units.

Compared with its direct competitors — Burger King, Wendy’s and others — McDonald’s has much greater visibility, both in terms of units on the ground and also in its powerful visual hammer, the Golden Arches.

Any startup or smaller restaurant chain must think about ways to improve their visibility in the communities they serve. Picking locations with plenty of traffic — both foot and vehicle — is the first consideration.

Out of sight, out of mind

In a neighborhood close to where I live, I have watched three restaurants in a single location come and go in the past five years. And the landlord is hanging out a shingle in the hopes of entrapping the next fool with money.

The problem is simple. It’s not the food, the ambience or the value; it’s the restaurant’s visibility. There’s virtually no foot traffic, and the restaurant is embedded in a large condominium with no visible parking. The chance of catching the eye of a passing motorist is slight.

Meanwhile, a block and a half away is the highest-grossing restaurant in the city, the Atlanta Fish Market. You can’t miss it. It’s the one with the five-story copper fish.

Street visibility is a key reason why some restaurants succeed and others fail. Yet too many operators are far more concerned with other issues, like the food, the ambience, the service, the name.

Sure, a restaurant can be successful by hiring a well-known chef and creating a menu that attracts a host of customers and generates a first-rate reputation in the media. That would allow it to save money on rent by locating in an out-of-the-way spot. Result: more profits for the business, more value for its customers.

But the hot restaurant invariably cools off. And the out-of-the-way location can turn out to be the iceberg that sinks the ship.

Two kinds of customers

If you do a great job taking care of your current customers, goes the accepted wisdom, you’ll never have to worry about the future.

This is simply not true. Current customers — the regulars — will slowly die out. Either literally or by moving away or finding another hot restaurant they prefer.

For any business to have a future, it must continually find new customers. That’s true no matter how good a job it is doing with existing customers.

But a business’s new customers also will have to find it. And one of the best ways to attract new customers is by locating in a highly visible space.

Then there’s signage

The vast majority of restaurant signage is the wrong shape. For some reason logotype designers think in circles or squares rather than horizontal rectangles.

Seven of the 10 largest restaurant chains use a variation of a circle or a square in their logo designs. Only three have horizontal rectangles that match the optimum design for a logotype.

What are the optimum dimensions for a logo? For maximum visibility a logo should be approximately one unit high and 2 1/4 units wide. This is the shape that matches the average person’s field of vision.

This is the reason billboards are almost never square or vertical — they simply would not attract the attention a horizontal billboard attracts. Actually, the typical billboard is 14 feet by 48 feet, or a ratio of about 1-to-3.4.

There’s a reason for the extra width, too. Traveling down a highway, a driver’s view of a billboard is almost never straight on. Rather, they view billboards at an angle where the vertical height remains unchanged, but the horizontal width is truncated. In essence, a driver’s average view of a billboard tends to be close to the optimum ratio of 1-to-2.25.

Restaurant chains that use square or circular logos have learned how to cope with the reduced visibility of their poorly designed logos. The typical approach is to use the logo in one location, often on a pole, and the name of the chain on the building — the McDonald’s approach.

Or they use a large logo on a window or side of the building and the name of the chain centered over the unit itself — the Starbucks approach.

What they are missing, of course, is the consistency of a unified approach to signage. Designing a horizontal logotype in the first place would allow a chain to have this unified look in all of its locations.

Laura Ries is president of Ries & Ries, a marketing consulting firm located in Atlanta. Her e-mail address is [email protected].