"Unleashing the Fire: How Passion Branding Ignites Your Business"

While working as a general manager of a fine dining restaurant in the Southern Suburbs of Cape town, I was looking for ways to make the Cavendish Mall-placed restaurant a "destination restaurant".

With an "Exclusive Books" as a neighbouring tenant I was able to spend the quieter evenings in the bookshop looking up marketing, PR, and branding ideas - I felt there must be more to placing ads in the neighbourhood paper, a chalkboard with the day's specials and even bespoke restaurant magazines. I made full colour photostat copies of promotions: a set menu for special days – Valentine’s Day, Freedom Day, Weekend date night, etc. We tried “dinner and a movie” specials idea as there was a cinema complex in the mall.

Some of these ideas took off but none were as successful as our Business Breakfast. I approached several tenants who opened early in the mall. I brought them coffee and a menu and invited them to a Business Breakfast and invited them to speak about their shop for 5 to 7 minutes to the rest of the tenants. I could never know how this idea would take off.

We met once a month and before long their customers were coming to our restaurant to have their business meetings, bringing their families for meals, or popping in for a coffee and cake (one of our many specials).

This was when I discovered Passion Branding. I didn’t know it had a name until I found one of my favourite books of all time, “Passion Branding”; Harnessing the Power of Emotion to Build Strong Brands; By Neill Duffy, Jo Hooper · 2003. This became my favourite route in branding - emotion to brand matchmaking!

When you have an emotional reaction to an event, a visceral response, you can’t help but respond! It is so important that whatever form your communication takes, it reaches an element of emotional objective.

Make sure “t’s” are crossed and “i’s” are dotted but, if it has no passion, no emotional trigger… quite frankly? A waste of words and good grammar!

Peace. Out.

Taly Gee.