MARKETING: 4 Ways to Bring in Holiday Traffic with Text Messaging
With 13 out of the 20 most successful U.S. fast food chains using SMS to reach their customers, text messaging is a marketing tool that can really help increase traffic by offering value to guests. Texting can remind your guests to return for future visits and can simplify the processes you have established. From enticing them with rewards to reducing waiting, you want to make the entire visit enjoyable and memorable for your guests.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Sycamore Beer Cans Pulled for Being NSFW
The holiday season is meant to be a season of love and joy, but perhaps not (traditionally) in the way that Sycamore beer cans suggest. The brewery’s batch of Christmas beer was pulled from shelves after someone anonymously complained that the labels look like it has deer having sex. It’s relatively tame, all things considered, but c’est la vie. You can see the original labels here.
Changing Advertising Landscape
Unsurprisingly, the increase will mainly be driven by a steep rise in online advertising sales, which is expected to grow by $60 billion between 2019 and 2024. Fortunately for traditional media outlets, in this case TV and radio broadcasters, advertising is not a zero-sum game and a dollar spent online is not necessarily pried away from a struggling radio station. In fact, both TV and radio advertising revenues are expected to remain more or less at the same level through 2024 with minimal ups and downs along the way.
NBA Zeros
The NBA season is closing in on two months old, and yet there are still 21 NAB players without a field goal this season. Timothe Luwau-Cabarrot, for example, is 0-2 from the field and 1-for-2 from the line, while Nigel Williams-Gross is 0-5 from the field but 2-for-2 from the line. That puts them at the top of the zeros list. There are still almost 20 other NBAers who haven’t net a single point for their teams. Can you guess who?
TRULY GREAT LEADERSHIP
Why it matters to you: Leadership isn’t complicated; it requires empathy and creative thinking.
In every career, you work for a variety of leaders, but it’s the truly special ones that influence your journey and make working for them memorable. But what makes a truly great manager great and what can we learn from them to improve our own leadership? This post on Forbes magazine identifies five attributes that define a great leader and we can all be better leaders if we emulate them. Beginning by acting like a coach and not an autocrat. Helping people achieve their potential by encouraging them with a coaching style that both empowers the staffer to achieve their own goals, but puts the reason for their success squarely in their own behavior. Secondly, a good coach understands your weaknesses but focuses on your strengths. By allowing an employee the satisfaction of knowing they can succeed and not harping on their frailties, you help them build the confidence necessary to actually improve their overall performance.
Another key to successful leadership is empathy. Start by learning the stories of your staff. By showing an interest, you make them feel valued and you learn where they are coming from as you manage them. That empathy also needs to allow your team members to be vulnerable and know that they are safe to do so. No one has ever improved on something they can’t acknowledge needs the work. By embracing vulnerability, you remove the stress of showing a weakness and begin to actually address it. Finally, don’t be a slave to convention. A truly great manager sees the way they do business and is ready to disrupt it when that change will improve his team’s performance. Don’t get blocked by “this is how we do it” mentality and think about your challenges more abstractly. Your team will love it and you will make yourself that memorable leader they will point to when recounting their own success.
[Source: Forbes]
INVENTORY EXCESS
Why it matters to you: Eliminate excess inventory and grow your bottom line.
The average restaurant carries too much beverage inventory and it’s as simple as that. Take a walk through your back bar and count how many bottles of booze on your back bar that are rarely, if ever, poured. Maybe it’s that Scotch program you tried to implement a few years ago, or five cases of some liqueur that was featured in a hip hop song that faded into obscurity, but all of it is wasting space and keeping your profit locked away. This captured potential can be released with a little bit of thought and planning. The folks at Nightclub & Bar featured a blog on how to eliminate excess inventory and they got much of the strategy right.
Let’s face it, you already paid for that dead inventory and it has already been expensed as a loss. The sooner you get it off your balance sheet the better. Why not discount drinks that include it or work with your staff to better educate them on those spirits so they can more effectively sell them? The post missed some other ideas like a Bin End wine sale on bottled wines you have in stock that are no longer on your menu or trading back to your spirit vendor those loose bottles for something that you actually pour with regularity. It’s up to you to get creative when clearing dead inventory, because the alternative is the clutter in your storage and the asset sitting idly on your balance sheet. Neither of those sound like appealing approaches.
[Source: Nightclub & Bar]
