What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest

Chapter 6

Great Brands Commit and Stay Committed

One of the restaurant industry’s most remarkable success stories in recent years has been that of Shake Shack, the New York–based burger-and-shake chain that began as a humble hot dog cart in 2001 and now has nearly thirty locations around the world. Out of an expressed commitment to be “the best burger company in the world,” Shake Shack’s CEO Randy Garutti now finds himself frequently rejecting otherwise-enviable growth opportunities, just because they somehow fail to square with the company’s ambitious vision.1

“We get asked to cater all the time, but we fight it,” Garutti told me in 2012. Catering can be a very lucrative side business for restaurants, especially for popular ones like Shake Shack ...