MARKETING: Market to Millennials & Gen Z by Showing Non-Traditional Sports [Hack #112]
The problem for sports-themed operators is that traditional sports -- i.e., baseball, football, basketball and hockey – are becoming less and less popular with younger generations. In fact, in a recent Nielsen survey, 56% of Gen Zers (aged 13-21) said nontraditional sports are “relevant to my generation” while just 44% said the same for traditional sports. Likewise, 56% of Millennials (aged 22-37) also favor nontraditional sports in a favorable light. That means sports bars looking to score with these age groups need to think outside the stadium.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Back from the Dead
File this under awkward moments… But a woman was grieving her “dead” ex (and former restaurant co-worker) only to find him working at a different local restaurant two years later. After the couple broke up, the ex-boyfriend completely ghosted – having borrowed a few thousand bucks from her and friends. A mutual friend called to say he had, murdered after borrowing cash from a local biker gang. Only, that appeared not to be true. Here’s the rest of the bizarre story.
The Most Popular Search on Bing is…
Google. For real. People went on Bing to search for Google. As of July, the search engine dealt with 44.4 million such queries for “Google” from around the world, far more than the second most frequent – “youtube” was searched for 33.3 million times. In another blow for Bing's owner Microsoft, the fifth most common search was people looking for help with Windows 10. Oops.
Sriracha Meth
Australian authorities found 880 pounds of meth hidden in bottle of Sriracha. The pull estimated at roughly four million doses of the drug and worth about $210 million. The shipment was sent from the US before being caught by officers in Sydney for “inconsistencies” with the cargo. Three men have been arrested in connection with the shipment. To be fair, isn’t Sriracha its own addiction?
MAKE SAFE CHOICES
Why it matters to you: How do you address guest when they ask if your restaurant is in a safe area?
Safety is a subjective notion. One person may walk through a neighborhood near your restaurant at night and feel perfectly safe while others might dart to their cars in fear of a confrontation. If you are in an urban setting you may get a question from a guest like, “Is the area around your restaurant safe?”
How you answer it matters, but it also begs the question of safety in general. The Advice Guy on Restaurant Business Online suggests this as your response, “I walk around the neighborhood all the time and feel safe, but I’d be happy to recommend a cab service if you prefer.” This answer skirts acknowledging that your neighborhood might not be perfectly safe by both reassuring the guest and offering them a way not to find out. It’s doesn’t discuss risk, but you show you are giving them thoughtful support as they navigate their way to or from your restaurant.
Keeping everyone associated to your restaurant safe is a real concern for restaurant operators. You have staff that needs to come and go to your parking lot or on foot as they leave your building. If you are open late, you have potentially intoxicated guests leaving your restaurant and what happens to them near your place matters. Providing a secure environment doesn’t have to hard. For example, if you make it a rule that no one leaves after shift without another person accompanying them, you can literally eliminate any concerns on that issue. What other solutions are you employing to keep your staff and guests safe around your restaurant? Cameras? Physical security personnel? Let us know and we will share it with our audience in a future post.
[Source: Restaurant Business Online]
FUTURE FORTUNE
Why it matters to you: Economic indicators continue to point downward.
We have been discussing the indicators of an impending recession that our own industry has presented over the past several quarters. Dropping traffic coupled with slowed growth are the first signs that we are about to see a downturn, but there are serious indicators of issues in the general economic data that also forewarn of impending trouble. In this excellent and comprehensive article on Fortune’s website, they describe five recession signs that point to trouble in 2020: Consumer confidence and spending, jobs numbers, declining work hours, failed IPOs, and dropping freight traffic. Any of these trends taken alone might not imply a pending problem, but together they should give us all pause about where the economy is headed.
For example, freight traffic has declined as compared to the last three years, while the number jobs created is about to dip below a technical level of 1.8 million. This means that fewer goods are being shipped to fewer employees. Couple those to the declining work hours and you can see the mosaic of trouble beginning to form. Again, we aren’t saying tomorrow, but sooner than any of us want, we are likely to experience a downturn. This could be a short one like 2001 that only lasted a year or it could be more significant like 2008. Either way, being away in advance will help you plan for the eventuality of it all.
[Source: Fortune]
