What are you really selling?
What exactly is your unique selling point (USP), what makes you different from all the other restaurants and why. Look at areas such as food style, pricing structure, menu items, menu presentation, wine list, staff, atmosphere, etc.
Why not gather your staff and sit down for a coffee and discuss what makes you different from other restaurants.
Write a list until you have say, thirty areas and maybe in the end you will conclude that you do nothing to separate what you do from any other restaurant. Nothing strong enough to make your restaurant stand out from the crowd.
To give you a clear idea of what I mean let’s quickly look at a business that has a more clearly defined unique selling point. For example, when you think about cars, which car comes to mind when you associate safety with it? In most cases, Volvo is recognised as the safest car in the market. Do you honestly believe that it is the safest car? Who knows if it is or not. What Volvo has done is taken the safety issue and make it their USP. You will most likely find that it is no safer than a lot of other cars.
Back to the restaurant business. Have a look at each of the areas identified above as being similar to other restaurants and look at what you can do to stand out. Some may require little thought. The pricing structure may be okay, customer expectation rises in direct proportion to your pricing and in many areas pricing is determined by the local demographics. So maybe leave pricing alone.
Maybe you need to change the menu, the presentation, the wine list and so on. At the same time, you need to come up with a USP that was strong enough to use for marketing purposes. You may finally identify one and go through the changes and implement them.
The one thing that you will find becomes apparent whilst working through this process is that you are not marketing food. In much the same way as Volvo markets safety to sell cars and McDonalds markets to kids to sell to adults, you have to market an experience or a reason other than the food and beverages to sell food and beverages. I know this sounds confusing! If you market food and beverages then the customer puts you in the same category as other restaurants that market food and beverages (and it is a big category). The ideal category is a unique one that contains only your restaurant and that is what your ideal goal should be.
You can have the best food in the world and not be busy. The general public would not believe you even if it were true. They may believe you if you pitched that your restaurant had the ‘leading’ sales of barramundi in Australia’. They may even choose to eat with you believing that you had the freshest barramundi. But if you told them that you sold the best barramundi it is unlikely that you would be believed!
Do people buy bottled water because they want water? I think they buy it because they want “pure” water. Does it make sense? In a strange kind of way it does.
Everybody eats. Every day they make a decision about where they would like to eat (home, takeaway, restaurant, pizza delivery, etc ). When they ask the question “where shall we eat tonight?” You should ask the question “Why should customers dine in my restaurant?” It’s a tough question.
Restaurant and Cafe Marketing
Businesses can survive for some time with poor record-keeping, insufficient finance or a lack of management skills, but they cannot survive without a market.
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What our foodie entrepreneur says…
“Linda has a vast knowledge of restaurant and catering management. Lots of information relevant to my business. I’ll definitely download more of her user-friendly eBooks in the near future.” Vanitha Lang (Kastury’s Indian Cuisine).
