The Whiteboard: To grow, small brands often must escape personality of founders

You’ll enjoy using the product or experiencing the service. You’ll feel good about yourself because you’re a choosy mother, a macho guy or a smart businessperson.

It applies to the smallest and the largest of brands, but there are real differences in how they are delivered.

When you go to McDonald’s, a carefully crafted culture, detailed in a training manual, delivers the brand. Nobody walks up to the counter and asks if Ray Kroc is in, or who the chef is today.

But when you call Joe’s Plumbing, it may well be Joe himself who creates the brand experience. Joe has his whole business on the line. He’s more likely to be exceptionally polite, to offer a discount or to go the extra mile at no charge. For Joe, his word is his brand.

And that can be the challenge for small brands as they grow — getting past the word and personality of their leader, which can be very powerful, but may not translate well into the promise of a larger company.

Case in point: Why are there no five-star restaurant chains? Could it be because the brand experience is so tied to specific people — the owner, the maître d’ and, most likely, the chef — that it is virtually impossible to extend the brand from one city to another without a perceived dilution of its promise?

I suspect that if you’re going to pay $100 or more per person for a meal, you want to know that it came with the personal touch of a famous chef and not from an underling following the recipe on an index card. It is essentially impossible for brands like this to be highly exclusive and available on every street corner at the same time.

On the other hand, Leon Leonwood Bean showed how a one-man brand could grow to become a household name. The L.L. Bean brand came into existence in 1912 when Mr. Bean invented a waterproof boot and began to sell it to hunters in Maine.

He quickly established two principles for the brand that endure to this day: a money-back guarantee on any product no matter how long you’ve had it, and his store never closes.

He went as far as to make a show of throwing away the keys to the front door to make his now-legendary point. His guarantee was soon tested as well, when 90 percent of his early production of the “Bean Boot” was returned. But he replaced every one and improved the design.