I learned a lesson at lunch the other day from my food. You would think that you'd be more likely to learn from a burger or even your fries, but no, this very poignant moment was brought to me by my ice cream cone.
Dairy Queen over in Redmond is one of my favorite places for frozen goodness because they have butterscotch dipped ice cream cones. Usually most places will have either chocolate or cherry, but not carry the wonderful taste of butterscotch. As I indulged in the melting deliciousness in my hand, I noticed the wrapper that they sugar glue to each cone.
Reading that little phrase made me think of all the times as a kid I had gone to Dairy Queen and it connected me with a part of myself that I hadn't heard from for a while. I thought about eating with my grandfather, who would always get a strawberry sundae, being bribed by my father to tell him what my mom had bought in secret and hidden in the back of the closet (sorry mom, it was ice cream!), and I thought about how eating the ice cream out of the freezer even to this very day, "Just wasn't the same." I remembered how when I was little and we would go to the Sizzler, I'd always try to make the little curl on the top of the self serve soft frozen yogurt there, inevitably ending in an unholy mess for the poor Sizzler staff to clean up (totally sorry about that guys!). Dairy Queen's curl is what makes it really a DQ cone. It's part of the magic of the brand.
What about you? What's your property's "Curl"? Do you have something that's unique only to your property? Something special that you do only for your residents that you haven't seen done 1000 other places? Brand Building is defining yourself for sure, but to really brand build, you also need a hook, a curl. Find your curl and you'll find a following!