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25 Marketing Ideas Restaurant Owners Overlook

Tweet Most restaurant owners get the basics of restaurant marketing down pretty well: they get a Facebook page, buy a couple local media ad spots, and get some big signs for the front of their location.  But there are a lot of marketing ideas that are simple to implement that can really go a long [...]

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Why Is It So Difficult To Convert A Bad Experience Into A Great One?

Tweet When a customer is displeased with the service you’ve promised to provide, whether it be in your restaurant or retail store or any other category that deals with people, why does one think that a simple “I’m sorry” is going to remedy things? If you truly want to convert a bad experience into a [...]

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Menu Engineering: Combo Meals Make Customers Think Value

Tweet No matter what kind of restaurant you run, from fast casual to fine dining, combo meals can help your customer make a choice that makes them feel like they’re getting a deal, even if the combo costs exactly the same as the a la carte menu. This is backed up by a study conducted [...]

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How To Turn Coupons Into Restaurant Marketing Opportunities

Tweet Despite the fact that a majority of restaurateurs view discount sites like Groupon as the biggest threat to their business, and despite a lot of talk in the restaurant industry about how discounts devalue a restaurant’s brand, new market research reveals that coupons and deep discounts are probably here to stay. The recession may [...]

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Klick Kitchen: Can Your Restaurant Save By Ordering Online?

Tweet Last summer I wrote about Klick Kitchen, an internet-based replenishment service for food service businesses.  At the time it struck me as odd that despite all the press Klick Kitchen had been getting, there didn’t seem to be any feedback from real chefs/managers/owners in the field who could substantiate Klick Kitchen’s claim that their [...]

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Improve Restaurant Sales And Brand Recognition At Food Festivals

Tweet Summer food festivals have been a fixture in American culture for years.  From the Taste of Chicago to the Alabama Crawfish Festival in Faundale, AL, food festivals large and small have kept growing and expanding, even through recent economic turbulence. Tens of thousands of restaurants participate in these festivals across the country.  Participation often [...]

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How To Make Your Restaurant A “Third Place”

Tweet The concept of the “third place” was first developed by Starbucks, and anyone who has been in a Starbucks immediately understands the principle: make your business feel like a home-away-from-home. Unfortunately for Starbucks they made way too many homes just as the economy turned south – tripling the number of locations in just three [...]

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Marketing Your Restaurant’s Core Values

Tweet In a previous post, I discussed the benefits of implementing Core Value Marketing as part of a successful growth strategy.  This type of program creates a bond with your potential guests while providing tremendous opportunities for free publicity. Most importantly, it allows you to provide much needed support to organizations in your community that [...]

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Why You Should Tell Your Guests To Order Themselves

Tweet If you do it right, guest prefer to order themselves.  This has been proven by the advent of interactive electronic ordering kiosks, which have quickly become commonplace in European and Asian quick service restaurants. Americans are finally catching up to their European counterparts when it comes to self-service kiosks.  Early adopters like Jack-in-the-Box have [...]

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NRA Announces 2009 Kitchen Innovations Awards

Tweet The National Restaurant Association (NRA) has announced the 2009 winners of their annual Kitchen Innovations award, which recognizes cutting edge advancements in improving the efficiency of commercial kitchen appliances and tools. Some highlights from this year’s list include: Advanced Composite Materials’ Silar Microwave Flatstone. This composite ceramic insert is designed for commercial microwaves.  It [...]

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