Restaurant Marketing Blog

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Restaurant Marketing: Sometimes I don’t get it. Restaurant marketing people, mostly with the larger chains, don’t understand their customers. Jersey Mike’s ran a huge full color insert in Sunday’s paper with valuable coupon offers and then went on to say that the offer was “good only at participating locations?”  Huh? Participating locations? What does that mean? That some units accept the offers and others don’t? And where is the list of units with their addresses that DO accept the coupons. I guess it’s up to us to figure out where the nearest Jersey Mike’s location is and then (good luck)—is it a participating location? Somehow, that’s not smart restaurant marketing.

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Friday, March 26, 2010

Restaurant Marketing: Walked into the Gibson Cafe in the Nashville Airport. The restaurant is adorned with fabulous Gibson guitars played by famous rock bands. One guitar caught my eye. I asked for the story behind the guitar—who owned it…and the staff didn’t even know. I asked “why not?” They said, “the owners never told us.” What a shame. An opportunity to tell a great story gone lost.

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

Restaurant Advertising Marketing: Have restaurants given up on advertising, believing the hype that Facebook and other forms of social media is the “new advertising road to riches?” Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of various social media platforms, but only if they’re used properly. And by properly, I don’t mean throwing out innocuous comments and discounts to your fans. That’s not advertising. That’s training them to be coupon cherry pickers.

And, while I’m a strong advocate of creating WOW’s to initiate conversations, I’m not an advocate of putting marketing eggs in one basket, hoping they’ll hatch golden geese.

And so I want to remind you that advertising is still a good thing. Yes, it’s harder to advertise these days because it’s more difficult now to get attention; more difficult to stand out and be heard. But, everything’s more difficult these days. So, we tend to default to the easy route and plop out a Facebook business page or a coupon and call that “advertising.”

Advertising is the manner of creating attention and persuading your target audience to purchase from you. Advertising is easy; what isn’t easy is that which makes your advertising successful—and that’s getting the attention of your target audience with a creative message.

And so I ask you these three questions—

  * How are you persuading your target audience that your restaurant is great?
  * How creatively strong is your message so that it sinks into the mind of a prospective guest?
  * Is it possible that if you’re not persuading, you’re not growing?

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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Restaurant Marketing: It’s great to be the first at anything because then you can market yourself as being the innovator. You can’t do that if you’re the second, third or fourth. Congrats to Panera for taking the step to be the first chain to include calorie counts on the menu readerboards.  They’ll get a heap of p/r out of it.

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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

McDonald’s mystery sauce oozes out of breakfast sandwich:  I ordered a McDonald’s Bacon Egg Cheese on Bagel sandwich and oozing out of it was a “mystery” sauce. Had no idea what it was, except the bagel was “oozing.” Not a pretty sight.  All I expected and wanted was bacon, egg and cheese on a bagel, just what the menu readerboard said.

Not knowing what this yucky stuff was, I called the store and the manager said they put this special sauce on it. I asked her why it’s not in the descriptive of the product and why you’re not telling people and I got the usual “I don’t know.” 

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