Understanding the Strengths and Weaknesses of a Firm’s Overall Restaurant Brand Image: An Importance Performance Analysis

In increasingly competitive and complex retailing environments, the overall brand image, or a customer’s expression of their global attitudinal impressions of the brand, represents a critical construct with many close associations with key performance indicators and metrics (e.g., satisfaction, loyalty, etc.). Although prior research highlights the importance of overall retail brand image to key performance outcomes such as customer satisfaction and intentions to recommend, this research seeks to answer a more fundamental question: how does the overall retail brand image of one brand compare to another brand? In this paper, we examine a specific type of overall retail brand image—a restaurant’s overall brand image—to determine the composition, strengths, and weaknesses of the restaurant’s overall brand image for four known restaurant brands (Applebee’s Grill & Bar, Chili’s Grill & Bar, Morton’s the Steakhouse, and Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse). In addition to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the restaurant’s overall brand image, we compare the restaurant’s overall brand image between casual-dining and fine-dining restaurants. To answer our main research question, we employ a multiple methods research methodology, combining insights gathered from qualitative in-depth interviews with restaurant customers and a broader online restaurant survey with American restaurant customers. Data from the online restaurant survey was analyzed through importance performance analysis, a hybrid method useful for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of a product, brand, etc., based on the underpinnings of confirmation/disconfirmation theory, latitudes of performance, and perceptual mapping (Ortinau 2008; Tillman 1967). Counterintuitively, the importance performance analysis reveals that customers are willing to accept lower levels of performance on some attributes for fine-dining restaurants (e.g., convenience, competitive prices), while preferring higher performance on all attributes for casual-dining restaurants. This finding suggests the type of restaurant needs to be considered as a moderator of overall restaurant brand image. Results further suggest that there exists little differentiation between competitors’ performance on important attributes within the restaurant category, unveiling an opportunity for managers to focus resources on achieving meaningful comparative advantage on key restaurant attributes.