More Restaurant Marketing Lemons

General retail marketing strategies don’t work for restaurants. No restaurant puts butts in seats by selling themselves - no one wants to be sold anymore. They do so by telling their story to a target market which makes a connection to those guests who have a social proclivity for patronizing that restaurant in the first place.

Retail strategies and tactics are great if you want to create a commodity, compete on price and slug it out in your market along with every other like minded concept that wants to sell a chicken sandwich.

Restaurants sell experiences not products. Marketing them like Wal Mart, Sears, Gap, Apple, HP, et al is just plain dumb and is extremely dangerous for any operator who would give them a second thought and still expect to create a success

The people who espouse this type of nonsense are very oftenr those who do not work with or understand how restaurants work.

Here are 10 more issues.

1. There are no “one-size-fits-all” strategies and “best practices” don’t work.

2. Each strategy is as unique as is each restaurant concept.

3. There are no strategic correlations between retail marketing (products) and restaurants (experience).

4. Wal-Mart, Sears, Macy’s et al have customers whose primary activity is browsing, restaurants have guests whose primary activity is social interaction.

5. Guest experiences are based on value relationships and emotional connections made by the front-line employees of the restaurant.

6. Word of mouth marketing (WOMM) is the best, most cost-effective, simplest, direct means of adding, engaging or acquiring new guests.

7. Mass marketing doesn’t work.

8. Social media (social websites & the like) haven’t proven themselves capable of any consistent ROI yet.

9. “Build it and they will come” is not a strategy.

10. While this discussion is about strategy, a single comment on a particular tactic - “Sampling” is not an effective tactic for acquiring new guests.

10.5 Positioning is 9/10’s of success.

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