Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: From our recent workshop in New Orleans, “How To Outwit, Outsell & Outlast the Competition.”

Restaurant Marketing: From our recent workshop in New Orleans, “How To Outwit, Outsell & Outlast the Competition,” the two words that seem to have been ingrained in those attending—Fascinating and Engaging. Are you fascinating? Do you engage with your guest? Can your guest engage with you, your restaurant, your product, your story, your community efforts?

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Friday, November 14, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: Follow these 9 restaurant marketing and hospitality steps to ensure you’ll still be standing after the dust settles.

1. Your Menu--
Is your menu—the best sales tool you have—designed to generate the highest profits possible? Or, are you continuing to sell low profit products that should be making more money? Analyze your complete menu right now. From my experience, a proper analysis of your menu has the potential to increase your profits 15% to 35%.

2. Your People--
Is your staff on your bandwagon? Explain to them that you are building a hospitality organization that’s going to survive these times. Are they on board? If not, get rid of them. You can’t afford to have a dissenter on your staff.

Allocate some of your advertising dollars into hiring great people and build a championship team that’s going to help you navigate these tough waters.

3. Your Differentiation, Your Story, Your Value--
Do you have a differentiation or value story to tell people? If you do, people will remember you and talk about you. If you don’t … they’ll forget about you and visit the restaurants they do remember. We all remember our bed time stories don’t we? Give your guests the “materials” they need to go out and “sell” for you and be your “marketing ambassadors.”

4. Your Connections--
Be the mayor. I’ve talked about this for 20 years. The major chains are losing their shirts right now because they invested their dollars in TV and radio, rather than in nurturing connections. Put your time and energy in developing relationships within your community. The only cost is your time.

5. Your Meeting Place--
Make your restaurant a headquarters – a meeting place. Find out what clubs are in your area … car clubs, business clubs, sport teams … and offer your facilities to meet.

6. Your Personality--
Get in front of people and be the face of the restaurant. Speaking in front of a 100 people is worth more (financially and in good will) than you can imagine.

7. Your Guests--
Your guests are the sole reason you exist in business. A lot of restaurants have forgotten that. So, make your guests feel important. Ask them for feedback. Ask them “how can you help them.” And, ask them why they chose to dine with you rather than competition.

8. Your Wow--
Everything you do, everything the guest sees about you, your restaurant, your menu, your food presentation, your greetings, your landscaping, your washroom, your lobby area, must be remarkable. If it’s mediocre, you’re just “another restaurant blending into the wall.”

9. Develop A Written Sales-Building Plan--
Ideas are a dime a dozen and don’t mean anything if they remain stored in your head and are part of the “I’ll get to it later” mental list. Write down what you want to achieve restaurant and by when ... and what it’s going to take to get you there.

From this, develop a three to six month sales-building plan. Get everyone’s (your whole staff’s) feedback and get them to “buy into” the program. And finally, get someone to hold you accountable for getting the plan done, because you will get stopped and revert back to the comfort zone of dealing with minutia and firefighting.

Having a written plan and having someone to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you implement the plan will make you “Unstoppable.”

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Helpful “Recession Proof” Restaurant Video Resources--

Menu Engineering Video CD: The 3-Part Menu Masters Engineering Course & How To Engineer Your Menu And Increase Your Profits 3 to 35%.

How To Recession Proof Your Restaurant Video CD: A 6 Point Game Plan + Bonus 116 page Book, “Wow! How To Win The Battle For Dining Dollars.”

For info on both of these , click on: Restaurant Recession Video CDs.

Posted by jcohen in • Restaurant Marketing
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Sunday, November 09, 2008

Restaurant Marketing: The Real Perception of Guest Value

Restaurant Marketing: There’s a big difference between what you as a restaurateur perceive as value and what a guest perceives as value. Just recently, our family of three dined at Schianno’s in Raleigh. We had 2 pizza slices, 1 kids pasta, 2 soft drinks, 3 salads for a total of $30. 

With just average tasting pizza and average service, there was little value here for my money. I felt we could have gotten a better value for the $40 by going elsewhere.  The dining experience was little value for the money spent. 

Technorati Tags: Restaurant Marketing Pizza Marketing

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Friday, October 31, 2008

A whopping 60% of restaurants said they have decreased their Yellow Page directory spending over the past two years, downgrading their listing from a display ad to a bold listing, or from a bold listing to free listing.

This was one of the many facts that surfaced in RestaurantMarketing.com’s “Restaurant Yellow Page Usage Report” – a survey of 214 different restaurants across the USA in various food and concept categories, from casual, to pizza to fine dining, taken in September 2008.

Restaurant marketer Joel Cohen, of RestaurantMarketing.com says that a total of 69% of respondents who decreased their Yellow Page expenditures over the past 2 years, eliminated their directory expenses altogether by going to a free listing.

Cohen reports that 42% of restaurants indicated when decreasing their directory expenditures, the Yellow page reps applied more sales pressure than usual and sometimes even threatening scare tactics.

Cohen says, “some restaurant owners reported that some sales reps said that their restaurant wouldn’t succeed without them being in the book. Some owners said they were hounded daily while others said they were the target of insults because of their decision.”

According to the survey, Cohen reports that the love affair with Yellow Pages is over. 80% of the restaurants surveyed said they didn’t feel that the various Yellow Page directories are successful in getting them new guests.

Over the next two to three years, 44% of the restaurants do not see the Yellow Pages as being part of their advertising budget, with 36% projecting it to be extremely minimal.

Technorati Tags: Yellow Pages Restaurant Marketing

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Sunday, October 26, 2008

Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse is lowering prices due to the economy, according to a story in the News & Observer.

I felt the article was one sided and exhalted the restaurants and owners/mgrs mentioned as making smart decisions. I felt that it advocates the fact that discounting for high end restaurants is a good business decision, when in fact it’s not.

The fact is that besides eating into the profits, which was rightfully mentioned, the discounting tactic is the lazy way out for trying to beat the recession.  What will the guests’ reactions be when the prices are raised? They’ll lose them.

It is a proven fact that lowering your prices in a recession tight economy is not the way to go. It devalues your product and devalues your restaurant.

Discounting is the penalty you pay for being unremarkable, not providing enough value and not having a written plan of action. And the restaurants mentioned are now paying that penalty.

If people don’t want to pay for your product, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.

Rather than decreasing prices the fact is that they should be increasing their value to their guests in other ways, whether it be a tie-in with for example Brooks Brothers, or a much better dining experience.

Sounds to me like neither one of these restaurants mentioned has a sales-building marketing plan based on increasing their value and what steps to take in a tight economy.

If they did, they wouldn’t take the lazy way out and discount.

Technorati Tags: Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse
Restaurant Marketing

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