Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: Power To The People. Don’t Break Guitars

Restaurant Marketing: This is a great restaurant marketing lesson. The destiny of your restaurant, its success or failure lies in the hands of your guests. Don’t believe me? Look what happened this past month. One of the largest and most devastatingly, yet successful online reputation attacks on a corporation took place. A huge airline was brought to its knees, humbled, shamed and reprimanded by a passenger for damaging his guitar during a flight. David vs Goliath. And, David destroyed Goliath to bits.

Finally, after a 12 month period of the airline refusing to take his request for compensation seriously and exhibiting poor, neglectful and non-responsive customer service, the passenger - a singer/songwriter - recorded a video and uploaded it to YouTube. After 4.5 million views and world-wide negative publicity about their customer service procedures, an embarrassed United Airlines finally - yes finally, took notice. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo)

The lessons for all restaurants (and all companies) no matter what size you are, are quite obvious:

—The power is now in the hands of your guests to use the web to embarrass you and tell the world if your service is sub-standard and problems are not remedied in a timely manner.

—Viral marketing has the ability to strongly promote the positive side of your business, but also rapidly tell the negative side – a disappointing product or a bad dining or take-out experience.

—To prevent negative publicity, make sure your guest service policies are reviewed and are implemented to the highest degree. Royalty service!  Respond quickly to any incident, question or complaint so that customer frustration doesn’t accelerate to the point of taking the issue to the Internet.

—Regularly monitor the various social media search engines to find out if anyone’s talking about you. Don’t think you’re too small or too geographically remote to be talked about positively and negatively.

The most important lesson is this - when dealing with a guest, it’s not what it will cost your restaurant now, it’s the embarrassing negative publicity and lost business it may cost you later.

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Sunday, July 26, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: Learn How To Use Twitter To Market Your Restaurant

Restaurant Marketing: Learn how to use Twitter to market your restaurant. Twitter just introduced a “Twitter: 101 For Business.” Learn the language, best practices and more.

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Friday, July 24, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: Burger King’s Marketing Calories, 1,010 Of Them!

Restaurant Marketing: Marketing ice cream and shakes this summer at your restaurant? Burger King’s “Oreo BK Sundae Chocolate Shake” (medium size) comes in at a whopping—or is it whopper—1,010 calories, 35 grams fat (21g saturated), 171g carbs, 770 milligrams sodium, 95 mg cholesterol, 155 grams sugar. A sinful way to contribute to obesity. And are they telling their guests about this. Of course not; we’re supposed to find out ourselves.

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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Restaurant Marketing: Attention Restaurants, My Name Is Not “Three”!

Restaurant Marketing. Attention restaurants. I’m getting tired of giving restaurants my hard earned money only to walk into the restaurant and be greeted by the number 3. I know you can count. But my wife, my daughter and I are not numbers. Possibly much to your surprise, we are people. People that have loyalties; people that can spread good “gossip” about your restaurant and we are also generous tippers. Yes, we know you can count and I know you need to know how many are in our party so you can seat us at the proper table, but it would be nice if, and especially when it’s so obvious there are three of us, to say “Thanks for joining us tonight for dinner. We really appreciate it.”

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Saturday, July 18, 2009

Restaurant Marketing, Menus & Calorie Counts

Restaurant Marketing: It would make sense to me to post calorie counts on menus and readerboards so guests can make the right choice as opposed to a “fat” choice in deciding what to order. Wouldn’t knowing this go a long way in helping American’s healthcare and obesity problems?

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