Can we even talk about branding with food in our mouths? Maybe not, but we can talk about restaurant branding with food on our minds. Our own Carolyn Walker has been prepping delicious insights on what makes restaurant branding truly cook, and which misconceptions around marketing are best left off the menu. Grab a plate and help yourself as Carolyn joins Yelp for Restaurants’ Josh Kopel on his podcast: Full Comp.
Listen to the podcast here.
Or scroll down for the full transcript. Bon appétit!
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Josh Kopel:
One of the biggest aha moments of my career was discovering that I wasn’t actually in the food and beverage industry, I was in the inventory management business. The easiest way to make more money wasn’t one-off events or nightly specials, it was optimizing my seating inventory on peak. More butts in seats is more money today, and here’s how you get it. Yelp for Restaurants Guest Manager Wait List functionality empowers your guests to add themselves to your digital wait list before they even leave their house. It provides accurate wait times and automatically notifies diners right before their table is ready. This dramatically reduces turn times, enabling you to handle more volume. Learn more about how this powerful tool can optimize your seating inventory today restaurants.yelp.com. Now, here we go.
Carolyn Walker:
Probably most importantly is thinking about this balance between brand and performance or activation, whatever you want to call it, conversion. There is a balance. Don’t lean everything into performance and getting guests in on the cheap or the quick. Think about the long haul and how your brand is represented in every single touchpoint.
Josh Kopel:
Welcome to FULL COMP, a show offering insight into the hospitality industry, featuring restaurateurs thought leaders, and innovators, served up on the house. How do ambitious brands punch above their weight class? Today, we’re chatting with Carolyn Walker of Response Marketing, an agency that specialize in helping little guys compete with the big guys. In our conversation today, we’ll tackle the big misconceptions when it comes to restaurant marketing, and Carolyn provides actionable information on how we can better position our brands to not only compete but to beat the competition.
Carolyn Walker:
I was educated at Northeastern University in Boston, which is a five-year cooperative education school. So you to go to school and then you work full-time. You go to school full-time, you work full-time. So I graduated from a college where I had a degree and two years of full-time work experience. I graduated in a time where the labor market was tough. It was hard for people to find jobs. Having that experience with Northeastern allowed me to get into my first role.
In fact, my last co-op job with Northeastern was with Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising in Manhattan, and they hired me after I graduated. So I was incredibly thankful for that opportunity, and I worked on some really amazing brands at Saatchi. I worked on Mylanta antacids, so I know more about gastrointestinal problems than I really care to admit. I worked, ultimately, through a bunch of other clients, NYNEX, Samsung, and landed on the adult Tylenol business, which was one of the largest accounts in the agency.
I decided that, hey, this was really cool and great, but it was so focused on advertising and I really wanted to learn more than just advertising. So I took my GMATs. I thought I was going to go back to business school, and this little, tiny ad was in Ad Age, like this big, for a marketing coordinator for Red Lobster, which was part of General Mills Restaurants at the time. So I left Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency side, went to the client side and ended up working for General Mills Restaurants, which is now Darden Restaurants, on the Red Lobster brand. From there, I went from a giant, huge corporation to a very small startup restaurant company called Sandella’s. While I never got my MBA, Josh, I’m telling you I got my MBA. It was an incredible, wild experience.
And then from there, I left Sandella’s and didn’t really know what I was going to do next. I started freelancing for Response. Within a week, they hired me full-time. Within a year, I became partner. Within three years, I became managing partner. In 2009, I bought the original guys out. So can I tell you it was very strategic plan path? Absolutely not. Here I am owning this agency, and I called myself the accidental entrepreneur because it really wasn’t in my intention. But what I learned from all of that and getting here at Response is that I really love servicing my clients. I really love helping my clients. I love helping them understand the power of brand. I love helping them reach their brand ambitions, whatever those might be and really punch above their weight more so than they would without a Response Marketing.
Josh Kopel:
You use that idea, that phrase on the website as well, “Punching above your weight class.” I feel like I’ve done that my whole career, especially from a marketing perspective. I own these very small companies that were very big brands, and it’s because, kind of like you illustrate, the idea was always to appear big, to appear ubiquitous. I think that many of us look at our competitors in the restaurant industry, and we say, “Man, those guys are everywhere.” But they’re everywhere due to a focus and this inexhaustible effort to be everywhere, to structure partnerships, and ad campaigns, and initiatives that’ll get you in the public’s eye, right?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, 100%. That’s exactly what we talk about. We help ambitious brands punch above their weight. So, what’s an ambitious brand? It’s a brand like you. You’re a brand, right? You’re aspiring to do more and be more than you currently are. To punch above their weight is exactly what you’re talking about, to fight on a competitive level that is allowing you to appear as big as someone else or better than someone else. So to do that, you really have to use all the resources that are available to you, internal, external, paid, earned, own, all of it, everything at your disposal to help you achieve those ambitions that you have as a brand.
Josh Kopel:
Marketing is this big, generalized ubiquitous thing that it’s so much easier to just turn around and ignore because you can’t even clearly define what it is as a restaurateur. The way marketing has evolved has significantly influenced the industry, especially in the last five years. But having said that, I’m also sure that in working with restaurants and then with other brands that that’s influenced your perspective on marketing at large. If it has, how so?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, I totally agree with that. Listen, the one thing that I’ve learned working across restaurant brands and non-restaurant brands is that you got to start with really strong branding itself. So, what do I mean by branding? Is branding a name? Is a brand a logo? Is a brand a tagline? It’s part of all of those things. Is it what you think is in your head as the business owner or the brand manager? Is it what you think it is? No, it’s not. What a brand is what your customers believe it to be or perceive it to be. So the only way to really build a strong brand is to deliver and affect the customer’s experiences with your brand.
I’m not talking about like in the restaurant business, you can go straight to, “Oh, the customer experience is what they experience in the restaurant or when they get my delivery of my product.” Well, that is just a tiny bit of brand experience. Their experience with your brand is starting from the beginning. How do they become aware of you? What do they find on your website? What do they see on social media? How are they interacted with at the door? How are they interacted with the delivery person, which by the way, you don’t have a ton of control of? But you certainly have control of your packaging and how that product is actually traveling to get to your guest and things like that.
It’s things that people forget about too. What does your bathroom look like? We’ve seen so much research come back and say one of the key indicators of guest perception of your brand, of your restaurant is what your bathroom looks like. If you have a dirty and disgusting bathroom, they think that your kitchen looks like that too. It’s the little things like that. Then also, the other big component of brand is your people. If you’re not going to treat your employees well, they’re not going to represent your brand well. If you’re not going to tell your employees about what your brand stand for, why you exist, they’re not going to be able to manifest that in a relationship with a guest. So brand is all of these things that come together. Like I said, Josh, this is not just restaurants, this is every brand.
Josh Kopel:
It is. Because I mean, it’s a much easier job to create love and affinity for a restaurant or a food. It’s probably much harder with a keyboard and a mouse, right?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, 100%. Actually, some of our clients, it’s even harder with. Take a McAfee for example, it’s security for your digital life. People want to set it and forget it and never think about it again. And by the way, most of the time that customers do think about their security software is when something goes wrong. So there’s a very negative perception of the brand. So you guys are luck you’re in this industry where there is a whole bunch of love. People love to eat. They love to go out. So you already have this positive emotion being associated with the occasion that your brand happens to be a part of.
Josh Kopel:
So let’s talk about brand and brand messaging because you said something before and I really want to unpack it. You talked about people and how your people can influence the way people see your brand. In the early days, I used to tell people, “My fine dining restaurant, this is the best southern restaurant in the city.” And so they would tell other people that. But that doesn’t mean shit to people. That’s also not the message that you want other people sharing because the best is incredibly subjective. So a lot of the messaging that I heard people when they were talking about my brand to other people, it was uninspiring. So we had to do a better job internally of crafting messaging that we would be proud for people to relate to other people and it would compel them to come to the restaurant.
An example would be rather than being the best southern restaurant in Los Angeles, which literally means absolutely nothing, we used to say, “Have you ever been to Preux & Proper before?” That’s what the servers would say. And then if they would say, “No,” they would say, “What we specialize here in are Southern classics reimagined. So it’s the food that you might’ve grown up with that you absolutely love, elevated and refined in a new way using contemporary culinary techniques.” And then you would hear that come back in. You would see that in the Yelp reviews that people would use our words to describe us. And that was the brand. The change there, I mean, when I tell you we got busier overnight as a result of it, marketing works. It took us years of trial and error to come up with that quick, simple, very clear way to describe ourselves. What does that process look like when you engage with the client?
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. So we actually have frameworks that we use to get our clients to uncover their brand purpose. Really, that’s what you’re talking about Josh, is getting to the core of the brand. What does the brand believe in? Why does the brand exist? You’ve heard of Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. Why is in the middle. It’s the hardest thing for brands to do. It’s very easy like you just said to say, “Okay, here’s what we do. Here’s how we do it.” Most companies, even the big companies, Josh, don’t really focus on the why. Why do we do this? Why do we exist? So like I said, we have tools and frameworks that we use and we take our clients through to get them to that.
They come to us at varying stages of their development, and so it’s a process. The things that we think about are we peel away the onion. We can start with what you do and how you do it, but we really work to getting towards why. And in that why is really talking to them about the market they’re in, some of the basics, who their competitors are. How are they differentiated? What do they believe in? Sometimes, it’s going back to the person or people that founded the organization and getting inspired by what motivated them to create this. So it’s a process and it takes work. We do a lot of workshopping. So it’s kind of an intimate thing when you’re talking about brand and trying to get to this stuff. So we workshop it, and we ask a lot of questions.
I hear you to actually talk a lot about questions. And you can ask questions, which is great, but you have to ask the right questions to get to the strong answers and ultimately figuring out what the brand really stands for. So we do that. A lot of times, it results not just in uncovering that why and their purpose, but it also, in many cases, has changed the way the company does business. They realize that, “Oh, we really are this or really believe in being this customer-centric organization.” And they change process to be more customer-centric or change their R&D process to be more customer-centric, or wherever it might be. That, to me, is super rewarding that you’re starting off with kind of a brand and marketing question and you’re creating things that change everything within the organization.
Josh Kopel:
Let’s pull on that string because I think it’s super important. I think one of the reasons that so many of us don’t focus on why is because we think that our customers don’t care. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but that’s not even the argument I want to make. The argument that I want to make is it’s that your employees care and your internal leaders care, and they want to know why. And if you are able to create that why, which is a useful exercise, it’s internal marketing and it will influence the organization in a significant way.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. In fact, we have a whole blog post about internal marketing and the importance of internal marketing. We actually call in the restaurant industry, your own front line, the forgotten ones. How important are they to your brand? Again, maybe it doesn’t matter that much that the guest understands why. Maybe it does in some instances, maybe it does. But when your employees, when that wait staff understands your why, that line chef understands your why, then it changes their thinking about what they’re doing and also empowers them to make good decisions about how the brand is manifested in that guest experience. So you want your team to have the autonomy to do the right thing, whether it’s something coming off the line or a hostess or a server to give that guest an incredible experience and to experience it in a way that is unique to your brand. This is why you’re doing this. I don’t know if you saw it, but there was a TED Talk by Will Guidara.
Josh Kopel:
Guidara.
Carolyn Walker:
… and he was talking about how he overheard the guests talking that were… His restaurant’s very fine dining and very high-end, and the guests were saying the one thing they missed on their foodie trip to New York was a New York City hotdog. He ran out of the restaurant, got the New York City hotdog, and brought it back, and they talked about it. This is what it’s about, listening to your guests and giving them a brand experience that they would never forget. So that’s the power of internal marketing. It’s one of the first things you should do.
Josh Kopel:
You’re playing a different game. My own personal experience was I aspired to be Will Guidara, candidly, but eventually, I realized I couldn’t be that guy and that there were too many people competing to be the best restauranteur in the world. What I could be is the best marketer in the restaurant industry, and that’s really what I worked towards. In doing so, just like I said, I was playing a very different game. The hurdle in our industry is that it is commoditized and that the best and that great are very subjective terms, and it varies person by person. But your belief system is objective and it is unique to you. So rather than trying to corral your community around, “I have the best burger,” “We have the best restaurant,” “This is the best service,” for you to say, “I believe in this, and that’s why I built this restaurant. And if you believe what I believe, then you should give me your money.” It’s a very different conversation to have, especially as a restaurateur.
Carolyn Walker:
I agree with that. I think, again, it’s not just a guest story, but it’s an internal story. When you rally the people around that, you start to build strong brand. The thing that has come up lately, Josh, is that in the last 15 or so years, digital has taken over everything. Digital, by the way, is highly trackable, measurable. So what happened in the last 15 year is all these marketers have chased digital. They’re using digital as primarily a conversion, a promotion, and activation, whatever you want to call it mechanism. Because the proof is there that you can attribute the sale to digital, all the money has gone into digital, primarily for activation or performance marketing. The brand has been forgotten about, building brand has been forgotten about.
So the scales have gotten way tipped into performance marketing. What’s now happening is that it’s not sustainable. Your core business and your brand is getting eroded over time with all this emphasis on performance. What’s the deal? So the scale is starting to shift back, and there’s a lot of research and data out there that is proving that brand building and brand marketing has a role in your marketing world and the role, it has lots and lots of benefit including securing your future, really.
Josh Kopel:
Here’s the thing with, I think, all marketing at this point, all marketing seems very much focused on new customer acquisition. When I talk to folks and they want to talk about marketing, they want to talk about social media, how to get their competitors’ customers in their doors, which is very interesting. Because for most of the folks that I talk to at least, they’re not about to go out of business. So they have customers. They would much rather focus, because I think this is the culture that we live in, especially from a marketer’s perspective, they’re very much focused on bringing in new people as opposed to saying, “Can I make more money off the people that are currently in my restaurant?” And number two, “How do I compel the people that know me and like me to come back?” Which it costs way less to convince somebody to come back than it does to originally get them to come in. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show today because the way you increase customer frequency is by building that relationship, and you build that relationship through brand.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, completely. Like I said, what is brand? What is brand? Brand is your guest experience. So across the board, what are you saying you’re offering? What kind of treatment are they getting when they’re there? What kind of post-experience are they getting? So it is a collection of everything. I think, Josh, too, you maybe alluded to this a little bit, but not every media channel should be used the same way.
So if you are a restaurant that is brand new and you do need new guests to come in, you should use way more broad appeal, awareness-building media and tell the brand story like why would they want to come in here? Why would they want to try you? I would stay away from things like it’s the $9.99. Who cares? It’s not going to start you off on the right foot to build a strong brand. They’re going to think that you’re just a low-cost provider and that’ll be stuck in their head. And when you try and take price, they’re going to say, “No.” They’re going to go somewhere else.
So my point is there’s awareness, broad audience awareness-building media. So think of things like video if you can afford it, or even digital radio, or OTT, any of these things, video in general, and then you’ve got things that are better for… By the way, social media too is great for brand building. But then you’ve got media that is really good for that conversion. So media like SEM, SEM being pay-per-click kind of stuff, the paid social media works well for that.
I would argue, too, that to get more frequency from your current guests, you need to know who they are. So there’s media for that too. If you’re building your list through a newsletter, or loyalty, or whatever, you’ve got this direct channel to those customers as well. By the way, when you have those email lists, you can actually match that list on social and serve them up that same content or similar content in their social feed. So you have to think about, “Okay, what’s the purpose here? Am I trying to build awareness? Am I trying to convert? Am I trying to increase frequency?” And what are the best vehicles to do that? What are the best messages to put in those vehicles, by the way, too?
Josh Kopel:
Can great marketing say brands that are failing?
Carolyn Walker:
No. Let me caveat that. Marketing can save brands that are failing if they have great product and great operations. If you don’t have great product and great operations, marketing can’t fix anything. Does that make sense?
Josh Kopel:
It does. It does. It does. Let’s say they do have great product and great operations. How do you salvage that brand?
Carolyn Walker:
So here’s a really good example. So I spent about six years at Sandella’s. When I got there, there was maybe 10 or so locations, more than half of which were company-owned. They started on a franchise path. They were getting area-development representatives. They were getting franchisees. We learned pretty quickly that the people that we were finding and the locations that they were finding were kind of not great. And then 9/11 happens and wipes out many locations of ours in New York City. We had gone to a real estate trade show, believe it or not, out in Vegas. And we were talking to people like Haagen-Dazs, and they were saying, “Oh my God, we’re at this trade show. We’re all having the same problem. We’re having a really hard time finding A-plus locations.” Haagen-Dazs is telling to Sand’s this, and we’re going, “Oh my God, if Haagen-Dazs is having this problem, we’re not going to get out of this problem.”
So it was a time where we all thought there was something going on with this idea of co-branding, taking a smaller footprint, putting two side by side, and having complimentary products like an ice cream and a sandwich place. Like, “Let’s find a space together.” Or, “Maybe you’re in a good space, but you’re not maximizing your revenue out of the footprint, so let’s put a Sandella’s in there.” So that was our idea, and we started doing that. It was working out all right. So we were like, “Okay, let’s pivot this whole thing.” We went from a franchise concept to a licensed concept, and we started to reach out to these potential cold brand partners.
One of the pieces of marketing that I had done landed in the lap of Lackmann Culinary Services, which is a contract feeder out in Long Island. And they said, “Holy cow, you fit your concept.” We took our whole 1200-square-foot concept and crushed it down to 50 square feet. And they said, “Hey, we have this little spot in Adelphi University in the student center, we’re not doing any sales out of it. Can we take your 50-square-foot concept and stick it in there?” We said, “Absolutely.” So I did everything, Josh. I’m telling you, I didn’t get my MBA. I got my MBA.
I trained them. I helped them install it, get it up and going. Lo and behold, that unit does the same volume that we were doing on the corner of Maine and Maine, and we were like, “Holy.” Guess what? A great location and a great operator in someone who they’re doing contract feeding for themselves, and they had other brands they’re working with and they’re executing beautifully. So re-marketing of the brand and marketing to a business-to-business customer saved the brand. Quickly, we went from, “Okay, we’re onto something in this college and university world.” Joined the list of the National Association of College and University Food Service, quickly marketed to them, and we landed our first Chartwells account, which is part of the Compass Group at, you’ll appreciate this, Louisiana State University.
Josh Kopel:
There you go.
Carolyn Walker:
That unit did five times the volume as Adelphi. So we pivoted. We marketed the hell out of the concept to contract feeders, and we went from nothing, literally almost nothing, to over 100 units within a couple of years.
Josh Kopel:
There’s a couple of things to really take away from that story, which is one, marketing was a fantastic tool. But it also required some mental elasticity in being able to say, “We have invested,” and I’m sure it was a ton of money, “hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in trying to serve customer X.” So the pivot to customer Y required forsaking all of that investment, which is a painful process. I think there’s so much to be said for being a bold enough leader to accept sunk costs and move forward with the right decision.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. Well, we had no choice, really. Your back is up against the wall. You’re going to fail or you’re going to survive, and that was really the situation that we were in and we survived. Like you said, it really wasn’t just marketing, it was making a pretty strategic move too, and letting go of everything that you did work on and love so much and made it something else.
Josh Kopel:
When I opened up my fine dining concept, we were, say, an elevated bar concept, and there was just no tolerance for it in the market. We had overstated. I think we were victims of our own success. Or, I’ll speak for myself, I was a victim of my own success with the first location and I felt like we could do no wrong. So we moved this elevated bar concept in, and nobody was interested. Then we had to elevate even further, which required massive investment, both internally into the organizational and operational infrastructure but also in terms of leveling up the aesthetics and putting a valet out front and all of these investments that we made to try and reach a higher price point customer.
Again, making those bold decisions, figuring out who your true customer is and who can actually support your operations is critical. There just weren’t enough humans that wanted an elevated bar concept where we were in downtown Los Angeles in 2014 to support a 6,000-square-foot restaurant. So in choosing a new customer and a new customer that we knew we could service, there was a larger total addressable market. It was a game changer for us, but it was also a very, very painful process. I’d be willing to bet that in exploring that idea, for so many people listening right now, could really benefit their brands.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah. definitely. I think you have to keep your eyes open. You have to understand where you are. It sounds to me, Josh, you had some kind of intuition about what you were doing and maybe not a whole lot of research or backup of what the guest or potential guest really wanted there. So it’s really keeping your mind, and your ears open, and being open to what the guest says, ultimately, what the market says, what the community says.
Josh Kopel:
Well, it was no longer about me. It became about looking at the market, seeing who was busy, who wasn’t right. We had done no market research going into the area. I loved the building. I felt called to the building. So I knew it had to be this building and this concept, and it was this beautiful confluence of all of these things that the universe was conspiring to give me so that I could open this place that nobody gave a shit about until we evolved it to be what the community wanted and what the community needed. Those were very data-driven decisions.
I was afraid that I would look foolish. I was afraid that in making these pivots or these adjustments that it would seem, especially in the early days, like a frenetic brand or like I was an indecisive leader. But, you know, there’s a massive opportunity cost for not making the right decision when it is so clearly presented to you. There’s something to be said for pushing against momentum, and if it’s been this way for so long, being able to say, “No, that isn’t the clearest path to success. This is.” And then using the internal marketing that we’ve previously discussed to rally everyone that’s working with you along with you into this new path.
Carolyn Walker:
Yeah, 100%. Listen, when I was working at Red Lobster, you can imagine that it’s a giant organization. Well, let’s go back to the beginning. So Red Lobster was founded in 1968, the year that I was born, by Bill Darden. By the time I got there in 1992… Well, General Mills bought them in 1974 when they had about five locations. General Mills put the pedal down and said, “This is an unbelievable concept. We’re going to go in growth mode.” And they grew like crazy. By the time I got there in 1992, which is less than 20 years later, it was over 600 locations. What Bill Darden’s vision was and his why for the brand was that he believed in making delicious, high-quality seafood available and affordable to everyone, including people who didn’t live on the coast.
So here I am coming from New England, a seafood snob, to go work on the Red Lobster brand and I was like, “What is the big deal with Red Lobster? I don’t know that I totally get it.” By the way, as a marketer too, and you’re so lucky that you had the path that you’ve had and you’ve went from a restauranteur to a marketer, which is amazing. While I spent some time in restaurants in high school and in college, I really didn’t understand the restaurant business until I went to Red Lobster and they put me in Texas City, Texas to help open the store for two and a half or three weeks, whatever it was. I learned about what it takes to operate a restaurant. It’s no easy task as you know. But going back to the vision, so he had this vision for the concept. Coming from the northeast, I thought, “Wow, I don’t know if this thing’s going to fly in certain areas.”
Because of what you’re talking about, what do people really want? Do they want affordable seafood in their backyard when they have fresh seafood sitting at the town next to them? They tried. They tried to grow in certain places across the country where the brand really wasn’t that accepted, or they had to go after a different demographic within the state to then have success in that state like in a Connecticut. Couldn’t really necessarily be in Branford, but it’s going to work in Bridgeport because the demographic is different. So that’s what they did, they learned, and some of it the hard way. But the really cool thing or positive thing about being part of a giant chain like that is you have incredible resources all around you. That didn’t become as clear to me as it did as soon as I went to Sandella’s and I had nothing.
But we had the best of the best research. We had the best of the best R&D chefs working on our menu development. We had location people scouting the world for, well, mostly United States and Canada for the best locations. We had procurement people scouring the globe for the best seafood. I mean, literally, these guys were on the boats in Alaska, and they were out in Oman looking at all the species in Oman, and they were in Europe, and they were in Australia and New… It was incredible. My mind was blown by the enormity of the organization and what we were doing. The point of that whole thing is that you’re right, you can’t put a square peg in a round hole. You have to have the right concept for the right place. Even big brands like Red Lobster learned that. Red Lobster was like the only seafood place in many cities in towns across the country with zero competition is why they endure today. 55 years later, the concept is still alive with 600, almost 700 restaurants. It’s incredible.
Josh Kopel:
Where’s the low-hanging fruit when it comes to restaurant marketing? What can the folks listening now start doing today that’ll have a positive effect on their restaurant businesses?
Carolyn Walker:
So I think that one is what we already talked about, it’s internal marketing. Don’t just think about marketing to your guests or prospective guests. Think about your internal marketing to your employees. By the way, don’t forget about your vendors and the people supplying you. There’s a lot of value in those relationships too. Your team needs to be treated right. They need to be treated with respect. They need to experience the brand. I think I heard you say, and I completely believe in this, is if you have a tasting for guests, make sure your employees are there too. Let them participate in the brand and the experience of the brand.
I think, two, if you’re not already building your own data and collecting your guests’ data, start right away. Data is everything. It allows that connection between you and your guest, and not just collecting it, but collecting it, leveraging it, unifying it, automating where you can to make your jobs easier. Ultimately, what you want to do is use that data to improve that brand experience. Imagine this. Imagine that a hostess sees in your reservation system or your wait list system that this guest was in two weeks ago for cocktail tasting. She says, “Hey, that lighthouse martini that you tried two weeks ago is on our menu tonight. Can I get you one?” Can you imagine that the guest doesn’t even have to ask for it? They know that the person had it, they liked it, and now I’m going to give them one to start their meal off. So I think that’s two, it’s all about data.
Three is marketing, and the tools of marketing have become amazingly democratized over the last 15 years or so and that started with the rise of digital and social. As Gary Vee would say, it’s leveled the playing field for everyone. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a Darden restaurant or an independent operator of “The Doctor’s Office” here in Bradenton, you can access these tools to improve the awareness, and conversion, and repeat business of your customers. So I’m talking about digital media’s become more affordable. I’m talking about AI today is like you can start brainstorming and concepting with AI in ways we couldn’t even fathom three years ago, never mind today. You can use platforms like Fiverr to on-demand, get people to create things for you really inexpensively but that make you show up like we were talking about, like a bigger brand than you really are. So I think that’s three.
And then lastly and probably most importantly is thinking about this balance between brand and performance, or activation, whatever you want to call it conversion. There is a balance. Don’t lean everything into performance and getting guests in on the cheap or the quick. Think about the long haul and how your brand is represented in every single touchpoint.
Josh Kopel:
Our industry suffers from razor-thin margins, and the only way for us to ensure profitability is to make data-driven decisions. The numbers don’t lie. Yelp for Restaurants just released some incredibly compelling numbers. For starters, Yelp reaches nine times more customers online than OpenTable and when restaurants pair that level of visibility with Guest Manager in Yelp ads, they experience up to an 8% lift in diner bookings. Think about what that 8% lift could do for your restaurant’s finances. To learn more about how Yelp for Restaurants can support your business, visit restaurants.yelp.com to learn more today.
That’s Carolyn Walker. For more information on Response, visit response.agency. If you want to tell us your story, hear previous episodes, or check out our other content, go to restaurants.yelp.com/fullcomp. Thank you so much for listening to the show. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, please leave us a review. A special thanks to Yelp for helping us spread the word to the whole hospitality community. I’m Josh Kopel. You’ve been listening to FULL COMP.