Its 7:00am when you first smell that fresh coffee brewing.  Half asleep and groggy eyed, you quietly pour the first cup of piping hot goodness.  As the mug warms your hands, you give a long morning stretch, and lazily open your laptop.  The calm peacefulness of early morning is soothing like crawling in fresh sheets after a hot shower.  Quiet, serene, the morning is yours.  Now it’s time to wake up, sleepyheads!

Like most Americans, your first morning task is to check email, delete spam, and cipher what really matters.  Without fail, there is a coupon in your inbox offering 53% off at your favorite local restaurant.

Hook, line, and sinker you’re sold.  Is this really a good thing?  Are we turning restaurants into department stores?

The Department Store Effect:

When do you buy new clothes?  Do you wait for sales/coupons or pay full price?  The logical argument is to wait for the sale, and that’s not our fault.  We love getting deals…it’s hard wired into the human psyche.

By bombarding us with coupons, department stores have brainwashed us to only buy during sales.  Talk about the biggest marketing backfire of all time!

Are Restaurants The Next Department Stores?

I hear more and more people saying “I’ll just wait for the Groupon.”  Here is a quick lesson in Marketing 101:

“As consumers slowly adapt to deep discounts, it begins to change expectations.  Once our expectations change, so do our buying habits…which is difficult to reverse.”

The idea “why would I ever pay full price” is dangerous.  Are these newly cropping up coupon sites creating this expectation in diners?

Happy Hour is Different

It’s no secret, restaurants and bars have been promoting happy hour specials for years.  Until the recent rise in group buying, this was a widely acceptable form of marketing (that keeps regulars coming back daily!).  Happy hour will never die, but the shift to deep discounts is flat out scary from a marketing standpoint.

The Smart Alternative

The smart alternative is to focus on specials you already run like daily happy hour.  Use online tools to create awareness of current specials and invite customers in.  Get creative.  Why not create daily specials on the fly?  Focus on creating a loyal customer base, and not customers looking for a one-time discount.

In my opinion, I fear if we continue to offer deep discounts, consumers will quit eating out unless they can find 53% off.  Our buying habits shift with expectations.  This could be devastating for mom and pop restaurants that lack the budget of large chains.

What do you guys think as customers?  As restaurant owners?  Please leave your comments below, I am intrigued by this conversation!

While they are nothing new, Prix Fixe Menus are a hot trend right now.  At least in St. Louis, they are cropping up everywhere!  In a downward economy people still want to eat out, but are looking to save cash.  Prix Fixe Menus bring in business and help your customers out.  Here are some quick reasons why:

The Menu is Limited

A limited menu helps you scale your costs.  Each meal costs the same…each meal has a set margin.  You can assure to make a specific margin off each meal, and that’s piece of mind.

Customers Want Limited Choices

When developing web-based software like UrbanBacon, it’s best to limit choices for users.  Keeping things simple is why we built UrbanBacon.  For example, I personally get lost when using Microsoft Office 2007.  There are unlimited options, buttons, formulas, and formatting that is flat out confusing.  Most of the time, simple is better.

The same goes for a menu.  Unlimited choices confuse people.  It’s overwhelming.  Have you ever opened The Cheesecake Factory Menu?  By limiting choices you take out the guesswork.  This is what you get, for this price.  That’s attractive to people because they don’t have to think.  In today’s society, we prefer streamlined options that eliminate our thinking, whether it’s technology or menus.

Perfect a Few Items

When doing self-evaluations, most people focus on strengthening their weaknesses.  To me, that’s completely backwards.  Focus on your strengths and become a Rockstar, forget your weaknesses.  What does Kat Vitale do REALLY well?  Tattoos.  How about The Cake Boss?  Cakes.  They are Rockstars in their skill sets and do it better than anyone else.

If you are bad-ass at grilling pork chops, than by all means put that on your limited menu.  If your customers constantly rave about your Shrimp Diane, than guess what?  It’s going on the limited menu.  Focus on your most popular dishes, perfect them, and make a limited menu.

Offer Deals without Affecting Image

In the minds of customers, deep discounts are perceived as desperate.

“They must be hurting for business, they’re practically giving them away!”

Don’t get me wrong, customers will jump all over a chance to get something ½ off.  It’s a no-brainer.  From a branding and business standpoint, it’s a bad move.  You deflate your product and value by offering deep discounts.  Trust me, people are paying attention.

Prix Fixe Menus present a few awesome options at a reasonable price.  3 Courses for $25 doesn’t kill your brand.  It says:

“We know you still love to eat out, and the economy is tough, so we are offering a few limited options at a reasonable price.”

At UrbanBacon we believe you should offer specials without devaluing your brand and product.  Prix Fixe Menus are the perfect compliment to both!

Its official, we are full blown Vayniacs at UrbanBacon.  Can you blame us?  The guy is flat out awesome!  Yesterday Gary Vaynerchuk posted a video calling out spammers on Facebook. You can watch the video here. One particular winery directly posted blatant spam on Wine Library TV’s Facebook Page.  They even had the audacity to link emails and offer a discount to customers.  Gary was not impressed by this marketing  fail…

According to Vaynerchuk, this is happening more on Facebook.  As his example proves, the food and hospitality industry are also among the spammers.  Which brings up a logical argument.  Are restaurants more likely to spam?  A unique battle restaurants have is the constant need to get the word out about daily specials.  Typically, unless people are actively looking for specials, they consider pushing them spammy.  Just like Gary implies, it’s time to stop spamming your customers.

Let’s face it, a large amount of restaurants are new to social media and online marketing.  Social media not like buying ads in your local newspaper.  It’s not a quick 30 second radio bit falling on deaf ears.  It’s not a television commercial that runs thousands of dollars per minute.  What is it than?

It’s a Conversation…Listen to Your Customers

That’s it.  You can’t post directly on other people’s walls and sell your business.  The old idea of exposure doesn’t work with the internet.  When you spam another user’s wall, you are slapping them directly in the face.  They don’t walk into your restaurant selling steaks do they?

I feel that owners want to treat social platforms like traditional media.  They think more tweets, more wall posts, and more comments will bring in business.  On the internet, that’s just more spam.

Focus on talking to other restaurants and users.  Leave valuable comments on their fan pages that praise their restaurant.  Get to know these people.  Make friends.  Then ask them to help promote your restaurant.  You can talk about yourself all day, but nobody listens until others are talking about you.

The main reason behind this post is that I don’t want to see restaurants spamming on Facebook.  Gary is 100% right.  In the long run, you’re only hurting yourself and your brand.  Focus on using social platforms to meet local people, and then make them customers.

What do you guys think about the video?  Is Gary spot on?  Do you think restaurants spam more?  Leave your comments below!

It’s no secret, the Internet has given individuals a voice.  Bloggers are splashed across the canvas of social media ranting about their encounters with restaurants and basically every industry on the planet.  Everyone is subject to reviews, and guess what?

People Listen.

This is the basis behind word of mouth marketing.  We all value each others opinions to some degree, almost more than we value critics.  Critics seem untouchable as humans, and it becomes hard to relate in our mundane lives.

This is nothing new.  We’ve been recommending and trashing restaurants for years.  Think about the office, how many times a day do you hear people talking about different restaurants?  Are they all good?  Of course not, people have bad experiences.  Not only that, we have been programmed by society to think complaining is rude.  So we hold complaints until we leave.  Maybe restaurants are to blame, maybe people are to blame.  The bottom line:  It happens.

I’ve always been a big advocate of acceptance.  By accepting and realizing these norms, we can all move forward.  People are going to blog about your restaurant, they are going to speak out over social media, and they are going to complain.  Not every customer will have a positive experience.  Maybe their dog died, or the food was off that day, or the sun wasn’t in-line with Pluto…whatever the case, customers will complain.  The way these complaints are handled is the deal breaker.

Let’s look at a scenario:

A young couple visits your restaurant and has a bad experience.  Trying not to cause a scene, they don’t address the situation (trust me, this is common).  They pay for the meal, tip their server, and head home.  It so happens, the couple runs a foodie blog that reviews local restaurants.  The next day, a negative review of your restaurant is published on the Internet.  Not good for business, right?  Your restaurant has two options:

You can ignore the review, and possibly spout your anger through social media…

OR

You can leave this comment on their blog:

“Hello, my name is ___________, and I manage/own (restaurant name).  I am deeply sorry you had a negative experience.  Next time please feel free to tell our wait staff, they want to help make things right.  To show we appreciate your business, stop in next time and have a meal on us.  We want you guys to come back and visit us.”

As a business, which do you think is the better response?  You have the opportunity to immediately turn a negative into a positive.  Other readers will see your reaction and appreciate your honesty and willingness to fix the situation.  That is ROCKSTAR customer service.  Your customers are talking, whether it’s online or offline, are you listening?

Yesterday, the well-known start-up Yelp was slapped with a class action lawsuit.    You can read about the story here.  Yelp has been accused of “extortion” by a veterinarian hospital in California.  The hospital contacted Yelp asking them to remove negative reviews of the business.  Yelp refused to take down the reviews.  Then a funny thing happened, the veterinary hospital was promptly contacted by a Yelp “sales representative.”  The rep told the company they could delete or lower the negative reviews on their pages for the low cost of around $300/mo.

Much to my surprise, this isn’t new news.  I tweeted a few articles yesterday and the reactions were shocking.  Apparently, I live under a rock.  My tweeps informed me that Yelp has been extorting business for quite some time.

I had NO idea…honestly.

This almost triggered me to remove my 40 some Yelp reviews yesterday, but I decided against (for now).  Everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and there are intriguing questions to be answered:

Are they really extorting small businesses?

Do Yelp reviews still hold water anyways?

How many businesses do you think will join the class action lawsuit countrywide?

One thing I do have to say about the situation:  It has destroyed Yelp’s credibility.  The site is built on reviews, whether negative or positive.  The fact they are collecting revenue to “hide” negative reviews destroys the entire mantra of the site.  Who can you trust?  In my eyes, the money blinded Yelp from what they originally set out to create.  I am anxious to see their response to the lawsuit.

What do you guys think?  Can a start-up like Yelp withstand a nationwide class-action lawsuit?  How do restaurant owners feel about it?  Is Yelp dead?

It’s funny to think how far we have come since the first Nokia 5110 cell phones.  Remember all the sweet face plates and bad arse hip accessories?  The Nokia had a battery life of around 3.5 weeks!  Not to mention they were basically indestructible.  I remember nicknaming my Nokia phone “The Brick.”  Two reasons:

1.  The size and weight slightly resembled a brick
2.  It could smash through glass if thrown hard enough

In my eyes, the Nokia was the first widespread personal cell phone that people actually carried.  Who imagined cell phones would become necessity?  Now, it’s a way of life.  Cell phones have connected us in ways never before imagined!  If your restaurant hasn’t already, invest in a smart phone.

So, what’s all this cell phone talk about anyways?  There is a current trend I notice.  When people (especially younger generations) sit down to dinner, where do their cell phones sit?

On the table!

I am guilty of this habit, I admit it.  But it brings about interesting questions.  Why must our phones be in front of us?  Are we that worried about missing calls?  Why should restaurants care?

Behavior Shifts = Culture Shifts

Pay attention.  These little changes in our behavior actually amount to huge opportunities.  Gary Vaynerchuk does a good job at explaining this phenomenon here.  He talks about people littering on highways.  Years ago it was common practice to toss trash out of the car window.  Now you are tarred, feathered, and fined for even considering littering.  Smoking in public is another culture shift.  Entire cities are non-smoking now.  That’s a HUGE shift in the way our culture works.  Ever see Mad Men?

Remember when Match.com was first introduced?  I specifically remember people saying “You must be a loser if you can’t meet someone in real life.”  Do you know how many normal people are on Match.com today?  It is no longer considered taboo, and is a viable platform for dating someone.  That’s a cultural shift, and these are trends worth recognizing.  They help us predict the future so we are in the best position to take advantage.

Why Should Restaurants Care?

The cell phone on the table behavior reminds us how connected we are becoming.  Through this little device, we can communicate on a mass scale.  People are online.  People are connected.  If your restaurant fails to see the trend, the culture shift, you’re going to fail.

I think it’s a sign of things to come.  People will begin meeting friends online, and then meeting up at restaurants/bars to hang out.  Tweet-ups are a great example of this.  Meetup.com also promotes social groups to meet online and physically meet up.

This is KILLER for restaurants.  Our entire connectivity is becoming transparent.  We used to be scared to give out personal info online.  Now, it’s not a big deal.  Match.com is no longer taboo, and all of your friends are on Facebook.  We are no longer scared to meet online.  Pay attention to cultural shifts like cell phones and put your restaurant in a position to win.

This culture shift means your customers are online.  Are you in a position to take advantage?  Have any of you guys already noticed other trends?  Leave your comments below!