Wednesday April 9, 2019
SOCIAL MEDIA: 4 Ways to Drive Up Restaurant Website Traffic From Instagram
Everyone loves a good food photo, and Instagram is one of the best places to scroll through to look at delicious meals and beautifully-designed restaurants. There’s no denying Instagram has changed the restaurant industry and the way customers interact with it.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Game of Thrones Drinking Game
As the final season of Game of Thrones airs this spring, many fans are beginning to mourn the death of their favorite show (pun intended). Our friends from Delish are here to help ease our pain with a hilarious GoT drinking game to get us quite… drunk.
“That Noisy Kid is YOURS, Mam”
The Restaurant industry deals with difficult customers regularly. Apparently, other industries experience similar BS just as often. BuzzFeed collected 18 responses from employees sharing their "Customer Is NOT Always Right" moment, and some of them are ROUGH.
MLB vs. Cuba
The Trump admin has canceled a deal that allowed the MLB to sign Cuban players, arguing that the agreement violates current U.S. law that bans business dealings with the Cuban government. National Security Advisor John Bolton accused Cuba of using its baseball players as “economic pawns” to generate funds for the Cuban government.
DISC, TUBE, PUCK
Why it matters to you: If not a burger, what shall we call the new plant-based meat products?
As with any innovation, there is a cycle it passes through on its journey to being an accepted product. In the case of the Impossible Burger, that cycle now appears to include some new regulation on how it is presented and described. Specifically, the European Union has newly proposed legislation that would disallow the use of meat terms to be employed to describe vegetarian and vegan meat alternatives. Sure this is totally silly, but the real issue here is why would they even consider it? The answer to that is undoubtedly a meat lobbyist was trying to protect their monopoly on the use of the word burger. Of course, it’s absurd to think that anyone would be duped into thinking a vegetarian based burger is made with real meat, right?
Well, considering that many Americans believe that chocolate milk springs from brown cows, there might be some cause for concern. However, in reality, nobody is making that error. These vegetable based burgers look like burgers, predominantly taste like burgers and pose an existential threat to meat producers. No, it’ unlikely that you’ll be serving Impossible Burgers to more guest than the real thing, anytime soon, but it’s also clear that the future of that question is still very much undetermined. Hence, the meat lobbyists trying hard to force a frame around these burgers that will make them significantly less appetizing. Among the proposed names, “veggie disc” and “veggie tubes”…yum. This will be a fight you’ll see here in America soon enough, we guarantee it.
[Source: Grub Street]
LOYALTY (R)EVOLUTION
Why it matters to you: Starbuck’s continues their loyalty evolution and it’s the lesson we all need.
The undisputed champion of restaurant loyalty is Starbuck’s. They have been perfecting their loyalty programs and supporting technology since 2008. This excellent timeline published on Nation’s Restaurant News is a great guide to how successful programs are developed over time. The program we all know today started as simply as a visit frequency program rewarding folks for 12 visits with a free beverage. From there it evolved into a couple of different programs with a Rewards and Gold Card version of their loyalty platform. They quickly consolidated into a single program, but they tailored the rewards to allow higher frequency guests to achieve an elite status inside the single concept. This is similar to how the airlines reward for tiers of loyalty.
If we fast forward to the present, they have now changed again to a new tiered system that allows guests to cash in their credits anytime they want. Instead of achieving a status to leverage your reward, simply spend sufficiently to qualify for whatever reward you choose based on your currency in the system. Twenty-five Starbuck’s “stars” gets you an extra espresso shot and 400 stars will get you some ground coffee or retail merchandise. The lesson we can reap from Starbuck’s loyalty evolution is that good things always need improvement and tweaking to achieve the optimal performance. In the case of loyalty Starbuck’s has continued to grow its product and tailor it to the needs of their guests. We can all learn from that lesson. IMHO
[Source: Nation’s Restaurant News]
Hero image courtesy of Delish.com