Brand building beyond the 4 walls
Why restaurants need to invest in marketing, just like everybody else.
Photo of the Slow-Roasted Beet Salad (with Pop Rocks) at Eureka!
A couple weeks ago, I sat down for lunch with a marketer in the restaurant business. We hadn’t bothered to make reservations as we were in SoCal and having lived in SoCal for 5 years, I was innately aware that we were dining in a wonderful place called America. Because as you see, in America, when it comes to food options, one is presented with a superfluous amount of choice. And at our particular location in Irvine, we had over a dozen dining options within walking distance.
We settled on Eureka! which was a new restaurant for me, but it had met a combination of key criteria most people look for when trying a new restaurant:
- It was close — i.e. time was a factor.
- It fell within our dining category — i.e. a sit-down premium casual restaurant.
- It conveyed a brand experience we were seeking— i.e. we could see that it had a social atmosphere, offered an interesting menu variety, and was full of happy looking staff/patrons.
- And finally, we had heard good things — i.e. others had a posititve experience traversing the road before us so our expectations were set.
We sat down and I ordered the Slow-Roasted Beet Salad with Pop Rocks (pictured above). Those of you know grew up with Pop Rocks will be relieved to hear that it was paired with water and not cola. During the course of lunch, aided by the popping of sugar bubbles in my mouth, we had an animated discussion about the need for marketing in the restaurant business.
My entire career has been spent helping marketers build a brand that thrives in an ever-changing, digital age. I’ve worked with marketers in the CPG, fashion, apparel, media & entertainment, telecom, travel, consumer electronics, automotive, and insurance industries and there has never been a doubt that marketing and more recently digital marketing and technology play a key role in influencing - if not driving - the direction of the business and the brand.
However, curiously enough I have found that this isn’t always the case in the restaurant/food service business.
The 4 Walls
My companion - a restaurant-marketer by trade — and myself have had a few experiences where the question of whether marketing (sometimes equated with advertising) is at all necessary especially if the <insert delicious thing the restaurant is “known” for> is enough to drive traffic through word-of-mouth.
In the restaurant business, the 4 walls, refers to the experience within the physical space — the food, layout, service, music, smells, lighting, signage, menu, atmosphere, training, etc, and then slightly further out (4 blocks-4 miles).
Image above: OCFoodies blog.
Getting this experience right for the brand is challenging enough to pull off well so some restauranteurs I’ve met make it an obsession to focus primarily on perfecting their particular 4 wall formula.
It’s an interesting question to consider:
“Is marketing needed outside of the 4 walls in the restaurant business”?
In answering this question, I try to think objectively as a diner first, not as a digital marketer.
First of all, I won’t argue that in the restaurant business, the creation of a unique, mouth-watering, and cult-creating product such as Paseo’s sandwiches in Seattle, the Father’s Office burger in LA, and Salt & Straw ice-cream in Portland is sort of like being Heisenberg holding the exclusive formula for blue sky meth in a city full of addicts.
Image above: Seattle Bloggers
These are all personal examples of establishments where I will gladly ignore any sensitivities of time, money and distance and wait awkwardly in a line-up outside for the opportunity to enjoy the miracle of their inventions.
Secondly, I agree that having an obsession with the 4 walls is the right place to start for a restauranteur. Quite frankly, if your product sucks, the market will likely dictate your fate for you.
Case in point, on Feb 26, 2008, the all-powerful marketer Starbucks had lost its way and Howard Schultz’s instincts were right to shut down 7,100 stores nationwide in order to retrain its baristas on all the fundamental pieces that come together in making and serving the perfect drink.
Image above: Onward by Howard Schultz
With that said, unless you are the only restaurant located on an island without access to a boat, you do not have the luxury of having a product that sells itself. Heck, I’m hard-pressed to find an example of any mass consumer product that is so perfect that it is without significant competition. Even the fruit company in Cupertino needs to remind consumers of why it’s products are unique.
Forces that Demand Attention Beyond the 4 Walls
In a world of competition, where consumers have choices, and where the ubiquitous internet accelerates access to information, it is a rarity that a consumer’s dining decision-making looks like this:
Article above: from the geniuses at The Onion.
In a digital world, brand differentiation is more important than ever
In today’s world, fresh ideas, distinct products, and on the flip-side, poor experiences can be accelerated exponentially faster and further than the 4 miles around a company’s physical location. The restaurant business is no exception and the consumer experience doesn’t end with the back or the front of the house.
In respect to the disruption caused by these forces I believe that all restauranteurs need to invest in marketing beyond the 4 walls.
Before I explain, first a few caveats… There are a wide range of marketing tactics and tools that can be used to generate brand awareness, new foot traffic and repeat customers. There are plenty of restaurant experts who focus exclusively on this subject so my list isn’t meant to be exhaustive.
Furthermore, how much to invest and what to invest in should be specific to the restaurant’s specific category, brand, audience, objectives and challenges.
But beyond the 4 walls, I believe there are 4 other things a restaurant marketer MUST get right.
- Social
Beyond just engaging a fan base, social media has been used to drive traffic and sales beyond the 4 walls.
In 2009, Starbucks mobilized roughly 1M people into its stores nationwide through a simple Facebook promotion by leveraging its then 3.6M fan base.
The same year, Kogi through the help of Twitter pioneered the roving food truck phenomenon and introduced exciting new mashups jumping food categories of familiar cuisines.
Image: Kogi Pacman bowl
In 2010, 39M people around the world were using Yelp to help decide where they were going to eat.
With new social platforms, companies have experimented with new ways of connecting with consumers and even extending their counter. In 2012, Jeni’s Spendid Ice Cream was a pioneer in using Tumblr to sell its gourmet treats online beyond the footprint of its 14 stores.
And today, fueled by the proliferation of smart-phones, food photography has impacted the way some restaurants plate their food for the discerning amateur photographer.
Source: NY Times “Your Eyes Are Happier Than Your Stomach”
Social media is here to stay and will continue to transform the restaurant business in ways unseen.
2. Mobile
For the past few years, the industry has declared each particular year the “year of mobile”. Today it’s probably safe to hang that trophy on the wall as the maturity of mobile penetration has lead to huge bets, in particular in the restaurant business being made on mobile.
Beyond just a mobile-website, Starbucks had trialed new and improved customer experiences optimized for mobile early on. In 2010 they offered nationwide discounts for mayors of Foursquare. In 2011, they launched mobile payments and by the end of 2013, Starbucks did 1B in mobile payment revenue.
Recently Taco Bell has launched their own app that allows customers to skip the line, pre-order, and to receive access to exclusive menu items and deals.
With Apple and Paypal’s recent announcements around mobile payment for the restaurant business and a number of promising mobile loyalty start-ups such as Belly, Pirq, and Front Flip, the jury is still out on who the winners will be.
However it is clear that we are just at the beginning and that the impact of mobile on enhancing the restaurant experience is still ahead of us.
3. Everything else
Even within the 4-walls, restaurants of all sizes put out experiences that are meant to engage the consumer but haven’t been designed with digital in mind.
For example, business card fish bowl promotions, customer surveys, and gift cards are often confined to physical experiences and live disconnected from other systems.
Furthermore, the expectation by consumers that a restaurant provide free wi-fi is only going to increase and restauranteurs such as McDonalds, Starbucks and Denny’s have been ahead of the trend.
And in order to decrease the friction of ordering and payment associated with human interaction, some restaurants such as Chili’s are rolling-out tablet ordering nationwide.
This article in the Atlantic pretty much summarizes how I feel about this idea.
I don’t believe in chasing the latest technologies just because they’re the latest technologies, nor do I advocate that more technology makes for a better dining experience.
But every touchpoint is an opportunity to reinforce the brand experience, so if your restaurant is about speed first in sacrifice of human interaction with all its fallacies, then perhaps putting a device on every table is right for you.
4. Leading with Purpose over Product.
And finally, in a digital world, a brand is a collection of all experiences -physical, digital, emotional, put together.
Today’s consumers have been empowered by digital. The are active participants, not a passive audience. They’re looking for substance, authenticity and meaning. They don’t simply choose brands, they join them based on a shared vision of how life should be lived.
At Modern Craft, we believe that Purpose is the glue that holds it all together.
Chipotle spends less than 2% of revenue on advertising and when it does, it focuses on communicating its brand purpose of Food with Integrity, which differentiates WHAT the restaurant offers from WHY. This bigger mission sometimes puts Chipotle in conflict with the ability to offer a better quality product at a fast-casual price. But I personally find this position a lot more interesting than Qdoba who leads with a rather vapid promise that they’re all about “food for people who love food.” If both restaurants were beside each other and offers equally tasty burritos, I would choose a brand with purpose every time.
In Conclusion
On the final day of my trip to SoCal, I met an old friend and colleague in Manhattan Beach for lunch. However having not been to MB for over 6 years, I was less informed about the options available to us.
So I did exactly what most consumers do — I Yelped. I landed on Lemonade which, if you’re not familiar with the concept, is a chic, SoCal-inspired restaurant serving healthy cafeteria-style food and amazing lemonade concoctions. If you haven’t tried it yet, I’m betting it will soon come to you, as the chain is already poised for explosive growth.
After reading a number of reviews, I went to their website to see what they were all about:
It was a perfect example of a restaurant that gets the 4 walls experience right, and delivers the brand beyond those walls in a digital world.
The biggest challenge of today’s marketer isn’t how to make all the technology work or how to be on every channel, it is making the right choices on where to invest their effort and how to execute in those channels in a way that is right for the brand.
As my colleague John puts it, it’s about putting more brand in your digital, and more digital in your brand.
The shameless plug
We built Modern Craft specifically for the modern marketer who is looking to build a brand in the digital age. We do this by providing sound direction and detailed plans on how to evolve the brand, which channels and tactics to pursue, and what infrastructure to invest in. We don’t solve problems with shallow tips or vague listicles, or by pushing the latest or flashiest piece of technology. We don’t proclaim to be gurus or visionaries, we’re just a group of smart and experienced guys who like to help clients tackle meaty challenges.
If you care to read more about how we’ve applied our craft to the restaurant business, check out our Medium post on Islands Restaurants.
