Restaurant Marketing: Higher Menu Prices and Consistency

A new restaurant marketing story for you with a bit of a moral at the end.

In order to set and maintain higher menu prices than your competition, you must carefully “choreograph” all elements of your customer’s experience. And in that, no detail is too small.

Forward to a story.

We just had a nice dinner in San Simeon, California. A small town halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco with a population of 400, it consists of a gift shop and maybe a dozen hotels and restaurants on either side of Highway 1.

Given the geographic location (in the middle of nowhere), we weren’t expecting much from the seafood restaurant attached to the hotel where we spent the night. Even less did we expect their menu to command a more than respectable average of $21+ per entree.

However, that is exactly what he did.

A family with 2 children at the next table, unable to cope with the surprise of the etiquette, got up noisily and hurried out the door in search of a more affordable option. (Kudos to the Maitre D’, who was quick, vocal, and heartfelt in thanking them for coming and making it sound like she was parting ways with his best friends to the other guests.)

We stayed. Partly too lazy to move our loaves, partly curious to see how the kitchen would measure up to a relatively high bar they had set themselves.

The restaurant was half full. It being Monday, and many of the kids were back at school, it seemed like a good night.

The waiter did his part well at every turn, from offering the drinks to suggesting the specials, turning invisible when we didn’t need it, and reappearing when we did. The food was worth every dollar the menu demanded, and possibly more.

Looks like we had a winner.

Except for one small but annoying detail.

Which was the waitress (the person who made the least money out of all the people in the store that night) who responded to every “thank you” with a moist-eyed “uhuh”?

Now, since when does “uhuh” mean “you’re welcome”?

I found myself thinking about how well everything was orchestrated that night to make my experience consistent with the menu and to make me happy to part with the money.

And also thinking about how every “uhuh” grunt thrown at me negated all the good that had happened up to that moment, and reminded me how far we were from the city.

That’s called inconsistency, and it’s your biggest obstacle to your ability to increase and maintain higher verification averages.

When it comes to restaurant marketing, the little things aren’t little anymore. They are everything.

Three questions for you to ponder (your restaurant business will skyrocket once you find the answers):

• How should you choreograph your customer experience?
• How do you train your service staff now, and how should you actually train them?
• How can you make sure they don’t bring their unfortunate social habits into your restaurant?