Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It has been said that one of the most important ideas in marketing, specifically in how we market our restaurants, is this idea of empathy. Empathy, of course, is the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes, to literally think about the people you serve and figure it out, what it is they want, what it is they need so that you can carefully construct a solution so that you can be the answer to their prayers. They that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode of Restaurant Strategy. Specifically how we get specific and intentional about how we think about the people that we serve and how we reach out to and market and communicate our value to the people we serve. Most of the marketing that we get wrong in our industry, we get wrong because we lack intention and we lack specificity. I'm going to show you how to bring specificity to everything you do through a case study. A case study about a restaurant that I worked at many years ago. And I want to share with with you how we thought about Personas, how we thought about the people that dined in our restaurant, and specifically how we went to serve them, how we went to communicate how we marketed to each of those Personas. This has a ton of value for you. Please don't go anywhere.
There's an old saying that goes something like this. You'll only find three kinds of people in the world. Those who see, those who will never see, and those who can see when shown. This is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast with answers for anyone who's looking.
Hey everyone, my name is Chip Close and this is Restaurant Strategy, a podcast dedicated solely to helping you build a more profitable restaurant. We cover everything from marketing to operations, whole bunch in between. Each week, I leverage my 20 plus years in the industry to help you build that more profitable and more sustainable business. I also work directly with owners and operators all over the world through my P3 mastermind program. We gather restaurant owners on a call for two hours every single week for a year. People join this program for a year and we make a profound impact in their businesses. If you struggle to generate consistent, predictable 20% profits, if you were taught that 20% is is not possible, I am here to tell you you're absolutely wrong. And I want to show you how you can target consistent, predictable returns every single month. To get started, set up a free call with me or someone from my team. Visit restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedule set up a free call. We'll learn more about you and your restaurant. You'll learn more about the program to see if you're a good fit for that program, there's absolutely no pressure to join. But just set up that call so we can get to know each other again. Restaurantstrategypodcast.com schedul as always, that link is in the show notes.
AI you love to go out to eat. So, as a guest, what's your biggest pet peeve when you're trying to choose a place to eat?
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah, as the father of two children, I can't leave the house for less than $30 an hour. My wife has celiac. So when we're going to make a. A dining decision, I live and die by that menu. I'm in there researching what's available. What can my wife eat? What can we share? What do I get to eat off of her plate? Um, and so that menu is just a crucial part of all decision making for me as a consumer. It's why at Marquee, we focus so much on our menus, our menu integration, so that as operators, your menu that lives in your point of sale, that you want customers to see is available and up to date everywhere.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: To learn more about Marquee, go to marquee.com m a r q I I.com to learn more about this and all of the incredible features they have.
So today we're gonna talk all about marketing. We're gonna talk a lot about empathy. And to do that, we're gonna talk about the importance of Personas and pain points. This idea of Personas is something that's really fundamental to marketing at a big level, at a big Fortune 500 company. Right? So let's walk it back, and let's put it in a way that you can understand it. P.S. by the way, in the book that I'm. That I'm. That I just wrote, the restaurant marketing mindset, we spend the first, I don't know, 30 pages of the book really talking about this.
It is that important. It's fundamental to the work that we do after that, I'll remind you, way back on episode one of this podcast, we talked about marketing. Marketing is the foundation for all business. And I said, hey, what is marketing? That's the question that I get all the time. It's a question I ask all the time. The answer is, for me, it's answered in three questions. Right? So what is marketing? It's defined by three questions. What's the product? Who is that product for? And then how do we reach those people, those people that need our product? What's the product? Who's it for? How do we reach them? That's the question, right? Those are the three questions that we repeat like a mantra over and over and over again. That's how we properly market anything, but especially our restaurants. And when we do that, we get thinking about the who in the equation. The who is literally at the heart of our definition. It's the second question, right? What's the product? Who is it for?
And then how do we reach them?
Meaning we identify people that have a problem, and then we craft a solution to that problem. That is all great marketing. And unfortunately, in the restaurant industry, we do it backwards, right? So in the book the Restaurant Marketing Mindset, I talk about how there are two main ways to market. Either we can create a product and then go and find customers for the product, or we can find customers, find a group of people who have a problem, and then craft a solution, create a product for them.
Most restaurants do the first thing, right? You create the restaurant you want to create, and then you spend all your time trying to get people to go far better, to do it the opposite way, right? Reverse engineer it. And this is what the best companies, not just the best restaurants, but what the best companies in the world do, right? They look for a problem that they can solve. What problems are you uniquely qualified to solve? If you've been listening to this for a while, you know the framework that I talk about a lot, the ABCDs of marketing. A stands for audience. The who, right? Who is a problem we could solve. And B, brand is your restaurant, is the experience you're crafting. What you create is a solution to someone's problem, right? So what's the problem you can solve? And then what's the solution that you put forth? If you do that, if you start working in reverse order, if you start marketing in reverse, it will change your marketing ultimately. That's what I want to urge you to do on today's episode. I started the whole episode talking about empathy. Empathy is our ability to put yourself in another person's shoes, to walk a mile in their shoes and say, man, what do they have to contend with? What do they need? How could I create?
How could I make their lives easier? How could I create something that they need, something that they'd be willing to pay for?
When we walk around the world thinking in terms of that, creating restaurants that people need, creating experiences that people need, it changes everything. Then simply all we have to do is tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, you know that problem you have? Yep, I recognized that you had that problem. I got a Solution for you, come over here. It becomes so much easier rather than trying to convince someone to come try your restaurant. Seth Godin, you know, I quote him a lot. Seth Godin is a noted public speaker, a best selling author, and he said many moons ago in a lecture that I heard, he said, a marketer loses when they have to convince the consumer of two things. And the example he gives goes something like this. He said, when you walk up and down the streets and you say, hey, do you like coffee in the morning? And somebody says, no, not really, I don't really drink coffee in the morning. And they say, oh, we really should. Coffee in the morning is great. It wakes you up, it gets your blood pumping. And when I convince you of that, let me convince you to come to my coffee shop. You have to convince them of two things. And it sounds ridiculous when we say it like that. But it's far better to just convince somebody of one thing. Meaning we walk around and say, hey, do you drink coffee in the morning? Say, yeah, absolutely. I can't live without my cup of coffee in the morning. Great, then you should try my coffee. If you like coffee in the morning, you're gonna love my coffee in the morning. That's not very difficult to get someone who's already a coffee drinker to come try your coffee. Now there are lots of ways that we can convince people to make a choice in our direction as opposed to another direction. But it begins by finding someone that doesn't have to be convinced twice. And it sounds overly simplistic, it sounds sort of stupid when you say it out loud. But you'd be amazed at all the restaurants. And maybe walk up and down the streets of your neighborhood, whether it's in a city, in a suburb, in a rural area, and look at the restaurants that are struggling on a Tuesday night. It's because they don't have something that anybody needs. Nobody needs this restaurant on a Wednesday. Nobody needs this restaurant on a Saturday morning. Nobody needs this restaurant on a. You fill in the blank.
They didn't do that deep work of saying, what do people need? How can I create something that they need? That's how you are successful. That's how we can be successful in anything we do. And again, we're talking about any business, anyone that serves people. And by the way, if you're in business, you're creating something for other human beings. Even if you're a pet store, you're selling to the humans. The pets can't shop. Pets don't have debit cards.
So when we're talking about marketing. Empathy is at the heart of everything we do. Now, let's get really technical. When we look at a market, right? When we look at a city, let's say a population, is everyone in that market, right? So in New York City, it's a population of 8 million people.
My restaurant is not for everyone. If I open a restaurant in New York City, there are plenty of people who can't easily get there. There are plenty of people who can't afford to eat there, and there are plenty of people who just aren't gonna like the food we serve. Great.
Then you are already starting the segmentation process, right?
There's all different ways to segment the population, right?
To slice it up by demographics and psychographics and by looking at their purchase behavior and their geography, meaning their relationship to there. But ultimately, if we're taking this very analytical, academic approach to marketing, we're segmenting a population because we're saying, hey, we can't possibly convince everyone to come here. We're just trying to find the people who are most apt to dine here, the people who. Who need what we have.
What we're trying to find are Personas. Personas with pain points, right? So when I worked at Gotham, Gotham restaurant in New York City, it's an institution. They will turn 40 this upcoming March. And I was there for eight years, and for many, many of those years, I ran the marketing for the restaurant.
And one of these things we did is this exercise in finding Personas. The idea of Personas is saying if you could find fit everybody in the dining room. You walk in on a Thursday night, and there are 200 people sitting there or 150 people sitting there. And you could pretty much put everyone in the dining room and 90% of the people in the dining room into one of your Persona buckets, right? Not everyone is going to fit neat and tidy, but most people will. What you're trying to do is find Personas. And I want to explain to you how we started doing this exercise for Gotham. And then later, I want to show you what we did with that, because that's really what you care about it. It's one thing to say, okay, great, I've got my Personas. Then what? What do I do with that? How do we actually market with greater specificity and intentionality? That's what I said at the very beginning. That's what I promised to deliver on this episode, and I will do that. But first, let's talk about Gotham. So Gotham is a fine dining restaurant in the heart of Greenwich Village in New York City. It's an institution. It's almost 40 years young. It's been around for a while. It's got three, three stars in the New York Times. It has one Michelin star. It is a very, very big deal. It's expensive. It's a special occasion restaurant. It's a place where people go to entertain clients.
It's one of the most popular restaurants in New York City. So when I was there, we sort of sliced it up. I said, okay, if I've got to come up with three, four, five buckets, these buckets are your Personas. Everyone has to fit somewhat neatly into one of those buckets. I sat back and I said, okay. I think there are four Personas, four main Personas of people who dine here. If I had to look around and say, hey, 90% of the people here will fit into one of these four buckets. Those buckets were locals, right? So very wealthy individuals who lived in the neighborhood who often were coming home from work and wanted a quick meal before they relieved the nanny or the babysitter. You know, they were.
They were just in for a quick bowl of pasta and a nice glass of wine. They were just dipping out before, you know, they went to the movie theater down the street. Before they went to theater.
Local.
Locals, right? People who lived in the neighborhood, for the most part, very wealthy individuals, right, who wanted, really, a casual experience. That was one Persona. The other Persona was special occasion people. People who came out to celebrate their anniversary, their birthday, a graduation, a retirement, right? That made up a significant percentage of the people in our dining room. We have business people, so a lot of people who were here to close deals or were doing client dinners or something like that, right?
So locals, special occasion people, business people, and then tourists.
Here's the interesting thing. Gotham was pretty straightforward. A meal at Gotham was right down the middle of the pike on the menu. There's a strip steak, right? There's lobster, there's chicken, there's duck.
It's pretty much right down the middle of the pike. It's very approachable, delicious, incredible, very well executed, but not weird, not quirky, not out of the ordinary. There are certainly those restaurants across New York City where you sit down and you say, whoa, I don't even know what this is. I'm tasting new flavors and new ingredients and all of that.
That's not what Gotham was. That's not what Gotham was trying to be. Gotham was trying to be back when it opened in the 80s, sort of, hey, this is the kind of place you could come without a tie, without a jacket. You get a wine list like you'd find at some of the best restaurants in the city, where you are required to wear a jacket and tie. But you don't have to have to do that here. You can come in with jeans and, you know, a nice shirt. You can come in in a suit and take off your tie and be totally comfortable. Those two groups would be totally comfortable, right? It was nice. It was very expensive. I think the check average per guest was like 1:25 or $130 a head when I was there. So it's certainly not an inexpensive meal, but it was laid back, it was relaxed, and it was straightforward as a very approachable fine dining meal. You can get a really great steak and get really great lobster, really great duck breast.
That's what they were known for. That's what they did well. And all of our four Personas had pain points, had separate pain points that were closely aligned. But the locals wanted something really easy, straightforward. They went all over the city, all over the world to try all kinds of different things. And when they were in their own backyard, they really wanted something else. They wanted something easy, straightforward, approachable. That's what we serve them, right? The business people wanted somewhere where they could, you know, they could entertain clients, maybe coming in from a secondary or tertiary market. And they weren't maybe used to some these quirky, strange, or sometimes pretentious restaurants. They wanted to impress them, they wanted to take them out, but they also wanted to make their clients right or somebody they were trying to entertain or trying to close a deal with. They wanted to try to make sure they were comfortable. So again, an approachable kind of meal was right. What they were looking for. That was the pain point they were looking to solve. We want to impress these people, but we don't want to alienate them. We want them to feel really comfortable in the room. Because the meals, the prequels for the deal, they both sort of needed separate things, but there was alignment in what Gotham provided to be able to do that, right? So the locals wanted one thing. They had a specific pain point. The business people had a specific pain point. Interestingly, the tourists and the special occasion people, they had a similar pain point in that they needed a sure thing. These are people who are, let's say, the tourists who are spending a lot of money to come into New York for a week, right? And they're going to see shows and they're going to museums and they're dining out A lot. They're spending a lot of money over the course of their week in New York City. And a lot of people said, okay, we just want to make sure we get a sure thing so we can say, yeah, we had a great meal in New York City that maybe that included a Michelin star restaurant. They wanted something nice like that, but they wanted to make sure it wasn't going to be weird that they were actually going to enjoy it. So for a certain kind of diner, Gotham was right in their wheelhouse.
Right. And likewise the special occasion people, the kind of people that dine out once, twice, maybe three times a year, they can't afford to dine out once a week or twice a week. It's just a, it's reserved. They save up for it. It's only every once in a while. That's a really important thing to understand.
So the locals, the business people, the special occasion people, and the tourists, those were our four Personas. On any given night, I could put pretty much every guest in our dining room and into one of those four buckets. And that, as it turns out, became a very, very helpful shorthand for marketing our restaurant. Now, how do we do that? How did we do that? How do we market to four different Personas? Because you do. You talk to them in different ways and you reach them in different places. We will talk about that after a word from another one of our sponsors.
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Now we're talking about Gotham. We're talking about empathy. We're talking about Personas and pain points. And when I was at Gotham, right, this institution, this bastion of fine dining in New York City, I said, we have four Personas. Now somebody else might come in and do the marketing for Gotham and find another crowd, find a different way to segment the audience. For me, I was running the marketing and so I identified those four Personas. That's something you should do. Sit down in your dining room and look everywhere and say, hey, who are the kind of people that dine at our restaurant? If I had to create Personas for them, right. That would all drive to a pain point, right? What do these people all have in common? And maybe you only have two or three or four, right? I would say usually no more than five, because the people come to your restaurant for a specific kind of solution to a specific kind of problem. Again, the problem is their pain point. When I was working at Gotham, we identified these four Personas, and they all have four different pain points that were very closely aligned with the solution that we created. Specifically, Gotham existed for a specific reason. We crafted a solution to specific problems. These four Personas had specific pain points that we solved.
So it's really important to do that for your restaurant. That's your first action item. If you've never thought in terms of this, I would say do it again. This is something we talk about in the book, the restaurant marketing Mindset, and I walk you through it in a very specific way. So if you're on the fence about whether to get that book, I would say get a copy or two, give it to your team. It will help you think more deliberately in this way and help you put it together. But that's where we begin. You got to put together a Persona or a list of Personas, right? Who has pain points now in the terms of Gotham and what you really care about, I'm guessing at this point is great. We've identified Personas. They all have specific pain points. Now what now? And this is what I said I teased out at the beginning. I want to help you market with greater specificity and greater intentionality. Oftentimes when we market our restaurants, and we've been guilty of this for a long time, but especially over the last five or 10 years, with the sort of the rise of social media, we just say we just need to talk about the delicious things we have, and people will come.
And that is not true. Nobody goes to restaurants for delicious food. And I mean this because all restaurants these days pretty much have delicious food. Certainly all of Gotham's competitors have delicious food. They can't promote their delicious food and expect that to be the thing that gets people to go there.
What will get people to go there is by recognizing. Right empathy. By recognizing that they have a problem and making sure you communicate to them that you understand their problem and you've crafted a specific solution to their problem. Meaning you have to say through all of your marketing, say, hey, I Know, you're looking for that perfect place because you don't go out very often, right? You only go out a couple of times a year. And you want to make sure that your money is well spent. We see you. This is a great place for you. You're going to find something you're going to love.
That's how you begin your marketing. All of your marketing, in essence, has to do that.
Just showing great pictures of your food, cool pictures of your cocktails is not enough.
Just sort of posting into the ether and hoping that the right people will see it is not enough.
So let's talk about how we do this with greater intentionality. I'm going to use a couple of examples in my Personas to help you.
So let's say tourists, right? Let's say tourists who are coming in, and we want to try to get to them. We want to try to make sure that a specific kind of tourist who's nervous about something or has a specific kind of problem, meaning, I want a great meal. I'm willing to spend money for it, but I want to make sure I don't waste my money. I want to make sure I love it. We want to make sure those people know that we are for them.
Specifically, what we did or what you can do is start a concierge program, because all the tourists are pretty much, yeah, some of them stay in an Airbnb, but mostly they're staying in a hotel.
So where do we think they're staying? Our key demographic, the Persona, where are they staying? And you don't have to make friends with 100 hotels. Certainly in New York City, there are more hotels than we could build relationships with. But maybe we narrow it down to 10 or 20. 10 or 20 hotels that have concierges that we could make friends with, that we can start building a relationship with the concierge team. And we could say, this is what Gotham's all about. Here, copies of our menu. Here's some snacks, here's some treats, and we'd love to invite you in for dinner.
Tell me a night when we can get four of you in. And we'll just send a lot of food so you can see what the experience is all about, so that they can experience the room, they can experience the style of service, and they could taste some of the food so that when they go back to their job and they're at the conference desk and they get the kind of person who comes up, we say, we want them to go, oh, you know what? They're going to love they're going to love Gotham. We're not doing that to butter them up. So they send us. They send guests to us instead of somewhere else. We are trying to show them the experience so that they send us the right people. Because it's going to be a win win. Because if the guests come up and they're really nervous and they don't know where to go and they can't get a reservation, they're going to say, the concierge, hey, this is what we want, et cetera, et cetera. Concierge is going to say, yes, I know where you're going to be happy. I'm going to help you get a reservation at that place. And then the people are going to come back to them and say, oh, my God, that was perfect. You knew exactly what we needed. Because the solution, the experience that Gotham crafted was exactly what the concierge recognized they need.
So there's no reason to start a concierge program to get the locals. Locals don't go to the hotels. The business people, for the most part, don't go to the hotels. That's specifically how we cater to tourists. Also, if we're going to advertise, if we're going to market in print, right, that's maybe travel magazines, that's maybe magazines at the big airlines, right? So Delta puts out a magazine that's in the, in the little pocket of every seat, right? United puts out one, American Airlines puts out one. Maybe that's a good effort. Because if 25% of our people every night are tourists, well, then a concierge program and sort of a targeted, you know, print media campaign, either through earn, through our PR company, or in advertising.
That seems to be a crucial way to do it, right? Maybe our digital media is going to be focused on geofencing, meaning maybe we're going to spend ads specifically targeted to people landing at JFK, LaGuardia and Newark. Right here in New York City, we've got three main airports. If you ever land in Las Vegas and turn on your phone, there are tons of people advertising to you in the airport because they're going, man, tourists are coming in. They're looking for places to go and things to do. The same is true in, let's say, New York City. So if we say Taurus, this is what we do. This is how we attract or acquire this kind of Persona. This is where we would go to get them. If you're not thinking in terms of Personas, you're never going to come to the solution like that. You're never going to come to a solution of, well, this is where we would find them. Because we don't know where these people all come from. They come from all over, small markets, big markets, international, domestic. But they all come in through a certain way. They all go funnel through the airport, pretty much. They all funnel through a hotel.
That's one key way. So that's an example of how we did and would continue to market towards that Persona, that Persona. Specific kind of tourist looking for a specific kind of solution.
That's how we would begin that conversation. And we would do that for each of the other three Personas as well. And we market to them in very different ways. Right. Take the opposite end, right? The local. So one way to market to tourists, right? We do a whole series of things. None of those tactics, none of those marketing efforts will work for our locals. So how do we get our locals? Right, that's local digital advertising in Google, on Facebook, on Instagram.
Right. Also, this is where formal walls marketing comes in handy, right? This is where we're shaking hands with everybody to walk in. This is where hospitality is just good for marketing. Right. This is where we shake hands and say, welcome. Hey, how are you? Where do you. Do you live in the neighborhood? I see you here often. That's where striking up a conversation and getting to know our people better is the best possible. Marketing. Inviting them back, putting, trying to get a standing reservation or getting the next reservation next week, giving them the card and say, hey, listen, when you're. When you're on your way downtown and you're thinking, hey, you got an extra 45 minutes to grab dinner with your wife, let me know, I'll set up the table, I'll pre order your food, I'll get everything ready so that everything can be as seamless, can be exactly what you want.
You'd be amazed at how little effort that actually takes to blow people away. And it's all within our capability.
So now two different Personas, two of the four Personas, and we market to them very differently.
Again, the Taurus, we're using a mixture of relationships with the concierges. We're using some print media, either earned or paid media through magazines and other channels, and then digital, right? Maybe geofencing at the airports and doing other things like that.
Those are ways we can begin to do that. And then on the other side, right? Totally on the other side, these local.
The local residents of the neighborhood, man, that's four walls marketing. That's just pure hospitality. Getting to know somebody, building a You know, building a profile in the reservation software and making sure that they know we are here to help them. We can give them what they need.
Now, you can apply the same sort of stuff with all of the rest of the Personas, and I won't bore you with that. Now this is just to help you understand how specificity will help you get more intentional with your marketing. So if your marketing exists, you know, just in a way of like, hey, we take a bunch of pictures and videos and we post to social media three or four or five times a week, that's not marketing. That maybe is an awareness campaign. That's sort of a present, a digital presence campaign. Maybe it feeds into SEO. But that is not intentional marketing.
Again, marketing begins by answering those three questions. What's the product? Who is that product for? And how do we reach those people for whom the product was built?
And we reach them in a variety of different ways. And by understanding your people, your Personas, understanding their pain points. Right? By bringing empathy to the table. That's how we get better at what we're doing. Everything. And I'll finish with this and say everything is about systems and goals.
Proper goal setting, what am I trying to accomplish? And then a system is a repeated set of actions. I'm doing the following things to achieve the following goal.
Everything in your operation has to be based on systems and goals. Proper goal setting and then putting a system in place to help you accomplish that goal. And then finally analyzing, tracking the results. This is what we're trying to achieve. Here's all the stuff we did to try to achieve that goal. And then did it work or did it not work?
Which things worked and which things didn't? If it worked, you double down on it. If it didn't work, you scrap it. You go back to the drawing board and figure out other stuff that you could try. It's an iterative process. And as your. As your operation evolves, you will get better and better and better. You will never get better, though, if you don't bring specificity and intentionality to what you're doing.
That's what I wanted to talk about today, guys. I appreciate you being here. I will remind you if there's ever any question about any of these episodes, I answer each and every email that anyone ever sends me. Me chip close dot com. My name is spelled with a K, so it's C-H-I P K-L-O-S-E dot com. Send me an email chipclose.com Let me know if there's anything I can do for you, any help you need, I am here. Appreciate all of you, and I will see you next time.
