Restaurant Business Entree - Experiential Marketing

If you've ever been to Carnegie Deli in New York City, you know there are two things you can count on every time you dine there, mile-high sandwiches and wait staff with attitude. The atmosphere is electric; the noise level is loud. The deli has firmly established its reputation as a quintessential NYC food fest destination.

Meanwhile, over at The Drake hotel in downtown Chicago, their English Afternoon Tea is a very fond and elegant memory. It beautifully mirrors the overall gracious experience the hotel offers its guests.

Experiential Restauranting
When patrons leave your establishment, what do you want them to remember? What do you want them to tweet about as they make their way to their next destination, while their impressions are fresh on their minds? Ideally, the lingering impression, the reason customers become regulars, is the imprint of a great overall experience.

The soul of your restaurant can emanate from the chef's personality and culinary skills, or be rooted in local culture and history. It can manifest through unique offerings like international flair; a quirky mix of wait staff that can sing, dance or act; rare and challenging recipes and ingredients; thematic interpretation; simple fare with comfortable surroundings. The ideas are simply endless.

The Key Elements of Experiential Restauranting/Style and Substance

- Clear concept of establishment style/type of cuisine, and the ability to articulate it
- Presentation of concept/personality that permeates all aspects of your operations
- Menu that not only reflects the concept but differentiates the restaurant
- Passion for food that radiates through the menu (think "Like Water for Chocolate" wedding feast)
- Service that reflects the concept and desired lasting impressions
- Identified and evolving "extras" which build the restaurant's cache over time

The Key Elements of Experiential Marketing/Mirroring Restaurant Ambiance

- Storefront and interior, name, and logo reflecting the intended personality
- Website look and feel, imagery, navigation, and content/writing style
- Advertising and promotions with insights into the dining experience
- Socialized marketing: Weaving different experience elements across select social media
- Mobile marketing: Patron outreach and restaurant locator tool*
- Bringing the dining experience full circle
* Example: Foursquare/Google Maps Mashup ("Musings of a VC in NYC" blog entry and comments)

Experiential Advice/Warning
When economic and/or other financial constraints stand to impact your bottom line, DO NOT, we repeat DO NOT sacrifice the quality of your ingredients or recipes to save money. Either reduce the number of menu items and/or incrementally increase the pricing. Consider changing your hours of operation or meals offered. Be sure to communicate why you are doing so with your patrons. If you choose to take the "easy" way out and cut the quality of your food and hope for the best, you are placing your core competency in jeopardy. The ultimate risk is the failure of your restaurant.

Scheduling Staff - A Challenge For All Restaurants

Restaurant managers will tell you that hiring and retaining staff as well as scheduling workers are their biggest challenges. Anticipating the size of the crowd on any given night is tough enough and then you must try and match the number of workers to the size of the crowd. Add to that, the need to balance the number of shifts and workers requesting time off and it can be a real challenge.

Most restaurants have gone to a computer generated scheduling system. Workers can put in their requests for time off and managers can plug in the shifts that they need to fill as they work through the schedule. Computer programs can help managers make sure they are balancing out the hours and spreading around the shifts fairly. There is nothing that will cause discontent faster in the workplace than employees who feel like they are being slighted.

When workers feel like they are under appreciated or under used they are likely to start looking for another job and turnover is the number one enemy of the restaurant industry. Having to hire and train new employees takes valuable time away from managing day to day operations and managers need to do everything they can to retain people. It is extremely important to hold onto servers because of the relationships that they establish with your customers who come back again and again just to see them.

Any manager will tell you that a good server is difficult to find and can be a valuable asset to your operation. While you want to make sure that the best people are working at the busiest times, it is also critical not to overwork those servers to the point that they might become burned out. An occasional day off on a weekend is a nice treat for a restaurant employee who is accustomed to waiting on other people out enjoying themselves. Using a computer system will give employees a chance to put in their requests for time off well in advance to help the manager plan for coverage. This type of scheduling means that workers will not be trading shifts on their own which is always a recipe for problems.