Tag Archives: Food industry

August 7, 2015 · 10:01 am

The Lord Helps Those That Yelp Themselves

Let’s end the week with a Foodie Friday post about reviews.  There are lots of studies that will tell you just how important “social proof” is as consumers are checking out a prospective buy.  People want to take comfort in knowing that they are making a choice that others have made and felt good about.  Over 70% of Americans say they look at product reviews before making a purchase, and I suspect the number is no different for restaurants.  Because of that, it’s incumbent on every business to check out their reviews.  For restaurants, that means Yelp.

We went out for dinner the other night and I decided to post a review of the place.  We’ve been to this place a number of times over the years and love it, so I thought a positive review would be a nice thing for me to give in addition to my patronage.  Most of the reviews of the place are quite positive.  There were, however, a few one-star reviews (roughly 10% of the total) and they are what bring up the business point today.

You can’t let bad reviews hang around like an old plate of food.  They must be dealt with or eventually the smell will overpower everything else.  Bad reviews are also a great source of research.  In this case, there were complaints about undercooked rice on a few nights.  Who was cooking that night?  A couple mention slow service – was someone absent?  Sometimes the reviews are unfair – complementing the food and service and giving the place one star because you think the neighborhood is “sketchy” isn’t accurate.

So what do you do?  Read every review carefully – you can learn from the good ones and learn more from the bad.  If it’s bad, maybe you want to figure out if this is a legitimate complaint or just a troll (check out the reviewer’s other posts).  You’re going to respond either way.  Apologize, lay out the facts as best you can gather them, and promise to do better if given another chance.  Remember that most of the people reading reviews have no opinion of you (or the reviewer).

A recent Washington Post article mentions that most restaurants don’t hear directly from customers while they are having an issue.  Instead, 80% go home and write something.  Your reputation is one of any business’ most valuable assets.  You need to monitor it and, to the extent possible, control it.  Fair or unfair, that’s reality!

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July 24, 2015 · 9:04 am

I Wanna Go THERE!

Foodie Friday, and today we’re going to vary from the usual routine.  Most Fridays, I rant about some dish or bit of cooking trivia and attempt to relate it to your business.  This week I want us to have a think about some information I read about the food business and how it markets itself to children.  After all, what better way to get a family into your dining establishment than to have a kid demanding to go!

The folks at Media Post reported on a study by the folks at Packaged Facts, which does research in the food, beverage, consumer packaged goods, and demographic sectors.  The study, called Foodservice Marketing Trends in the U.S.: Technology, Mobile, and Social Media, examines how restaurants and others in the food service industry can grow their businesses based on the trends uncovered by the study.  So far, so good.  It’s what they put in the press release that concerns me:

The family demographic is important for restaurant marketers to target. Almost inherently, acceptance by kids strongly influences parent choice in where to dine and parties with kids aged 12 and younger account for almost $18 billion in annual restaurant spending. However, it’s often easy to overlook kids as vital consumers of digital marketing. Successful modern day restaurant strategies often leverage digital entertainment to increase brand engagement with kids.

It goes on to talk about what several firms are doing to market themselves to kids in order to have the kids ask the parents to take them to the dining establishment.  These activities include downloadable apps using a QR code on the menu, branded tabletop games (which cost the adults money so the kids can play – no pressure there), and the ability for kids to upload things they color or make to their Facebook pages – guess no one told the restaurants that kids under 13 aren’t supposed to have a Facebook page.

My real concern is that there are a number of laws that have been put in place to protect kids.  There is something called CARU – the Children’s Advertising Review Unit – that works with the marketing community to protect kids.  It issues guidelines.  There is also COPPA, which is a law that protects kids’ online privacy.  I couldn’t find any specific guidelines for mobile, but I wonder if the general online guidelines are being followed.  These include:

  • Reasonable efforts, using all available technology, should be made to establish full disclosure and choice exercised by a parent or guardian when a site wishes to obtain personally identifiable information from children for marketing purposes.
  • Advertisers who maintain children’s sites should not knowingly link their sites to pages of other sites not in compliance with CARU’s guidelines.
  • Advertisers who communicate with children via e-mail should remind and encourage parents to regularly monitor their children’s e-mail and online activities.
  • Information collected for the purpose of obtaining verifiable parental consent should not be kept in retrievable form by the site if consent is not received in a reasonable amount of time.

In other words, just because kids are a good set of influencers, the food industry – and all of us in other industries as well – have some rules that we ought to follow.  In the rush to grow sales, it’s never a great idea to grow legal liability at the same time.  Marketing to kids is tricky business, and I wonder if the people who focus on that target are as focused on the laws and guidelines that apply here.

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July 17, 2015 · 12:24 pm

Responsibly Irresponsible

This Foodie Friday, I want to rant a bit on responsibility.  What’s prompting this is a report from the Center For Science in the Public Interest on their annual awards for the 9 most unhealthy chain restaurant meals.  I’ll admit that almost everything on the list sounded pretty good to me.  After all, who doesn’t enjoy 7 cheeseburgers piled high on a bun?  But my rant isn’t about chain restaurants offering dishes that are really unhealthy.  We allow people to sell cigarettes and lots of other products that can potentially kill the consumer (cars, for example).  Is it inherently irresponsible for businesses to create products that end up causing societal problems?  You tell me.  Diabetes is an epidemic but nearly every supermarket product has some form of added sugar and we’re just getting around to banning trans fats which bring about heart disease.  I’d rather than any business person think about minimizing the damage before they offer something to the public but that’s probably wishful thinking.

Here is the thing: you’d have to be pretty stupid not to understand that you’re consuming a lot of calories and fat when you chow down with that 7 cheeseburger menu item.  You probably don’t understand, however, that the 1,330 calories in the burger are accompanied with 47 grams of saturated fat and 4,570 mg of sodium.  Let me quote the report on another dish which comes from The Cheesecake Factory:

The Louisiana Chicken Pasta, which weighs an impressive 1½ pounds, comes topped with four slices of heavily breaded chicken (in case you didn’t get enough white flour in the mound of pasta). Add the New Orleans sauce (butter and heavy cream), and your plate is up to 2,370 calories (more than a day’s worth), plus 80 grams of saturated fat (a four-day supply) and 2,370 milligrams of sodium (1½ days’ worth). For those numbers, you could have had two Fettuccine Alfredos plus two breadsticks at Olive Garden.

When you jump out of an airplane, you know it’s risky.  When you get on a roller coaster, there are always signs explaining the risks.  When you order many of the extremely unhealthy products available in restaurants, you’re generally flying blind. Even when the nutritional information is posted, it’s often inconspicuously posted on a wall someplace and it’s rarely on the menu near the copy that is pushing the product.

So back to responsibility.  We all need to pay more attention to what we’re eating and we need to learn to ask questions about just how bad a dish is.  At least that way we can attempt to minimize the damage by eating a bit better over the next couple of days.  Marketers need to provide enough information to allow us to make intelligent choices.  Killing your customers is almost always a bad idea, and encouraging them to kill themselves (slowly) without speaking up about the risks is, I think, irresponsible.  At least someplace like the Heart Attack Grill is pretty upfront about the risks.  You might not like it, but it’s responsible.

Thoughts?

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