The wine tower and purple cows

There’s a good chance you don't pay much attention to the wine tower when you first walk into Francesco Martucci in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood.

Most restaurants have a wine cellar, often visible from the dining room. Not Francesco Martucci. They have a wine tower. Wine from floor to ceiling encased in glass, rising up all the way to the rafters 20 or so feet in the air. And not a ladder in sight.

At first glance, you might think it's decorative. That the bottles they actually serve come from a room where everything can be reached from ground level. It's only when you see one of their wine angels clip into a harness and get hoisted into the air to fetch a bottle that you realize the insanity. And once you see it, you'll never forget it.

I went there for the first time on my last trip to Miami last month. What brought us there was the lofty reputation Martucci built as one of the world's best pizza chefs at I Masanielli in Italy. His restaurant in Miami is his first in the U.S., and it was quickly rated one of the five best in the country. Suffice it to say we went in with high expectations.

We hadn’t even finished looking at the menu when a wine angel — that’s what they call the staff that retrieves the wine — clipped into a harness and began floating in the air. As a former Jeep owner, I immediately recognized she was being hoisted by a ceiling-mounted winch. She paused about ten feet off the ground and started looking around for a particular bottle. Meanwhile, at least one person at every table in the house (ours included) whipped out a phone to record the spectacle. It was completely mesmerizing.

And the wine tower wasn't the only conversation piece. The amuse-bouche that opened the meal arrived in a tiny clay flower pot, styled to look like a plant growing in soil. A $55 pizza topped with shaved wagyu was torched by hand by the server at the table. Every single course is designed, engineered even, to be unforgettable.

None of that would matter if the food wasn't special. It would just be a gimmick. A restaurant that's fun to photograph and forgettable to eat at. Benihana's with a higher price tag. Martucci's reputation both creates a promise and gives that promise credibility. But that’s not enough. The food had to deliver on that promise, and it did. That’s what earned a return visit when I was back in Miami this week (not to mention a blog post).

So what does the wine tower have to do with purple cows? I see brands and marketers become so fixated on differentiation — on being a purple cow — they lose sight of whether their promises are meaningful and credible to their audience. Or whether their brands can actually deliver on those promises. Memorable without meaningful and credible doesn't matter, and promises that don't matter can't elevate a brand regardless of how visible or memorable they are. Worse yet, being visible and memorable if you can't deliver on it becomes a liability that can sink a brand.

Kudos to Martucci. His reputation and glowing reviews bring you in the door. The wine tower and theater captivate you, and the food delivers on the promise.

That's quite the recipe.

This is the third in a series looking at the Brand Value Engine — my framework for how Visibility, Promise, and Delivery reinforce (or undercut) each other — through real brand experiences. You can read more about the full framework here.