Promoting Your Restaurant.

In a franchise situation, the brand owner will take a lot of the responsibility of the promotion, including the creating of marketing collaterals, general advertising and a degree of local advertising specific to your location. However, as a business owner it is always important to ensure that promotion for your restaurant is being done adequately.

Promotion can start anytime, but it should begin in earnest and in a planned manner with scheduled activities from the date the final launch has been planned.

Your promotion strategy depends on the type of restaurant you will be running and the catchment area for your customers. As mentioned earlier, QSR and cafes have more of a local clientele – customers who are already in the area. Casual and fine dining restaurants attract customers from further afield. Naturally, the promotion efforts for the first two formats need to be more locally focused and the promotion efforts for the other two formats should have a wider spread.

Localised efforts are cheaper to promote and restaurants that have a wider appeal would attract the lifestyle writers of city-based and national publications and hence, knowing your targeted clientele and choosing the right promotion strategy is very important.

A web presence is extremely important too. You need to have a dedicated website, and presence in all popular social networking sites. The Internet is the best way that customers can easily find all the important information regarding your restaurant, including operating hours, exact location and the menu. In the era of smart mobiles, access to people on the move is equally important.

Getting yourself talked about is the most important objective. The appeal of the concept and the experience of your restaurant is the only way you can ensure that you are talked about in pleasant terms. That is the challenge of word-of-mouth marketing.

It would be best to work out your promotion campaign through a thorough marketing plan. The following points need to be kept in mind while preparing it:

1. Design Fresh and Consistent Communication
2. Build a Public Relations Strategy
3. Do Effective Advertising
4. Drive Social Media Conversations

You can add to the list by writing in to us.

Types of Restaurants and Business Formats.

There are many types of restaurants to choose from. Broadly, the choice falls into restaurant category, cuisine range and business format. The restaurant industry consists of a wide variety of categories: full service restaurants, fine dining, casual dining, fast casual restaurants, coffee shops, cafes, snack bars, quick service restaurants, food courts, take-out stands, street stalls, kiosks and other eating joint formats. These formats are further divided based on the food they serve. Either they are specialty restaurants specialising in one cuisine, or multi-cuisine restaurants, which means serving a variety of dishes from around the world. Furthermore, the prospective restaurateurs have three main business formats to choose from: the start-up model, acquiring a running restaurant and buying a franchise. Let us examine restaurant categories, cuisine range and business formats in some detail.

Restaurant Categories

As discussed above, there are many categories of restaurants. This book will deal with four basic types of restaurants: Fine dining, Casual dining, Cafe and Quick Service Restaurant (QSR). These are marked by the level and nature of the service. As the name suggests, QSR category offers quick service and the level of service keeps increasing and is at the ultimate in the fine dining restaurant. The other categories of restaurants can be seen as variations of these four categories. Thus, kiosks and street stalls are a more basic variation of the QSR category. Coffee shops and snack bars are a variation of the cafe. Fast casual restaurants may not give full service at the table but offer a better quality of cuisine.

Let us deal with these four categories in some more detail.

Quick Service Restaurant (QSR)

Quick service is a restaurant that focuses on speed of service at a price that is light on pocket. These restaurants offer minimum table services. Fast food restaurants or QSR cater to ‘meat-sweet diet’ and are known for their short food preparation time. They offer limited menu, which is readily available in take away, though seating is also an option. These are different from the traditional restaurants in the sense that they serve food in a disposable container/plate and do not use any cutlery.

Ambience

The traditional interior design of QSR includes hard surface, bright lighting and primary colours as they facilitate easy maintenance, fast turnover and upbeat energy. Provision is made for children as very often QSR serve the entire family. Play areas for children are also found in some of the restaurants. However, they need to be positioned well so that parents can eat while they can keep an eye on their kids.

Service

In a QSR format, speed of delivery and low cost are key considerations. Customers can be expected to eat the food served to them from the disposable containers in the interests of speed. Rarely is there any table service, customers are most often expected to pick up their food at the counter.

We will cover the remaining three categories in our subsequent posts. Write in to us for any queries, information on the categories of restaurants and the latest QSR trends in India.