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

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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