Marketing Restaurant Online

Some of you may have watched the Superbowl Ad during the game intervals. Among many of the popular ads, one of the ad that grabbed my attention was Denny’s Restaurant Ad. Since I blog about Restaurant Marketing it is natural to gravitate towards restaurant ads to see how effectively they have managed their return on their millions of dollar Tv advertisement investment.

To my surprise, Denny’s Restaurant has brilliantly crafted this tv advertisement. With tv viewers less attention time span and the fact that their ad got not much of a time on the Superbowl ,they managed to grab the attention of many by offering Free Grand Slam breakfast for February 3rd, 2009 which is today. Remember the Superbowl was two days ago on Sunday February 1st of 2009. So right after two days, the memory of the ad is still fresh in many peoples mind. The breakfast offer is back to back just after two days. The marketing seems to follow well planned sequences.

How did Denny’s well planned marketing worked out so well in sequence by engaging them on the Tv screen and then attracting to their restaurant floor.

The other thing that I noticed today is that early in the morning I started getting twitter feeds about Free Grand Slam Denny’s breakfast. People were tweeting that they were going for free breakfast at Denny’s.  On the Tv ,Fox channel was giving a coverage about Denny’s Free Grand Slam breakfast. The host were interviewing some of the customers. I feel this is a great free public relation that the restaurant Denny’s got from the television network like Fox and possibly many more.I then made a brief tweet about Denny’s Free Grand Slam breakfast to my followers via my twitter account. I thought it would be useful to those who would like to have some free breakfast especially during economic down turn and more importantly to share the brilliance of this restaurant marketing.During the morning I searched for Denny’s in Twitter and found out so many buzz about the Free Grand Slam breakfast. It was funny that there was one guy who was frustrated with long waiting line in the DMV left for breakfast at the nearby Denny’s. I am sure there were many who were sharing the great Free breakfast offer  with others via twitter or other communication tools. This was spreading like wild fire. Wow! I believe that it was a great viral marketing.

The catch about this marketing is that the offer  was available only today for a  limited time from 6am to 2pm. So this created urgency for the customers if they wanted to take advantage of this offer. Though they might have lost some money on the breakfast they could have offset some of the  loss by offering some other suggestive selling once customers came to the restaurant. But clearly Denny’s strategy was a long term. They were willing to take short term loss to earn long term gain. They were making a clever effort to engage with as many customers as possible to remind them about their brand. They were giving a test drive for their tasty Grand Slam breakfast to many and some of them I believe who might have never tried one. This provided another opportunity to introduce their menu to new potential future customers and also remind the existing customers about their popular  breakfast.

I thought this was a great marketing effort by Denny’s restaurant especially during this economy downturn. What do you think about this marketing? Please do share your thoughts on this by commenting below.