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May 2012 Newsletter

May 21, 2012

Greetings!

We’ve been travelling a lot lately, and we couldn’t help but notice how exciting the hotel dining scene is getting again. This happens periodically in the business cycle, as hotel-development strategies have shifted back and forth between full-service and limited-service approaches. This time the cycle seems to be very much in support of offering amenities like spas, concierge services, and exciting food-and-beverage facilities—even multiple options. What’s really different this time, however, is the fact that so many of the high-profile hotel openings are among the ranks of the boutique lodging sector, not the well-established chains. And that has made the hotel-dining boom even more high stakes.

While you’re here, be sure to read Karen Brennan’s excellent analysis of how to tell if your advertising approach is really working. The founder and principle of the brand strategy group Brandscapes, LLC , Karen debunks several prevalent myths about how to measure the results of your marketing efforts.

To your success,

Dean and Danny

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The End of Ho-Hum Hotel Dining

By Joan Lang

Every decade or so, there seems to be a renaissance in the quality and innovation of hotel dining—and this one’s a game changer. Positioned to attract gastro-tourists, upscale business travelers and sophisticated food-loving locals alike, this new crop of restaurants (often helmed by famous chefs) are rapidly becoming destinations-within-a-destination. Pack your bags and go.

Shanghai Terrace, The Peninsula, Chicago

Aiming to recreate the ambience and romance of a 1930s Shanghai supper club, this elegant new Chinese restaurant sports dark lacquered wood and dim, moody lighting, plus a Cantonese-style fine dining menu complete with dim sum and a five-course traditional Peking duck feast. There’s bird’s nest soup, abalone and steamed market fish, plus such contemporary reinventions as miso marinated cobia and dry aged prime ribeye with smoked garlic sauce, plus ambitious cocktail and tea programs.

Tamarind and Bellocq, The Hotel Modern, New Orleans

Two high-profile options—a restaurant and a cocktail bar—anchor this new Central Business District boutique hotel. Tamarind showcases French-Vietnamese culinary influences via local star-chef Dominique Macquet and chef de cuisine Quan Tran: Lemongrass Galanga House Cured Salmon, Wagyu beef coulette with Asian ratatouille, Saigon Cinnamon Molten Cake. Bellocq, named for the famed Storyville photographer, touts sophisticated cocktails and naughty live entertainment.

Parallel 37, The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco

Marketed as a freestanding restaurant, Parallel 37 (named for San Francisco’s geographic latitude) specializes in local ingredients like Sonoma duck and Dungeness crab, as interpreted by Michael Mina acolyte Ron Siegel. A “pairing and sharing” menu and communal tables lend to a neighborhood lounge vibe in the restaurant, aided and abetted by Camber Lay’s one-of-a-kind cocktails (e.g., the Bar Fly, with Bulleit bourbon, Benedictine, poblano pepper, vanilla and fresh lemon juice).

Wit and Wisdom, Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore

Michael Mina leads the team behind this upscale tavern offering seafood-intensive “comfort food with a contemporary twist”: lobster corndogs, roasted Barnegat Lighthouse skate wing griddled in a cast iron skillet, Border Springs Farm braised lamb shank. Frequent promotions like Burgers & Beer and a Preakness Triple Crown menu help bring in locals; comfortable leather couches and generous cocktails encourage them to stay. The hotel is also home to Lamill Coffee for Euro-style café dining, and a Japanese izakaya-style restaurant called PABU.

The Dutch, W South Beach, Miami

The culinary amenity for Miami’s hip hotel and residences is Andrew Carmellini’s second “just an American restaurant” (the first Dutch is wildly successful in Manhattan’s SoHo), featuring high-quality hangout food like oysters, dry-aged beef, and such “supper” entrees as marinated roast chicken and homemade pappardelle with lamb ragout. It’s quickly become a power destination for breakfast and lunch, and a serious bar scene with a huge collection of specialty spirits to wash down the fried-oyster sliders and sheep’s milk ricotta with grilled bread.

Wolfgang Puck at Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles

The original celebrity chef continues his domination of the local food scene by lending his name

to the F&B roster at this historic glamor-hostel. The Puck-ish menu focuses on modern California cuisine with luxurious European and Mediterranean influences: red snapper crudo, Dover sole, roast guinea fowl, exemplary bread service. Society and celebrity weddings, breakfast-in-bed, a lavish Sunday brunch and a star-studded outdoor lunch on the legendary terrace complete the return of old-school dining excellence to the expensively (Rockwell Group) refurbished and re-opened hotel.

China Poblano, Cosmopolitan Hotel, Las Vegas

In a city rife with high-profile chefs and their restaurants, none has gotten more attention lately than this hot new outpost of the José Andrés/ThinkFoodGroup empire. The daring China-meets-Mexico menu connects East to West with Chinese noodles (made fresh daily at a display station), dim sum and soups, served alongside tacos, tableside guacamole, and ceviches in a distinctly casual-hip environment, where Singapore Slings share bar space with Margaritas and aquas frescas.


Advertising: Which Half is Which?

By Karen A. Brennan, Marketing & Branding Strategy

By now everyone has probably heard the saying, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Most people attribute it to a friend or business associate, but the comment was originally made by retailer John Wanamaker, a marketing pioneer in the early 1900s. I guess the reverse is also true: Half of the money we spend isn’t wasted…it actually generates a return on investment (ROI) that builds sales and builds the brand. The real question is, how do you know which half is which?

• I just visited P.F. Chang’s for the first time in a long time. What made me do it? I saw their “20 Lunch Combos Under $10” TV spot. After seeing it enough times, I just had to go. But I didn’t go for lunch; I went for dinner. In other words, the advertising moved me even though I didn’t go for the deal. The Chang’s spots do a great job of making the case for the brand and the product and use the deal to merely “punctuate” the ad, not as its centerpiece. It’s not about the deal…it’s about the brand, with a big coupon exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

Years ago I read that including a coupon in an ad increases readership by 90% (almost double) even if people don’t redeem the coupon. This makes sense, especially when you consider that redemption rates on coupons average 1-2% and are often redeemed at a rate of less than 10%. People are paying attention to the ad and responding to it, even if their “response” is a non-coupon visit. I recently spoke with P.F. Chang’s president, who confirmed that the restaurants have experienced lift at both dinner and lunch because of this promotion.

Lesson: The law of ‘unintended consequences” can also work in your favor. Be sure to factor that into your ROI.

I recently attended a board meeting where the accountants looked at 5-10% coupon redemption rates as “modest,” and questioned whether it was worth doing. Interestingly enough, there was a positive ROI on the promotion, but the accountants wondered whether they might have gotten an even higher ROI doing something else—the grass is always greener. My take on this is that the ROI is the low end of what the promotion achieved when you consider the overall awareness it produced and the energy level it created in the restaurants during what would have otherwise been a slow time (like P.F. Chang’s). And we all know the best promotion result is a busy restaurant.

Lesson: Don’t be distracted by someone else’s green lawn.

Advertising is like the pill you take to make the symptoms disappear. Once the symptoms have gone away, you might think you are fine and decide you don’t need the pill anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a Cumulative Effect of Advertising: A number of years ago it was found that only 60% of the impact of an advertising initiative is felt in the first year, 25% is felt in year two, 10% in year three, and 5% in year four. If you keep advertising year after year, it will build and build until year four, when you will finally realize 100% of the benefit of the campaign. If you do the same thing the next year, you will get the same 100%. This will make it appear that sales have flattened, but the truth is that the base has moved. A certain level of marketing simply ratchets up the base.

Lesson: Stopping your advertising loses the residual impact and sets you back years in building sales. Ultimately, you need to “up the ante” to get bigger impact. Stops and starts, rather than a consistent year-after-year approach, leaves money on the table because of the lost impact.

• Reach & Frequency, the traditional measures of advertising in a mass media world, are giving way to Impact & Engagement, the watchwords in a social media world. But it’s not an either/or choice. A full marketing approach includes both Reach & Frequency and Impact & Engagement. Anecdotal information that reflects how much more powerfully guests respond to your brand is almost as meaningful now as the ROI.

Lesson: Advertising that doesn’t Reach enough people, doesn’t reach them Frequently enough, doesn’t have Impact or is not Engaging is probably in the half of your advertising that doesn’t work.

• Not spending money enough may cause a promotion to fail, whereas spending a little more would give the program enough to break through and be a success. Years ago, I tested two ad campaigns. One featured a “buy one, get one free” coupon and the other featured “buy one, get one for a dollar.” Our managers thought they would save a lot of money not having such a high coupon cost, when in fact the number of people coming in for the less compelling deal was so much lower, it didn’t even generate enough revenue to pay for the ad. The BOGO with the free offer, on the other hand, actually generated a lot of traffic and made lots of money.

Lesson: Go Big or Stay at Home.

So here are my simple rules:

1. It’s important to measure sales gains not only against last year, but also against a realistic assumption of what sales would be if you had done nothing. Ask, for example how your competition is doing. If you are doing better than they are, your advertising is working.

2. Make it about the brand, not the deal. People will seek out the deal—you’ve got to expose them to the brand on the way. That gives you impact today and tomorrow.

3. About the time you are getting sick of your advertising, your customers are just beginning to pay attention to it—the promotions that are working are working because you stick to them.

4. Continuously evaluating your efforts and eliminating the things that aren’t working, and doing more of the things that are, will build the half that works and eliminate the half that isn’t.

For help with your advertising and marketing strategy contact Synergy Restaurant Consultants.



Why Blog?

By Joan Lang

 

In the rush to Facebook, Twitter and now Pinterest,  blogging has gotten a little lost in the social media fray. But one of the original ways of “sharing” on the internet can still be a valid outlet for foodservice organizations.

Blogging has been around since the late ‘90s and was first used by politicians and news services to express opinions and begin a dialog with readers. In the business world, the blog has been eclipsed by Facebook for many interactions with followers, but its uses as a “long form” for communicating with employees, customers, and even suppliers and vendors need not be overlooked.

If Facebook and Twitter are a short story, then the blog is a novel, and can be used to explore more in-depth topics in a variety of ways:

•  When used internally, a blog written by a member of the top management team can be used to help establish the culture, mission and communications pipeline within the company. The CEO can provide a roadmap for growth strategies and more, while a human resources executive can post about policies or other issues affecting the team. A blog post carries a degree of weight and permanence that no memo or email can match, since it also becomes part of the company’s archive

•  Externally, a blog can be used to showcase an important project or team member. For example: The corporate executive chef, who often labors in obscurity to the public eye, can blog about the R&D process, with posts about travels and favorite meals or a “diary” of how a new signature dish came about. Linked with demo videos and recipes, this can be extremely effective in putting a face behind the food that’s served, positioning the company’s culinary chops with existing and potential customers

•  A blog that exists on the website serves as a constantly updated source of content, helping to drive traffic to the site. Blogs can also help with SEO (search engine optimization, that all-important vehicle for getting “found” on the internet); by using key search words within blog posts (such as “macaroni and cheese” or “hiring bartenders”) you can help market your restaurant in strategic ways

• Allowing employees to post blog items (under supervised circumstances) helps give key team members a voice and can engender pride, engagement and personal development

• Blog posts can be used to demonstrate expertise. Synergy’s blog highlights the variety of skills and services the company provides, such as menu development, food trend analysis, staff training, kitchen design and more, as well as being a way to bring attention to the team’s activities and projects

If you do decide to move ahead with a blog, here are a few rules and tips for making the most of it.

1. Make sure the person who’s doing the writing can actually write. Designated writers should enjoy writing, understand the mechanics of spelling and grammar, and be willing to post regularly.

2. Have someone else proofread every post before it goes online. Twice.

3. Promote your blog via Facebook and Twitter so followers will know there’s a new post.

4. Make sure readers can navigate easily to the rest of your website from the blog, in order to capture the enhanced traffic opportunities.


Current Synergy Projects

Maitland, Florida-based Sonny’s BBQ, with over 120 restaurants in 9 states, has named Synergy Restaurant Consultants as its “go-to, think-new” team. Synergy will be working on multiple strategies as it seeks to re-energize the Sonny’s BBQ brand through new menu items, operational efficiencies and equipment upgrades. Read more.


Tip of the Month

The Restaurant Growth Index

Searching for new locations? Restaurant Business magazine’s annual RGI study is available online to guide you to Towns with Potential. The alphabetical list, prepared in conjunction with Nielsen, ranks all 942 Core Based Statistical Areas (aka metro areas) by such values as population, number of restaurants, and sales per capita. The study helps identify areas that may be underserved, and where restaurant sales are strong compared to the national average