MARKETING: How to Start a New Fan Club Chapter at Your Sports Bar [Presented by FanWide]
If you have read our last two posts in FanWide’s Guide to Starting and Growing a Fan Club in Your Sports Bar then you are ready for the big moment — officially creating or finding your local fan club. By now, you’ve picked the best league and identified a few target teams. But before you just directly ask a fan club chapter to host their events at your bar, we want to coach you up on the different organizational structures for collegiate alumni associations and professional sports fan clubs to help you increase your chances of landing your first fan community.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Rising Temps
A recent climate change study has found that London's weather could feel more like Barcelona's in 2050. Even though that might sound like a dream for Londoners, the change could be accompanied by severe drought. Seattle and New York could also see pretty big increases, with Seattle feeling more like San Francisco and NYC feeling more like Virginia Beach.
To the Moon?
In the 1960s, NASA's budget made up an increasingly large part of the U.S. federal budget. In late 1957, the USSR successfully launched the satellite Sputnik into orbit, the first battle in the space race and one that directly led to the creation of NASA. The space budget made up the largest chunk of the federal budget in 1966, when 4.41% of the budget was dedicated to NASA. In 2017, NASA made up just about a half of a percent of the federal budget.
NYC Aims at Grubhub
Grubhub controls 69% of the restaurant delivery marketing in NYC and council members are asking the state attorney general to open an antitrust investigation into the company. They also want to revisit the terms of the 2013 settlement that allowed Grubhub to acquire Seamless. NYC remarked on Grubhub’s “outsized market share and heavy-handed tactics” to reduce competition which could then turn into the company driving up “the commissions paid by struggling locally owned restaurants.”
IT’S A DASH TO DIGITAL DINING
Why it matters to you: Continued traffic drops may only be mitigated by off-premise sales
If you haven’t waded into the off-premise market, recent reporting from TDn2K may be all the insight you need to get in the water. TDn2K’s latest Restaurant Industry Snapshot showed a summer slowdown in June, with same-store sales falling 0.1%. This is, of course, coupled with the continued decline in guest traffic that has been plaguing casual-themed dining for the better part of the last two years. It appears that growth of consumer spending can no longer outstrip the traffic loses to create sales increases, as we have seen consistently over the same span. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported, the number of restaurants lifted nearly 16% in the last 10 years. And according to the Wall Street Journal, restaurants are now growing at twice the rate of the population. The only bright spot for the full-service dining segment has been the continued growth of off-premise ordering.
We have certainly focused on delivery as the main driver of that off-premise dining, but that may not tell the whole story. It’s the combination of delivery, catering and carry-out that is driving new sales to replace the traffic declines we are observing. No thoughtful operator can continue to ignore these crucial aspects of a functioning full-service restaurant any longer. We suggest you do a quick review of your own efforts as pertains to off-premise dining. If you haven’t implemented digital dining with both a third-party delivery service and on-line carryout ordering, now is the time to get on-board. But don’t limit your efforts without exploring an increased effort towards catering. If you expect to survive the culling of restaurants from overdevelopment, you’ll need off-premise as much as happy hour or late-night dining. We don’t want any of you to fall behind so check out our recent posts focused on delivery and how to best exploit it for growing your business.
[Source: FSR Magazine]
WHAT’S GOING ON? [Song]
Why it matters to you: A lack of civility in our culture appears to be affecting our industry as well.
Ok, so this is less an industry commentary than a moment of reflection on the state of our industry. Last week, there were a multitude of headlines centering on restaurants and interactions gone wrong. Each of these interactions was different, but all of them reflect poorly on our industry. From the elderly woman that got angry at a Burger King employee for speaking Spanish to his staff to the man that punched a Subway employee in the face because she was checking the validity of his large bill, we are seeing a total loss in civility.
But that civility loss isn’t just from customers. Take the Buffalo Wild Wings server that told a guest while checking her ID, “…Don’t take this racially, but sometimes the only way you can tell with black people is from their eyes and their smiles, because it’s so dark.” While two of the three instances have a racial component, it’s not the racism that is alone at work.
It appears our filters have completely been erased as the dialogue in our country is coarsened. This is no political comment and frankly we don’t care who is to blame, just that it’s destructive and will make our industry increasingly difficult to manage. Whether it’s a guest that expresses frustration at a foreign language or one that gets outraged because a business is protecting itself in a reasonable manner, our culture appears to be losing the perspective necessary to navigate these moments. If only for your long-term sanity, it will pay to make sure you train your staff to learn how to manage these moments without making them worse. Whether it’s teaching your managers how to maintain their grace when a guest acts inappropriately or ensuring your service staff understands how to be thoughtful in what they say to a guest during service, it falls on us. It may not seem fair and we would hope guests could self-regulate better, but either way, we are offering custom and it’s up to us to determine the environment in which we deliver it.
[Sources: Yahoo Lifestyle]