“Location, Location, Location!” is Not Enough

I recently heard from a restaurant owner who had declared bankruptcy that he was reopening on a busier road.

Naturally, it seems that he attributes his initial failure to lack of traffic.

What he fails to realize is that there are restaurants which are located in the middle of nowhere, isolated places should I say, who still have no problem in creating monster waiting lines and month long reservations.

As a matter of fact, I remember seeing such a restaurant on the same block as his initial location.

Our dear restaurant owner is failing to see the real cause of the bankruptcy.

What he does not realize is that moving to a popular strip will increase his costs dramatically (rent) as well as competition (it’s likely that every restaurant owner will want to be located in a busy area).

It’s true, his visibility will be increased but visibility is not enough to ensure a restaurant success in the long-run.

Yes, in the short-run, people will be curious and step in. If they like it, they will come back and/or tell their friends. If they do not like the exact opposite will happen. Yes, that scenario would occur whatever the location.

Our dear friend would be better off creating a name for the restaurant no matter the location. If you really want to get technical, this process is called brand building.

How does a restaurant become a popular darling?

Time, signature dish and/or celebrity chef to name the three main characteristics of some popular restaurants.

If a restaurant has been around for ages providing the same “good” food and service, the more time goes by the more established it becomes.

If a restaurant has one dish that it does so well, the dish alone will make it a superstar. You always hear of a restaurant with “the best burger in town”, “the best bagel in town”, “the best chicken in town” and so on.

If a restaurant hires a celebrity chef, it’s bound to become popular from the day its door is first opened. This is true with the high end type of restaurants.

What strategy should our friend follow?

The second.  The signature dish road. To offer a cuisine or dish that’s so different and special that it will become the talk of town.

And, he would certainly benefit from that traffic does goes by daily as word of mouth is the second best way to increase a restaurant’s fortune after media exposure, which does kick in usually after that word of mouth gets by a food critic who writes a glowing review.

What dish should the restaurant champion?

I can’t cook to save my life so there I cannot help anyone. However as a marketing professional, I can offer some guidelines.

Let’s use hamburgers as a quick example…

The dish has to be reflective of the overall restaurant ambience. For instance, the dish cannot be a fantastic steak if the restaurant is supposed to be serving vegetarian food in essence.

The dish has to be unique. One that’s unheard of or one that’s popular but that’s prepared very differently. If  for instance, every restaurant in town make their hamburgers from frozen meat how about fresh meat? I know, that’s a silly example but it’s supposed to illustrate the point in question.

The dish has to have a special name. One that is unique and that has the potential to catch on with the mainstream. If someone could come up with a drink called “sex on the beach” and make it a worldwide phenomenon, certainly anyone could name any dish!

The dish has to be economically feasible. Most people will come in for that dish. If it costs quite a lot to make and the other items on the menu do not offset the expenses, there’s trouble on the horizon.

The dish has to be fast or slow to make. If it’s delicate, customers will be patient. If it could be made faster elsewhere, they will not stick around.

The dish has to be hard to reproduce. You do not want competitive restaurants destroying your point of difference. That’s why you might want to say somewhere on the menu that the dish is made with a secret sauce or ingredient and so on à la Coca-Cola.

Those points above should suffice in turning around a restaurant. Now, whether or not they will be put into practice, that’s a different story.

Most restaurant owners turn industry consultants and yet when I visit their websites, they seem to preach things such as, give away free food, post ads in local newspapers, invite the local police sheriff and so forth.

While I have no particular problem with such restaurant marketing suggestions, those are just short-term business moves which once stopped will cease to produce results.

However, once a restaurant gathers a favorable reputation for particular dish, the world gets around more and more beyond even the owner’s control.

That’s why you will never see any successful restaurant advertising. It’s so popular it does not need to.

That’s why once such restaurants had to burn to the ground, once rebuilt, they have no problem rebuilding their businesses.