Monthly Archives: February 2009

Restaurant Marketing in 2009 – Do or Die Time for Many Restaurants!

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Guest Post By:

Bill Sifflard – (From http://newentrepreneuressentials.com )            With over thirty years experience as an entrepreneur, an executive and as a management consultant, Bill Sifflard understands the challenges and opportunities that small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs face. Bill brings a savvy mix of innovation, technology and experience to help small business owners thrive and grow in this changing market.

Does your restaurant have an effective marketing strategy for 2009?

Does your restaurants marketing strategy include a bWeb 2.0 marketing philosophy geared towards your business, or are you clinging to the hope that a new newspaper coupon will drive business through your door.  If you own, manage and/or handle the marketing for a restaurant, than I have one simple question.  Do you know who your customer is? I do not mean do you recognize their face, or know their first name when they come in for lunch or dinner.  I mean, do you actually know who they are, so you can communicate with them and manage an effective marketing campaign to establish them as a loyal customer who will think of you first when they are deciding where to spend their dining dollars?

Five Essentials to Restaurant Marketing in 2009

There are five essentials that any restaurant who wants to survive and thrive in 2009 needs to embrace in order to drive business to their front door.  It requires a paradigm shift for many restaurateurs, that is hard to face, but you are in a battle to win over a diner, who has many choices.

The strategy is not to spend more money on newspaper, radio or even TV ads, as for many restaurant owners I have spoken to their budgets have dried up due to higher food costs, strong competition from chains and fewer customers.

1. “Capture The Customer” Philosophy

You need to make it the #1 goal of each one of your wait staff, bartenders, host staff and bus people, to capture every customer that walks through your door.  Now I am not suggesting that you drag them into a banquet room and not let them out. What you need to do is effectively train your team to capture the name and contact information (name, email and mailing address if you can), of each guest who visits your establishment, so that you can quantify who they are, what they like, where they live and begin your work to develop them as a loyal patrons for life.There are a variety of ways to do this, but to be successful you need to give to get.

2. Abandon Your Old “YAMETO Marketing Strategy”

To many restaurant’s market themselves based not on a strategy to drive customers into seats, but on a strategy based on what everyone else is doing.   I call this the “YAMETO Marketing Strategy”, because everyone ends up following each other saying “Ya, me to!”.    You see a competitor with an ad in the newspaper, so you feel compelled to respond with your own. I was told by one owner that he runs ad’s each week so people know he is still open.  That seems like an awfully defensive marketing strategy to me.One restaurant runs a special that seems to work for them and soon everyone is offering a similar deal.  How many restaurant ads that offer “buy one dinner and get one free” can they actually fit on the same page in a
newspaper?You can not abandon marketing, you have to attack it differently.  If you stop to cut costs you will quickly be forgotten in this market where people are going out less and looking for deals more. What you need to do is enhance your marketing strategy, so that you can separate yourself from the crowd.  You have to do it in a cost effective yet strategic way, that will maintain your existing client base, while pulling in new diners to capture.

3. Harness the Power of bWeb 2.0 Marketing

It is not enough for your restaurant to have a Web 1.0 site that shows some nice pictures of your restaurant, map with directions, contact info and  the menu.  I am sure that many restaurant owners have spent thousands of dollars on this type of site, but it will not set you apart from the competition and is just a glorified yellow pages ad that is created to “talk at the person who visits your site”. I am not saying that having a good looking static web presence is not important.  People who are searching for you, can easily find out where you are and what you offer.  What I am saying is that this site is not going to drive people through your door unless they are already thinking about and looking for you. To effectively take advantage of bWeb 2.0 marketing you need to blend a marketing strategy that enables “you to communicate
and interact with your customer“, so you can identify who they are, target their feedback, respond to their interests and remind and motivate them to visit you often.

4. Start An Interactive Dialogue

There are a variety of bWeb 2.0 tools that are available to begin a dialogue with your customers (as you capture them) and reach out to new ones to draw them in to be captured also.  The key is to develop these new strategies and blend them with your traditional marketing efforts (that you know work), to establish an interactive dialogue with your customer that will build loyalty and keep you in the forefront when it comes time to plan a dinner out.

There are a variety of tools that you can use develop and manage this interactive dialogue with your customers.  They include

* Blog posts about the restaurant and upcoming events
* Interactive web calendar
* Email coupons and monthly specials
* Email newsletter
* Polls and feedback
* Postcards
* Frequent Dining Club Cards
* Birthday emails or cards
* Be a community conduit (get involved getting the word out)
* Online reservations

5. Consistency is Key

There is no doubt that this requires a level of commitment to market your business effectively, but much of the work can be outsourced, automated or handled by a VA “Virtual Assistant”, if you do not have a marketing person on staff.

Once you develop an effective marketing strategy and system for your restaurant, then you need to get complete acceptance and buy-in from you team, as they are the ones who are going to make it work in the long run.  If they believe in it and see the value, then they will make it a success.  Then it is developing a consistent message and philosophy to capture every person who walks through your door and make them a customer for life!

Metrics

An important element to any marketing plan is to develop metrics and track your results in order to identify your ROMI “Return on Marketing Investment”, so you can adjust your marketing efforts and develop a budget in the future that works for you, and you not working for it.

No one marketing strategy is going to work the same for all restaurants.  There are a variety of variables that need to be considered.  You are going to need to test market and evaluate what your customers respond to, and what they do not.  You should always be prepared to make adjustments to your marketing strategy and try different combination of tools, promotions and campaigns, to see which ones work the best.

Remember this is a long term campaign to create lifetime customers.

Taking Effective Action

In any small business you either change and adapt to changes in the market and maneuver yourself to stay in position to ride the crest of the wave. If you don not make those adjustments than you risk getting caught in the trough and getting swallowed and bounced off the rocky bottom as the wave of change rolls by you.

Ask yourself three simple questions tonight.

* Do I really know who my customers, are and can I market to them directly?
* Do I have a plan in place to adapt and capture new customers in 2009?
* Am I able to quantify the effectiveness of the marketing dollars I currently spend?

To learn more about bWeb 2.0 marketing or additional marketing ideas for restaurants as well as any small business go to Bssential Small Business Solutions.   Please give me your thoughts, ideas, questions, feedback or success strategies that you have implemented.

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Restaurant Discount Marketing Is What A New York Restaurant Implements By Cutting Prices. Is This The Right Strategy To Survive The Recession?

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Note- The idea presented in this article is based on latest trends in food industry that I have been reading in newspapers, customers perspective on food expenditure habits that I saw on  CNN and some  hard brainstorming. Success is not guaranteed. But it is worth giving a shot.

I watched the CBS news channel online and they were talking about restaurant industry that has been hit hard due to the Downturn Economy. Even the high end New York restaurant like Le Cirque who enjoyed the luxury of serving the elites from Hollywood stars like Sinatra  to powerful political figure like Jacqueline Kennedy, is suffering due to the slow economy. There were times when customers had to fight for the seats at the restaurant. But now the restaurant has to fight for the customers to fill those  seats by even cutting the prices of the food in their menu.

No doubt it has not only affected the high end restaurants but all types of restaurants around the country. But is it this the right strategy to survive in this Economic Downturn?

To survive one has to do anything that would help sustain their restaurant business. But cutting the price alone will not help as your profit margin decreases significantly when your rent, mortgage, food cost remain the same. So what should we really do as a restaurant owners? This is a big dilemma.

In the midst of this economic chaos, there is another restaurant chain McDonald’s that has increased the sales and profits during this year than last year.  So why is this happening when one is losing and the other is winning?

There are several factors why McDonald’s is still profitable even during the economic downturn. One of the key reason is the Pricing. Their pricing is so economically scientific  that it is virtually recession proof. Be it good time or bad time, people love the price. In fact during the bad economic times like  now, people are more attracted because they want to survive but at an affordable price. Let’s face it, no matter how bad the economy is people need to eat in order to survive. I don’t think people are going to say, that economy is bad, so I won’t  eat for now and I will eat later when I have the money. Truth of the matter is that even if you don’t have money people will have to eat even if they have to do it by borrowing. They can postpone the vacation or furniture they planned to buy but not the food that they have to eat in order to survive.

The question is  what can you as an independent restaurant do to attract those customers who don’t want to cook at their home and try some other reasonable alternative?

Well, I can not tell what you can do or can’t do because every one’s situation is different from one another. But what I can share with you is some of the creative ideas that people have implemented to grow their restaurant business in non traditional way and may be make more profit than you would make other wise.

I read this in one of the newspapers article that there is a trend getting popular in the restaurant industry  in some countries like Australia, England and also some Asian countries.The trend is that they offer            “Pay What You Think Is Right” for the food that they serve in their restaurant without ever handing the restaurant bills. Considering the tough economic situation, looking at the new trends and combining with the right pricing logic behind McDonald’s success even during the Economic Downturn, it sparks an idea of introducing the similar “Pay What You Think Is Right” pricing model here in United States too.

During tough economic times customers have less disposable income to spent in fancy pricey restaurants. So the barriers for any body to eat in a decent restaurant is the price. In order to get rid of the price factors from the mind of the people restaurant could introduce“Pay What You Think Is Right” pricing model. So now the people who wanted to have a good food at a nice restaurant without having to fear the pricey tag are more comfortable to go and try their food. Psychologically it  takes off the price pressure from the customers mind. Now this soft sell enables them to allure more customers who would otherwise not come or would try other alternative like cooking at their own house or go for other cheaper food at some fast food chains. After having the meal, to your surprise the customers actually would leave little more than what you would charge them on the actual invoice. I think this is natural that when people are not controlled they tend to be flexible. In fact they tend to pay more as they feel obligated for the trust that you have on them for their best judgement. Well all of them might not drop the same amount. In most cases larger proportion  would drop more than you would charge them. Though there might be few who might drop less than the meal value, when you average all of them, you would still be a winner. Because with this strategy, you would fill the restaurant which other wise would have been empty anyway.

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Restaurant Internet Marketing-3 Steps To Recession Proof Your Restaurant Business During Slow Economy.

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Everyday there is some kind of bad news about economy on the television, radio, newspaper you name it. Well it does have an impact on business but it doesn’t mean that you have to sit paralyzed doing nothing. Instead of thinking there is no customers, one should re-frame that mind set to how can I attract the customers that do have money with effective and affordable marketing campaign. If you are creative you can do it for free by implementing some of the free online tools available on the internet. For smart restaurant marketers, it can never be the best time to  shine by providing remarkable product and service when all your competitors are pulling back.

Watch the above video and you will get some ideas on how to battle through the sluggish economy. There are 3 key critical things that can be abstracted from the video for small restaurant which they can implement to succeed during the Economic Downturn. They are as follows:

  1. Increase your marketing-Online Marketing
  2. Measure your online marketing campaigns
  3. Repeat upon successful “Return On Investment” of your marketing.
  • Increase your marketing-Online Marketing – Marketing is the first thing that you don’t want to cut back. By Marketing I mean Internet Marketing because it is effective and affordable and in some cases virtually free or very low cost.
  • Measure your online marketing campaigns – Always measure what you are trying to achieve from your restaurant internet marketing effort. As it is said you can never know if you succeed or failed if you don’t measure your effort. The traditional marketing medium like Tv, radio or newspaper have never been able to measure the results of your restaurant marketing let alone the effectiveness.
  • Repeat upon successful “Return On Investment” of your marketing-As a restaurant business owner or entrepreneur one always ask return on investment of your online marketing. If you spend 15 cents for a click on You Tube video marketing for the catering and got $500 dollars worth of catering business then it is a great return on your marketing investment. I would go with it closing my eyes. Once you succeed your first online marketing effort, repeat the same strategy with slight variation. There is no limit on testing on similar internet marketing campaigns, refining them and finding success.

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Restaurant Video Marketing-Using You Tube, How Dunkin Donut Created Effective Marketing Even During The Slow Economy That is Powerful Than Superbowl Ad.

Posted on February 7, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

I have to admit that I admire how Dunkin Donut does their marketing so effectively bringing the humanly feelings side of marketing despite the fact that it is a big corporate. Big Corporate for me in most cases is not associated with relationship building.They are still hung up on old industrial age mass media marketing.

When I watched the video, there were couple of things that I liked about it that is worth mentioning.McCall Gosselin, Communications Manager of Dunkin Donut understands the relationship marketing and has integrated that aspect in the video marketing campaign. First of all it is not some sort of cheesy ad that your eyes ball are accustomed to which you desperately want to flip the channel. Though the video is to promote their Dunkin Donut brand, they are not doing it  like some of the other restaurant brand does like say “hey we have the best steak, come and try us.” In my opinion no body cares about the best steak. All people cares is if it solves their problem. So the video is going with that approach to begin with. Instead of saying we have the best coffee than Starbucks or McDonald’s, they are saying ” Hey customers we understand that economy is hurting you, so as a gesture of your loyalty for the good times, we want to extend our hand by giving you Free train ride and also a chance to win Free train ride and Free Coffee for the whole year of 2009. There are four aspects in this video marketing that resonates with the loyal customers . They are as follows:

  1. Relationship Building- Engaging with them
  2. Sense of Caring – Giving away a free one year train ride and Coffee
  3. Entertaining – By bringing in Peter Ostrum-”Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory” Actor
  4. Inspiring people even during the Low times
  • Relationship Building- Engaging with them-Dunkin Donut marketing team has gone to the Boston’s South station where their  customers are. That is the place where every morning all of their customers commute sometimes with a cup of Dunkin Donut coffee in their hand. They go right there and engage them by educating them about the Free train ride and Free coffee for the whole year of 2009 and also giving away free train rides right then and there. They are talking to the customers building a rapport and relationship.
  • Sense of Caring – Giving away a free one year train ride and Coffee - The fact that they are giving away the free train ride right then and there and also a chance to win Free train ride and Free coffee for the whole year of 2009, shows that Dunkin Donut do care about their customers even during the bad times. It is a gesture of extending hand for the loyalty that they showed to Dunkin Donut during the good times. I think this is the most powerful marketing than the short lived multi million dollar Super Bowl Ad on the television.
  • Entertaining – By bringing in Peter Ostrum of the 1971 film “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory”. Dunkin Donut is entertaining its customers by providing an opportunity to interact with Peter Ostrum and re kindle their old memory and at the same time bringing fun and joy even during the bad economic times. It is a small thing but it does matter. The customers were delighted to receive Charlie cards and ” Gold en Ticket”. How cool is that to see in person and receive from Peter Ostrum who you have admired from your child hood.
  • Inspiring people even during the Low times- It is also inspiring for the people to see that Dunkin Donut is on their side even during the low times. The fact that their campaign says “You Kin’ Do It” stresses that they support their  customers  be it good time or bad time.  The other message that I feel that they are giving is that despite the Economic Down-turn, keep your heads up, strive to succeed, be creative and you will find your way. That’s why Dunkin Donut says, “You Kin’ Do It”

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7 Tips On Marketing Your Business In Downturn Economy By Seth Godin.

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Seth Godin-entrepreneur and best selling author of 10 books has successfully helped thousands and thousands of small and big companies to be remarkable. He has a great wisdom of knowledge to all the businessess-small or big including restaurants during this Economic Downturn.He encourages everyone to change our idea about industrial age mass media marketing and laser focus in leadership marketing built around community which he likes to call tribes.

After watching the video released on Mashable and listening to his interview on Ducttape marketing podcast, what I learnt from him as a restaurant entrepreneur are:

  1. Less competition- Best time to shine.
  2. Show up.
  3. Be the best.
  4. Hire irreplaceable people
  5. Speed and Timely delivery
  6. Focus on relationship marketing not advertisements
  7. Be creative and innovative to even beat the large multi billion dollar restaurant chain
  • Less Competition – Best time to shine. -During the Economic Downturn most of the business including restaurants pull back because they panic and starts thinking irrationally. They cut down their marketing expenses. That’s why there is less competition.That means there are less restaurants in the battle field. This is the best time to shine and grab all the customers that are looking for great restaurant with remarkable food and great service.
  • Show up- Again because of the slow economy restaurant entrepreneurs think that there is no business so there is no point to show up in any events be it trade show or marketing coaching seminars. But this is the time to show up in events to network and fine tune your marketing campaign to laser target the customers you desire.
  • Be the best. He encourages you to be the best restaurant in  your area. Don’t be a generic brand sandwich store. I can make the same thing at my own home. He talks about a Greek Supermarket in New York. They are the best market with in driving radius miles for  the best goat cheese. So when people need the goat cheese they don’t look for sale in Wal-Mart or Costco. They go straight to the Greek Supermarket.
  • Hire irreplaceable. Restaurant Business is known for high turn over. There is a general concept of hiring cheap labour. I understand that as a business you have to control labour cost. At the same time, one has to focus on hiring the people with the right people skills who can stay for a long haul. You will save more in a long term than that you might save 50 cents an hour on the labour who doesn’t posses the skills required for hospitality industry and most probably leave your restaurant once he or she finds another restaurant who pays that extra 50 cents an hour that you were hesitant to pay.
  • Speed and timely delivery- Speed is critical especially in this fast paced world. One of the key ingredients to McDonald’s success is the speed. No wonder they make billions by delivering billions of burgers at a lightning speed. If you are taking more than 2 minutes and 45 seconds to deliver your customer food in a quick service restaurant environment or taking more than 30 minutes to deliver your pizza then it is time to structure your business to fulfill that timely delivery demands.
  • Focus on relationship marketing and not advertisements- He argues that the ad that we saw during the Superbowl were great to watch. But they are expensive and short lived. They die and fade away after Superbowl. What you want to focus is on the relationship with your customer by understanding their needs  and fulfilling those demands. It all starts with permission.
  • Be creative and innovative to even beat the large multi billion dollar restaurant chain-Every economic crisis has opportunity. In this economic down turn be creative and think out of the box.With your innovative online marketing you have a chance to even beat the big multi billion dollar restaurant chains. He says Twitter one of the fastest growing company online today doesn’t have millions and billions of capital with them. All they have is a great team of few people with a laser focused vision.

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Restaurant Business Productivity-How Google’s To Do List Can Help You Remain Productive.

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Google has released it’s To Do List on Gmail which I thought to share with you.Since every one of us has to do list that we don’t want to forget, it is a vital tool that can help us become productive. Considering your restaurant hectic schedules, I understand how organized one has to be and most importantly not to forget theimportant tasks necessary that might impact your business financially. I believe this simple tool would help you both in personal and business life.

The nice thing about this feature is that it is online. That means it is mobile. Even if you forget your mobile phones you can access your to do list from any internet enable devices be it desktop, laptop or other mobile phones and from any place be it Paris or Singapore or New York. You can manage it with your Gmail account. All you have to do is type Gmail.com/task and it will lead you to its online To Do List tool. You can
save it and bookmark it on your iPhone or GPhone or any other mobile devices which has internet access.  You can add the important things to be done on your mobile to do list online tool. Once the work gets done, you can delete and focus on the other important thing. This might keep you organised and be productive especially in fast paced, hectic life of your restaurant business.

I hope this might be useful to you. Do let us know how it is helping you in your restaurant business life. We would like to share with other restaurant owners like you who could benefit from this.

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Increased Restaurant Sales And Profits During The Economy Downturn-How To Do It?

Posted on February 5, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

1 out of 10 restaurants started in America fails in the first five years. Why most restaurant business fail despite the best food in the town?

Most of the restaurants get started with the good intention to make profits. But do they make it to the end. I don’t think that 9 out of 10 make it. They doom to fail within first five years.It is sad but true statistic from the Small Business Administration.

Most of the restaurant fails not because they lack great food but because they lack great marketing. And that is Online Marketing.

Has it happened to you or that you have seen some restaurants with average food that has attracted big lines at their doors and the one with the great food doesn’t have customers at all. Well the fundamental difference is that the restaurant with lots of customers focuses his effort in marketing. He spends 80% of his time creating some brilliant marketing campaign for his restaurant so he can attract more and more customers every month like a clock works. He has marketing system in place where he opens and closes the valve of the marketing to increase and control the volume of business he wants.

My question to you is, do you have the control over the flow of traffic to your restaurant?

If not then it is time to think differently. It is time to focus on marketing. By any means I am not suggesting that you don’t have to maintain the quality of the food. You have to have a great product to begin with. In fact you can have an average product and if you market it well then you are far ahead than the guy who is hung up on making the best food in town and having no clue about marketing his product. Take an example of McDonald’s. It doesn’t have the best hamburger, and yet it is the most profitable and the largest restaurant chain in the world.

McDonald’s has one of the best system that produces the so called great hamburgers at a greater speed than any restaurant chain. In the past they created the drive thrus to speed up the service. Well now you might say that McDonald’s has great amount of capital. Truth of the matter is that you don’t have to have tons of money in this age of technology. All you need is your time and creativity into online marketing that can be systemized leveraging the internet.

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4 Reasons Why McDonald’s Has Increased Sales And Profits Even During Economic Downturn. What Can Your Restaurant Learn From It.

Posted on February 4, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Today every restaurant entrepreneur are feeling the pain of economic downturn. There is no doubt that it had an impact on all businesses including restaurants. It had an effect of sales decrease by 30% and in some cases up to 50%. Despite all the economic turmoil, there is one restaurant empire which in fact has increased sales and profit this year than last year as reported by the Quick Service Restaurant Magazine. So the question is how on earth, McDonald’s is able to make more sales and more profit while other restaurants are suffering with low sales and less profits.

Well the answer lies in their mantras that they have been using for years and still continue to use them today. The four key ingredients to their success are

  1. Quality
  2. Service
  3. Cleanliness
  4. Speed

Watch the video where they talk specifically about those four things and execute them consistently. The first thing starts with the quality of the product. Their new item go through rigorous quality control before it lands to the menu. They introduced their new coffee which went through several tests. They are consistent in maintaining the quality so every time anyone goes to McDonald’s he or she receives the same flavour or taste. No wonder it has challenged even the king of coffee- Starbucks.

Second thing they focus is the Service. No matter how good your food is, if you don’t provide a good service to deliver them then it means nothing to the customers. They have several training programs to teach and train the employees to deliver the food with service of excellence.

Third thing they focus is the cleanliness. One of the Manager at McDonald’s said that before anything he makes sure that his restrooms are clean. If a restaurant can’t keep the restroom clean, how can the customer trust the cleanliness of their kitchen. That holds true to everything in the restaurant and the surroundings. So they make sure that not only their kitchen, dining room are clean but most importantly the restrooms are clean and also outside of McDonald’s surroundings.

Lastly the most important thing to their success is the speed. Their success depends upon a system which can deliver the millions and even billions of hamburgers, fries, and cola to their customers at the fastest speed possible. That is the reason McDonald’s came up with drive thru to speed up the service back then.Today if you would like to speed up the service, then technology is at your disposable. Without spending millions and virtually for no money or little money you can implement a system based on internet technology that will enable the small restaurant owners to deliver their food at a greater speed than before.

I hope this will give you a clear picture to reflect upon and rethink about your restaurant business model and see if you follow the similar models if you want to succeed in the 21st century,new digital age of restaurant world.

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Restaurant Superbowl Advertisement-Why Denny’s Superbowl Ad Is So Brilliant And How Did It Attract The Hungry Customers From Tv Screen To Their Restaurant Floor.

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

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.

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Restaurant Search on Google Mobile Maps-Why Creating Restaurant Mobile Ad Targeting On The Go Customers Is Critical To Your Restaurant Business Success.

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Nash Sherchan| Leave a comment

Google has been doing online ad for a long time. It is no surprise. However lately with the rise of mobile web users trend Google has introduced their mobile-ad.

So What is really Mobile Ad?

Mobile Ad is an ad program introduced by Google where any business-small or big can place their ad targeting specifically on the go customers with mobile web enabled hand held devices like iPhone, Gphone and many others that are coming to the market everyday.

Why Restaurant Mobile Ad is critical for your business success if you want to win in this digital age of mobile phones like iPhone and Gphone?

Watch the video above and hopefully it will give you a good realization on how important mobile ad is to your restaurant success especially in this new age of digital mobile phones.In the video John who happens to land in London is hungry. The first thing he wants to do is eat. So he makes a mobile search for curry restaurant nearby by using Google Mobile Map. He doesn’t even have to know where he is. The device will automatically recognize the location of the mobile device when John presses the 0 button on his mobile phone. Then Google mobile displays the curry restaurants near by. He selects the restaurant. He makes the reservation if required by calling direct and then goes to restaurant to fill his hungry stomach. It makes John’s life so easier. Now with this scenario, the question is has your restaurant prepared with mobile ad to attract customers like John?

During the recent World Economic Summit at Davos, Switzerland Chad Hurley the CEO of You Tube mentioned that use of mobile web has been growing in rapid speed than any other thing online. That indicates how fast this mobile user base is growing. Take an example of my self. I was not using mobile web browser before. But now since I bought iPhone six months ago, I am loving it. Some times I don’t even open my desktop to do simple search like directions, search for restaurants and so on.There are so many people like me who are joining the bandwagon of internet enabled mobile handheld devices that pretty soon almost all of them will have them. Therefore restaurants should not neglect these mobile userbase who I like to call Generation Y.They are good at multitasking. They can be driving and with the other hand could order pizza online with their mobile phone. They don’t have a patience to wait long in line. So with out waiting they go to the cash register. They show their text order confirmation number which they receive on their phone after they pay with their itune account or paypal account or credit card. Out they go. They are in a hurry. If you can’t manage to be fast enough like them by integrating online or mobile ordering system then they will leave your restaurant never to be seen again at a click of a mouse or push of a button on their mobile phone. If you don’t serve them fast and treat them well, they will tell to the whole world about you on Twitter with a push of a buttons on their iphone or Gphone. Your reputation and survival in this digital mobile age is in their hand. So understanding the change that is coming with this new generation Y of mobile users is very critical to your success in this new environment. More importantly to understand this new breed of mobile customers and changing your self to match the fast paced customer service that they always demand.

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