Why Most Restaurant Brands Lose the Plot Ft. Devika Sekhar

The Unlikely Beginning: From Movement Therapy to F&B Marketing

Devika did not plan to end up in marketing. She trained as a movement therapist, someone who reads people through body language rather than words, and had wanted to be one since she was sixteen. Getting into brand communication happened almost by accident, on the job, with no formal marketing background to lean on.

That grounding in reading people turned out to be far more useful in hospitality than she expected. She points out that hotel groups spend enormous effort building SOPs and scripted greetings, training staff on exactly what to say and how to say it. But none of that matters if the person delivering it does not mean it.

A staff member having a rough day can recite the same warm greeting as everyone else, and a guest will still sense something is off, even if they cannot say what exactly gave it away. Devika has carried that same instinct for reading sincerity into every brand she has built since.

The First Way Brands Lose the Plot: Forcing Emotional Connect

Every F&B brand today wants to tap into nostalgia and emotional connect, and Devika agrees it matters deeply, especially in a market as emotionally driven as India’s. But she draws a hard line between connect that is earned and connect that is manufactured because a brand feels it is expected to have one.

Her point is that customers do not need any training in branding to sense when a story feels performative rather than real. They simply start wondering why a brand is trying so hard, and that question alone is enough to break the trust a brand is trying to build.

The Second Way Brands Lose the Plot: Not Knowing What They Actually Want

When a restaurateur comes to Devika with a marketing problem, she has learned that the stated problem is rarely the real one. She sees two kinds of restaurateurs walk through her door, those who have never run a restaurant before and are excited but unclear, and those with operational experience who still lose their way somewhere in scaling. Across both, one issue shows up more than any other.

Why a Simple Menu Is the Biggest Clarity Driver

This shows up most clearly in menus. Devika has seen countless multi-cuisine restaurants trying to serve Indian, Chinese and continental all at once, simply because the owner wants to appeal to everyone. Her belief is the opposite.

She has trained operations teams to physically taste every dish on the menu themselves and talk about what they genuinely enjoy, rather than reciting a memorised recommendation. Guests can tell the difference immediately.

For Devika, nearly every branding problem she has ever solved traces back to the same root issue.

The Third Way Brands Lose the Plot: Rushing to Scale

If there is one instinct Devika pushes back against more than any other, it is the urge to scale before a brand has proven itself. She has watched restaurateurs chase rapid expansion, only to shut down and pivot within months because the brand never had the chance to mature.

Her benchmark for F&B profitability runs far longer than most founders expect, and she is emphatic that this has not changed even now.

She points to Pebble Street Hospitality’s Foo as a brand that got this right, opening one outlet, letting it mature for years, refining what worked and what did not, before expanding at all. She sees the same philosophy behind old, beloved standalone restaurants like Kamling in Pune and Ling’s Pavilion in Bombay, spaces that never chased scale aggressively but built decades of loyalty simply by staying consistent and letting their regulars come back on their own terms.

The Fourth Way Brands Lose the Plot: Marketing That Doesn’t Talk to Operations

One of Devika’s more counterintuitive points is that brand communication does not start with the customer at all. It starts inside the organisation, in the conversations between marketing, chefs and operations, long before anything reaches a menu card or an Instagram post. Marketing teams often want to present a dish or a campaign in a certain way, but if it is not operationally viable, the idea falls apart the moment it meets reality.

She is candid about where the friction in these conversations usually comes from, especially between chefs who feel protective of their product and marketing teams trying to simplify it for a wider audience.

Her own approach, shaped by years of asking questions without any hotel management background to fall back on, is to never assume she understands a team’s constraints before asking.

The Fifth Way Brands Lose the Plot: Chasing Every Trend

Devika is also wary of brands that constantly chase whichever audience or trend seems to be winning at the moment, particularly the pressure many F&B brands feel to build everything around Gen Z. She does not dismiss younger audiences, but she is clear that a brand cannot let a demographic dictate its entire identity.

“Not every trend will work for every brand.”

Her advice is to be secure enough in a brand’s identity to sit out a trend entirely if it does not genuinely fit, rather than joining in simply because everyone else is.

One Brand, Many Playbooks: Bastian, Ammakai and the Question of Price Point

Devika’s time across Bastian, Ammakai, Nom Nom Express and Tibbs Frankie taught her that branding cannot follow one template even within the same company. Bastian’s beach club, Garden City and Empire outlets sit at a distinctly aspirational price point, one many customers cannot visit often, but still want to be seen at at least once. Ammakai, on the other hand, sits at a more approachable price point with consistently strong value for money, something many guests do not realise until they actually visit.

She also draws a clear line between formats. QSRs are built entirely around speed and efficiency, casual dining sits somewhere in between, and fine dining is about the full experience, where guests are paying as much for how they feel throughout the visit as for the food itself.

She adds that a single bad experience anywhere in that fine dining visit, even somewhere as small as a washroom, is often what a guest remembers most, regardless of how good the meal was.

What Keeps a Brand From Losing the Plot: Old School Loyalty

Despite spending most of her career building digital-first brands, Devika remains a firm believer in one very analogue idea, the loyalty card. At Nom Nom Express, this simple mechanic worked exceptionally well with younger customers who wanted visible value for their money without any complicated app or points system to track.

She is equally clear that loyalty cannot always be manufactured through a program. Some restaurants earn it purely by staying consistent for decades, citing Ling’s Pavilion and Malaka Spice as places where regulars keep returning without any loyalty scheme at all.

She also points to Tibbs Frankie as proof of how deeply nostalgia can anchor a brand. The word Frankie itself is trademarked to Tibbs, and for an entire generation of Bombay customers, no other roll ever really replaces it.

How She Knows If Marketing Is Actually Working

Devika is refreshingly honest about how difficult it is to tie brand marketing directly to revenue, unless it is a delivery platform where every rupee spent can be tracked against an order.

Her real litmus test for whether marketing is working has nothing to do with a dashboard.

She is equally clear that this same word of mouth is unforgiving. A brand can believe it has built the best product and given the best experience, but if guests are not talking about it, none of that effort has landed.

Consistency, more than any single great campaign, is what earns that word of mouth over time.

Final Thoughts

Most restaurant brands do not lose the plot from one big mistake. They lose it slowly, through a menu with too many items, a campaign forced into an emotional angle it has not earned, an expansion plan that moves faster than the product can support, a marketing team that never talks to operations, or a brand that keeps chasing whichever trend is winning that week.