Your guests define 'value' by the totality of the experience: the service, the décor, the food and its flavors and aromas and the cost: all details that create a memory. The most memorable experiences come from an organized, well-rehearsed and communicated performance. Great 'word of mouth' is built note by note, scene by scene, act by act, so that by the end of the visit your guest walks away 'wowed'. Or bored. Or, worse of all, disgusted. It's your choice.

We will review the last of the Five Golden Rules of Method Marketing: "Market from Inside, Out". Many clients and colleagues assume that Marketing begins with advertising that involves reaching out to consumers. Method Marketing teaches that marketing begins inside both the guest and those people who animate the restaurant concept and the communication energy, in turn, flows outward. Advertising is really the leaf on the branch farthest from the roots. As a practical matter, however the actual process of marketing communications does begin within the store. As you 'walk the walk' of the story, you create effective and provocative "talk". This organized program of communication becomes just one more element in the staged piece of Restaurant Theater the operator creates through the use of Method Marketing.

Issue #17 concentrates on creating dynamic, branded "Experience Details". These are the deliberate, staged moments of truth intended to create a memory. With the restaurant the center of the universe, the show may last as much as an hour or so. In the same way a movie or play has deliberate moments of drama, comedy and climax, there needs to be key parts of the restaurant experience that provide similar wallop. You deliberately theatricalize such a detail to make it count, to make it memorable. While still based 'in truth', the intensity gets raised several notches. Keep in mind that dialing up a moment does not mean making an Experience Detail louder or cruder. It may be soft, bold, romantic, sensual or fun, but most of all, it must create an Experience Detail that is memorable.

What is an Experience Detail? It is a part of the restaurant experience that heightens the entire visit for the guest and brings your story home. It may be as tangible and big as Hard Rock Café's merchandise shops, Champps Video Walls or Fuddruckers "Build Your Own" fixins area. It may be as subtle as Ed Debevic's "World's Smallest Sundae", the smell of smoke at Goode Barbecue in Houston or the way the server uses a crayon to write their name on the paper table mats in Macaroni Grill. The most memorable experiences are made of many such details, large and small. What makes the detail yours, instead of a stale copy of someone else, is that it comes from adhering to the Five Golden Rules. Your Experience Details make sense and have ultimate power in your theatrical, branded experience. It won't matter what the other guys are doing. You will be unique.

Creating an effective Experience Detail: Guidelines

1. Experience Details are the memories you intend your guest to take with them
2. Experience Details need to be thematically consistent with the restaurant story. No 'effects for effects sake'
3. Experience Details must delight at least one of the five senses. Frankly, the more the better.
4. Experience Details are, by definition, theatrical. They not only suggest you are in the theater business, but they demand the seriousness you would use to stage a show
5. Experience Details need to be fully understood by your staff of actors. They must have a complete comfort level with what the details mean, how they work and be part of your quality control. Your staff must insist that each Experience Detail be executed impeccably.

There is more than showmanship involved here. I read in a recent Wall Street Journal that Restoration Hardware has enjoyed healthier sales than Pottery Barn and many other furniture retailers because they have found a way of creating an Experience Detail to communicate their 'retro chic' positioning. They have been selling the heck out of old 50's style victrolas, replete with plastic casing. It doesn't matter that vinyl records went out a decade ago. The consumer buys into Restoration Hardware's brand story so fully, they are willing to pay a lot of money for something that has little use just because of the memory it evokes.

The Lesson: Revisit your story and identify places in your physical environment where you can create heightened Experience Detail. Your value will be determined by the memories such acts generate.

In the next issue, we'll look at various ways to communicate cost effectively. --> GO

 

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