Individual restaurant marketing: checking out the stops and starts - column

Fourth of July marked three years that I've been thinking about nothing but marketing individual units for chain companies. We started contract marketing in 1988.

And before that I spent years suffering from the sales sheets of Bob Evans and Ponderosa, reflecting that we'd done a great sales job overall, but we were getting killed in Orlando or Chicago or wherever.

So I was thinking this morning that since my focus has been so dominated by one area of the business, I wonder if I can come up with a few "don't eat yellow snow" type rules for my readers.

Because of the pain we've suffered from trial and error, these "rules" came to me surprisingly quickly and easily. I hope they are helpful to your Local Store Marketing efforts.

(1) Stop trying to "buy" local store marketing. You can pay consultants, researchers, database companies, direct mail houses, advertising agencies and services like mine all the money you want to salute LSM with, but until you make unit empowerment, which costs nothing, a real thread in the fabric of your chain culture, the money will be wasted.

(2) Stop trying to buy unit empowerment. In fact, one of the worst things your chain can do is to put local budgets in the hands of your operators. Without education and support, money causes chaos. An appropriate analogy is that is better teaching a starving person how to fish with whatever pole he can find than to simply buy him a fishing pole without giving him the training and instruction that are necessary to land a big one.

(3) Stop creating just an LSM program. It won't work unless it reflects a process. That is, if you are just trying to discipline the organization to do locally exactly what home office decides it must do locally, you will continue to be as disappointed as I was. Do you work better when you're following orders or when you're an integral part of a success story?

(4) Stop hiring LSM people on your staff or your agency's staff, thinking that will spur local store marketing. . . In fact, most of the time it stymies it. Instead, convince the everyday unit people of LSM's worth. Educate and support them in the execution of "their" programs, and you will pay less and be more successful.

(5) Stop creating huge LSM training manuals. They are expensive in time and money and are not only useless but also in many cases counterproductive. The problem with those big manuals is that we try to cover every eventuality that might ever occur at the local store level. By doing so, the manual becomes a tome and scares the hell out of 90 percent of the people you want to use it. Of the 27 manuals we've done, the longest is 17 pages.

Don't ever expect perfection -- in your LSM plans or your unit people. We figure that in the best program we're in, we are effectively reaching about 40 percent of the unit managers. Please note that this is about 100 percent better than the situation before our program. You're not perfect; we're not perfect and neither are the general managers. So don't frustrate yourself believing that will change because of some new angle.

(1) Start your next LSM program by first reaching a consensus at the corporate level that everyone who meets the customer at your chain should be empowered to be a marketer. Second, gain commitment that the general manager or unit leader will be the focal point for leading this effort.

(2) Start your new program with real listening sessions with the operators you hope to empower. That is, go in with information on their neighborhoods (much is easily available from database companies or check with your real estate and site selection people) and with a plan outline. Then urge them to --no make them--embellish your plan to reflect their knowledge and ideas.

(3) Start being overtly honest with your unity people about marketing. During our training and motivation sessions we've used alarming honesty, such as in the following examples:

"Look, tomorrow we, the corporate chain people and contract marketing, will be on to something else. But you'll be here with the pressure to build sales. So if you listen, we'll leave you with some real tools to use."

"Okay, veterans, you've heard it all before. But so has Michael Jordan when his coach and supporter Phil Jackson reminds him to follow through with his hands toward the basket."

"We'll make some mistakes on this program, and so will you. But that's okay. It's okay. We'll learn from them then by just pointing at success instead of each other."

(4) Start creating manuals and promotional tools that are so simple they will embarrass you, so simple that everyone understands them and can use them.

(5) Start reapplying some of the simple disciplines that worked in the past. God didn't create us all to be Thomas Edison.

If all this makes sense to you, call me and ask any questions you'd like. But don't ask how I learned all this. It's too painful to recall.

COPYRIGHT 1991 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group