One of my favorite places to grab lunch is Lucca Delicatessen in San Francisco’s Marina District.
Here is a place that has been in business for almost eighty years, standing the test of time across generational hand-offs of a family-run business, changing tastes of the populace, demographic upheavals (the Marina was once predominantly the home of Italian immigrants, now its yuppie-ville) and economic cycles.
Obviously, they are doing something right; namely sticking to a core that they do really well, while incrementally changing with the times for the better.
One thing, in particular, that they do is ‘accenting,’ a strategy that is both inexpensive and easy to emulate.
Basically, two thirds of the items in their refrigerator case are salads and prepared pastas (think: shrimp salad, ceci bean, caprese, potato, macaroni, ravioli, etc.).
As such, a lot of the first impressions of Lucca occur when you look in the refrigerator case. Does the food look fresh, homemade, standout in flavor? Is it worth the premium you pay?
What Lucca does here is essentially put two accents on each salad. One, finely chopped parsley, adds color, and just amplifies the “this is fresh” sensibility.
The other depends on the dish, but is basically a flavor enhancer, like grated hard-boiled egg or cheese shavings. In a subtle, but effective way, it tells the customer “this is not a garden-variety (read: commodity) dish.”
Taken together, the use of accenting visually conveys that Lucca has not lost sight of the importance of attention to detail, and of course, you can taste the difference when you eat the food, so this is not mere marketing optics.
In the tech arena, Apple is the master of such brand accents, and of course the current reigning high priest of the “minutiae matters” religion. Similarly, Google uses seasonal graphics on search pages as a simple way of reminding you that humans are behind its magic.
How might you apply accenting to your business?
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