MENU: “Gimme All the Toppings!” [Presented by LambWeston]
78% of guests are interested in topped fries, so get creative with your fry offerings by adding ingredients that are already in your restaurant. Put a topped & loaded shareable on your menu, or try out a topped & loaded LTO. For more menu tips visit LambWeston.com/Recipe.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Cow Appreciation Day
This past Tuesday was Chick-fil-A’s 15th annual Cow Appreciation Day, a day for celebrating the company’s “Eat Mor Chikin” cow mascots. To celebrate, Chick-fil-A gave away free food to anyone who sported cow spots, waved a cowbell, or dressed like a cow. What sort of weird (and fun) promotions do you run?
A Bad Year for Millionaires
After seven consecutive years of growth, the world’s high-net-worth population -- i.e. everyone with investable assets in excess of $1 million -- suffered a $2.1 trillion loss in collective wealth in 2018. That’s according to Capgemini’s latest World Wealth Report published earlier today. Before you break your piggybank to make a charitable donation for millionaires in need, be informed that the decline can largely be attributed to the ultra-rich -- i.e. the top 1% of the world’s high-net-worth population -- who accounted for 75% of the total decline in global millionaire wealth.
NBC Lands Sky
If you were looking for more shoulder programming then some good news. NBC’s Premiere League Pass now include some Sky Sports programming. Premiere League Pass will now have two weekly Sky Sports shows -- Sky’s Soccer Saturday and Goals on Sunday. It’ll also host a slew of other shoulder content (list found here). The usual group of NBC Premiere League content will still be available, such as Premiere League Download, Match of the Day, and Men in Blazers.
HACK YOURSELF AN INFLUENCER
Why it matters to you: Finding the foodies in your market may be your path to marketing amplification.
While reading an article on Andrew Zimmern (celebrity chef) touting his genius hack for finding a fabulous restaurant in any city, it dawned on me that it’s totally relevant to every restaurant marketer. Zimmern suggests you do a quick search to find the professional foodies – local chefs, food writers, food editors, etc. – who know what is happening on the restaurant scene. People who know everything from the hottest chefs and buzziest restaurant openings to the best hidden mom-and-pop gems in every neighborhood.
This may be a great travel hack, but it’s also a perfect way to identify the local influencers in your city. By identifying the people that track the food culture local to your restaurant, you are also seeing what they are talking about and what excites them. It stands to reason, you will learn a few things about what’s popular in your market.
If for no other reason, you can at least assess your competition. But there’s another far more valuable motivation: getting the attention of these local food influencers. You don’t have to be fine dining to engage with foodies, just serious about a quality. It would also help if you have a signature item that is attractive to the foodie sensibility. For every food influencer focused on esoteric cuisines, there are as many that appreciate a perfectly cooked burger or ribs that fall from the bone. They are also a potent and likely free media source to promote your restaurant. So, follow Andrew Zimmern to get the attention of your local food influencers.
[Source: Forbes]
GASTROPHYSICS? REALLY?
Why it matters to you: Is the noise in your restaurant causing guests to order tomato juice?
Our industry has long understood the impact of sound on the restaurant dining experience. This is why recent efforts to actually study the influence of sound may prove invaluable to managing the overall atmosphere of your restaurant. To begin, this study confirmed that extremely loud music does indeed negatively impact diners. Ironically, the study was spurred by another example of loud sounds affecting customers. The person that literally wrote the book on sound & dining noticed that people order more tomato juice on planes than anywhere else. With a bit of delving, he learned that the flavor of umami is heightened by low pitch noise (engine sounds) and passengers appear to crave it.
While there is much to unpack, it does, at minimum, confirm what we’ve already known: sound matters and it’s our job to manage how it impacts the guest experience. One chef in England actually created a dish that included an Apple iPod speaker along with an array of seafood. The iPod speaker played sounds of the sea. Charles Spence ,the author of the book on sound in restaurants, recounts that he and many journalists that ordered the dish cried because of how evocative the experience was for them. We aren’t suggesting you attempt to make guests cry with your music selection (which means you should avoid Nickelback at all costs, just sayin’). However, there is no doubt paying attention to the ambient and directed sound in your restaurant can be a way to positively enhance the dining experience.
[Source: USA Today]
