The Curious Case of Aryaas, Anand Bhavan and Saravana Bhavan

Travel anywhere across Kerala and you are likely to come across restaurants carrying familiar names such as Aryaas, Arya Bhavan, Anand Bhavan and Saravana Bhavan. To an outsider, it almost looks like one large family of brands spread across the state. Yet every regular customer knows that these restaurants are usually unrelated businesses with different owners, different managements and often very different standards.

What fascinates me is that despite knowing this, many of us still experience a certain level of comfort when we encounter these names. The moment we see "Aryaas" or "Anand Bhavan", we instinctively expect reasonably good South Indian vegetarian food. We know there is no common ownership, yet the names themselves seem to act as a signal of trust.

Interestingly, this phenomenon differs from names such as Udupi or Punjabi Dhaba. In those cases, the trust originates from a geographical cue. Udupi points to a place and Punjabi Dhaba points to a region and its food culture. Aryaas, Anand Bhavan and Saravana Bhavan, however, do not carry a geographical tag. Yet they seem to communicate a similar promise of authentic South Indian vegetarian food, familiarity and hygiene. The equity appears to come not from geography, but from decades of collective association built around these names.

Part of this may be explained by the pedigree associated with Tamil vegetarian restaurants. Over decades, successful brands such as Saravana Bhavan and countless smaller establishments have built a strong association between these names and quality South Indian cuisine. The reputation of Tamil cooks and restaurateurs in this category has probably contributed to the equity as well.

What is interesting from a branding perspective is that the trust often transfers even when there is no formal relationship between the businesses. Entrepreneurs have benefited from this collective equity, but there is also a downside. When too many businesses use similar names and visual identities, the names themselves begin to lose distinctiveness and gradually move towards commoditization.

Perhaps that is why we increasingly see modifiers such as Sree Aryaas, Aryaas Grand, Aryaas Park, New Anand Bhavan and numerous other variations. The businesses are trying to enjoy the familiarity of the original cue while simultaneously differentiating themselves from everyone else doing the same thing.

It is a fascinating example of how brand equity can sometimes exist not at the level of an individual brand, but at the level of a category. The question is whether this shared pool of trust ultimately strengthens all the players involved or slowly erodes the distinctiveness that created the trust in the first place.

I would be curious to know whether others have noticed similar examples in other categories.