Why do people drive past three cafés to get to yours?

1The scene: four minutes on Olaya

Composite scene, not a specific customer

Sunday, 4:40 pm. Khalid is leaving work, the road is jammed, and he wants a coffee before home. On his right, three cafés in a row: a new one with a lovely front, one with an English name in thin lettering, and a third he couldn’t name if you asked. He passes all three. At the lights he spots a cup in the hand of a passenger in the next car, a colour he knows from a distance. A kilometre later, he turns into your drive-thru.

Ask the three café owners why they lost Khalid. The first will say price. The second, location. The third, “we don’t have an ad budget.” The answer is simpler and harsher: none of them lost him, because he never thought of them. He didn’t compare. He didn’t weigh quality against price. He picked the name that was already in his head before he left the office, then confirmed it with the colour of a cup in a stranger’s car.

That isn’t laziness. Nobody has time to evaluate every option every time, so we take shortcuts. A brand is that shortcut.

2The image: the car window at a Tahlia traffic light

Stop at a light on Tahlia or Olaya and look out of the car window. You have a few seconds before the line moves. What do you recognise in one second, without reading anything?

The colour of a sign. The shape of a cup in someone’s hand. A queue of cars at a drive-thru. That’s what sticks. The English name in thin type on a beige front? Nobody reads it from a car.

The window test is simple: anything that needs reading isn’t seen. Your brand in the market isn’t what’s written in your identity guidelines. It’s what people pick up in one second while busy with something else.

3The idea beneath

In the roundabout episode we talked about mental availability, being the name that comes up when the question is asked, and physical availability, being on the customer’s route and in their app. Here we go one layer deeper, because that availability doesn’t come from “brand awareness” in general. It comes from three specific things.

First: the moments. Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute found that brands grow mainly by being easy to remember and easy to find for more people, not by being loved more by a few.¹ And remembering doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a moment the researchers call a category entry point. After work. After isha prayers. Before the match. On the drive out to the desert on a Friday. When guests turn up unannounced. Each of those moments is a separate door in the customer’s head. So the question isn’t “do they know you?” It’s “in how many moments does your name come up?” A café that owns one door loses to one that owns five, even if its coffee is better.

Second: the cues people recognise in a second. Jenni Romaniuk calls them distinctive brand assets: the colour, shape, character or sound that signals you without your name being written.² She judges them on just two tests. Do many people link it to you? And do they link it to you alone? The white cup with the small logo fails the first. The wooden front with the plant and the neon sign fails the second, because a thousand other cafés have it too.

Third: a brand makes every riyal work harder. In 1993 Kevin Keller defined brand equity as the difference in how people respond to the same marketing when they know who it comes from.³ In kitchen terms: the same offer, the same ad, gets a bigger result from a name people know. That’s why a brand is an asset, not an expense. You build it once, and it lowers the cost of every customer after.

And the Saudi market is hard on weak brands, for two reasons. First, reach is no longer an edge: Snapchat ads reach 72.9% of the population, according to DataReportal,⁴ so your competitor reaches the same people you do. Second, choice is dense: an estimate published on a specialist blog puts Riyadh at roughly one café per 1,250 residents, without explaining the method, so treat it as a picture, not a number.⁵ And to be honest, I couldn’t find a published Saudi study measuring distinctive assets for cafés or restaurants. What we have is what we measure ourselves.

4Where the money leaks

In multi-branch groups, brands get wasted in three quiet ways.

Changing the look every year. New marketing head, new identity, new cup. Every change wipes out memory you paid years to build. A distinctive asset grows through repetition, and your team gets bored of it long before your customers do.

Branch 30 doesn’t look like branch 3. A sign in a different colour because the contractor suggested it, a different cup because the supplier changed, a different front because the mall had rules. So the new branch inherits none of its siblings’ memory. It starts from zero and spends on ads to build what it would have had for free. Repeatability is the asset, in operations and in appearance.⁶ And a known brand’s customer base is one of the cheapest bridges into a new city, provided people recognise it when they see it there.⁷

Discounts instead of a name. Every offer that makes price the reason to come buys a visit, not a memory. And on delivery apps your thumbnail is the car window all over again: a generic burger photo among twenty generic burger photos means you don’t exist.

Financially, a known brand means a lower cost per new customer, and an opening people already recognise before the doors open. At Riyal Albarakah (Sultan Group), acquisition cost fell 40% during the growth from 3 branches to 33, as reported by the group; it was not measured against a control group.⁸ I won’t claim the brand alone did that. But expanding on a name nobody knows costs a great deal more.

5The Sunday-morning question

The question: If you covered your name, would anyone still know it’s you?

Three small measures

7Credit, and what comes next

None of this is my invention. Mental and physical availability come from Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow (2010),¹ distinctive assets from Jenni Romaniuk’s Building Distinctive Brand Assets (2018),² and brand equity from Kevin Keller (1993).³ All I did was carry them from the lecture hall to a traffic light on Tahlia.

Which leaves a harder question. The moment your name comes to mind isn’t a trait of the customer. It’s a trait of their situation. Khalid is a different customer at a work lunch than on a Thursday night out. That’s the next episode.