Restaurant marketers’ jobs are getting more complicated every day, not only with the proliferation of ways to reach customers, but also with the major shift in what post-recession consumers want, said Aric Nissen, vice president of marketing for Minneapolis-based Famous Dave’s, the 184-unit chain of barbecue restaurants.
Executives from some of the industry’s largest chains gathered to discuss these forces last month at the fall conference of the Marketing Executives Group, or MEG, a National Restaurant Association study group that Nissen co-chairs with Jennifer Weerheim of Yard House Restaurants. The three-day conference, held in Miami under the theme “Real Challenges — Epic Solutions,” featured a keynote speech by Red Mango founder Dan Kim. Breakout sessions also covered consumer trends — including a presentation by John Gerzema, co-author of “Spend Shift” — as well as social media, local-store marketing, mobile advertising and growth strategies.
Change will continue to be constant in the next year for marketers, Nissen said. But whether they are getting their restaurant brands up to speed with mobile or social marketing — or getting them prepared for mobile-social, he joked — genuine connections with guests remain the most important fundamental that underpins any marketing innovation.
“You can engineer a loyalty program or drive traffic with a mobile app or a points system,” Nissen said. “But at the base level, it’s about trust.”
What was the biggest challenge on everyone’s mind at the MEG conference?
The big challenges are twofold. First, economically, the structure has changed. If the market goes up, down or sideways, we still have to produce value for our guests and shareholders while building our brands over the long term. We don’t really know if next year’s going to be a rapid recovery, a slight recovery or a dip back down.
The second thing is the explosion in the way we communicate with one another, and not just in the traditional social media of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Mobile marketing and smartphones are another revolution waiting to happen. They’re going to impact the industry in a huge way, from how customers perceive us to how they pick restaurants.
How has the foodservice customer changed from even a few years ago?
John Gerzema crystallized how radically different the consumer is today from five years ago, in that behavior and attitudes have gone from mindless consumption to mindful consumption. People are voting with their pocketbooks and realizing that in order to take more control of their lives, they’re only spending money with companies whose values align with theirs. Values of brands that mattered in the past were “mysterious,” “confident” and “glamorous,” but today the attributes consumers rate as most important are “kind,” “high quality,” “friendly” and “socially responsible.” I think Chipotle is on to something with their “Food with Integrity” campaign.
What key improvement should every restaurant marketer consider right now?
The cornerstone of it now is probably online ordering. But let’s take a step back. If you have a website now, think about how it could be simplified and accessible from a mobile device so that it’s easy to find locations and get one-push directions and one-push contact info. It’s about letting customers find you efficiently.
We may want to put our stories up there and get deep into our menu, but that stuff is secondary to helping the guest find a location and figuring out what to buy quickly. After that, the door’s wide open for mobile payments, mobile gift cards, location-based [platforms] and all kinds of apps for inside and outside our restaurants.
A thing that blew my mind was when one of our speakers demonstrated an augmented-reality app [for a smartphone] where you scan a street with your phone, and all the Yelp reviews pop up as you go down a row of restaurants.
So much restaurant marketing is being done around price points now. But is there a way to increase loyalty without dramatically lowering the average check?
What we saw at the conference is that discounting is actually the way to destroy loyalty. By making it about the price point, you’re commoditizing the brand. Restaurants need to figure out how and why they’re different and pitch that in a way that’s relevant. The technologies have never been better for loyalty programs, but you build loyalty by building the connections with guests, exceeding their expectations, and then being their top choice.
Is there a way to keep up with new marketing technologies without taking your eye off important fundamentals like local-store marketing?
My prediction for local-store marketing is that it actually grows in prominence. Local matters most. At our “Small Budgets, Big Impact” panel, there were lots of local-store marketing ideas. As brands are able to have that one-to-one connection through e-mail or text programs or Facebook pages, the requirement that you have mass advertising dollars goes away. You can easily customize a promotion on the local level, just like how not all our Famous Dave’s locations are doing smoked turkeys this Thanksgiving season. n
Contact Mark Brandau at mark.brandau@penton.com.
Follow him on Twitter @Mark_from_NRN.
