Our firm has enjoyed a productive collaboration with the Capital Hotel in Little Rock. This gem of a historic hotel, lovingly and extensively restored by the Stephens family ownership team, has been hard at work over the past two years also reinventing a unique brand of hospitality.

Working with the hotel’s leadership team, we have established that this new take on Southern hospitality produces a special takeaway for guests….the feeling of being “Southern Comfortable.”

A big driver of the Capital’s brand story is its culinary innovation, led by Executive Chef Lee Richardson. Richardson, a transplant from some of the premier restaurants in New Orleans, was inspired by the indigenous foods and foodways of Arkansas and the South. He connected with local organic and sustainably grown producers and has created a local “food chain” that reaches from the local farm to the Capital table.

Before “Southern food” was “Southern fried,” it was handmade, homegrown and prepared with loving kindness. Southern food was fresh from the kitchen garden or the back-40, pulled this morning from the farm pond or the milch-cows and kept fresh in the springhouse. Our pretraditional Southern forebears knew from whence their dinners came–and it was NOT Kroger!

I titled this “living your brand” because the Capital Hotel is producing an innovative and unique experience, and the opportunity for brandologists to study a business that’s intentionally living out its unique brand story.

On a weekend in November, the hotel and culinary team will partner with P. Allen Smith and Blackberry Farm–two notable food and farm destinations–to produce “A Tale of Two Farms.” In 5 meals and two days, the personalities behind these three extraordinary properties will give guests a private glimpse behind the curtain–of the culinary arts, vinology and sustainable farming.

Lee Richardson calls his special take on Southern foodways “New Americana Cuisine.” A Tale of Two Farms will be a memorable plunge into this new genre and an extraordinary opportunity for fans of food and fans of brands to take a post-graduate course in the disciplines.

Check it out at: A Tale of Two Farms

A follow up to my earlier post on the importance of the CEO as the chief brand steward and brand champion.

In a live your brand company, the brand starts and ends at the CEO’s door. Think about Steve Jobs at Apple. He’s probably the pinnacle of the brand CEO.

For the brand CEO, there are just a few imperatives regarding his or her leadership of the brand:

• know what it is
• know what it isn’t
• be champion, cheerleader, communicator
• see and be seen
• carry the flag and bang the drum

When John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, “the plumbers of the Internet,” was interviewed several years ago, he made the statement that it was his job in EVERY conversation to reiterate the core objectives of the company. If he wasn’t doing that in even a 5-minute briefing, he wasn’t doing his job.

So it is with brand stewardship. The big boys do it, and the small business CEO must do it as well. Once again, the small business has an advantage—she can personally interact with a great deal more of her organization every day. The CEO of Wal-Mart can’t touch one million employees very often. But the CEO of the small and middle-market business can touch his or her employee base all the time.

A couple of parting shots on the brand CEO from a couple of the big boys in branding theory and practice:

“The executive with the best opportunity to observe the company from all viewpoints and empowered to make appropriate changes is the CEO. He or she is the one who must have the creativity and foresight to determine where the company should be heading, the communications skills to impart this vision effectively to others, and the power to secure funding to implement whatever changes are required. In other words, the initial responsibility for successful corporate branding has to be the CEO’s alone, even though the organization executes branding and is ultimately responsible for its success or failure.”

—James R. Gregory, “Leveraging the Corporate Brand

“…companies that treat their brands as the sole purview of their advertising, marketing or brand management departments are often unsuccessful. They fail to consider that their brands can be profoundly affected by extensions, acquisitions, distribution, product development, customer service, quality control, etc.—in other words, the entire list of disciplines that it takes to make a business.

“And many of the key decisions that determine whether the brand will thrive or fizzle are made when the people whose job it is to be conscious of the brand are not present. That is because many of those decisions are made by lawyers, accountants, salespeople and software engineers. Often the only person in the room looking out for the quality of the brand is the CEO. This means one thing: The safekeeping of the brand is the CEO’s responsibility. The buck stops there.”

—David F. D’Alessandro, CEO of John Hancock and author of “Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand”

One of my favorite small business sites mentions Branding Like the Big Boys in a blog post from Editor Eve Gumpel and branding guru Lynn Parker.

http://www.womenentrepreneur.com/2009/10/branding-like-the-big-boys.html