Everybody is the marketing department

In 1969, the Rolling Stones needed the cover designed for their new album Let it Bleed.

They hired a creative team to come up with the design.

The team included an art director, a graphic designer, a photographer and the rest of the usual people.

They had the idea to feature a cake. 

There was no way you could buy a cake like this in the shops at the time, so they would have to make it themselves.

Nobody in the team knew how to bake a cake, but one of the group knew a friend ‘Dee’ if she could help.

Dee was a young woman working at the time as an assistant at their photography studio, turning her hand to anything that needed doing.

Dee made a brilliant cake. 

She decided to do something really fun, gaudy, over-the-top, old fashioned and chintzy, like an Edwardian wedding cake, complete with ittle model figures of the band.

It took on a whole new dimension to the idea. It became the star of the show.

The record was a huge success and sold millions of copies.









That same year Dee got a job as a food writer at The Daily Mirror, and then went on to write books and present cooking shows on television.

Today Dee is probably better known by her full name - Delia Smith.

Great ideas often benefit from input from lots of different people.

When you’re a tiny company, ask everybody what they think about everything.

Ask the kitchen porter what they think of the photos.

Ask the chef what they think of the wallpaper.

Ask the cleaner what they think of the menu. 

You never know who might be hiding a little unknown genius.

Everybody is the marketing department.

Popcorn

Some years ago, entrepreneur Guy Hands and his firm Terra Firma bought the cinema chain Odeon.

At the time, the chain was doing very badly.

Video and the beginnings of internet downloading had completely devalued and destroyed the cinema experience.

At Odeon, the staff there all lived and breathed movies. 

They believed in the art of movies. 

They wanted each and every customer enjoy those movies just like they did. 

They made sure they knew each one of those movies intricately. 

They paid for expense funded trips to movie premieres in Hollywood and immersed themselves in the movie business.

The problem was, movies wasn’t the problem.

The experience was the problem.

When you go to the cinema, you are not just going to see a movie.

You’re going for a night out, to enjoy yourselves, with indulgent snacks, drinks and an exciting and comfortable environment.

So Guy Hands had to take all the managers to one side and carefully explain to them they weren’t in the movie business.

They were in the popcorn business.

From that point on, they worked hard to create the greatest cinema experience the world had ever seen.

The food and drink, atmosphere, service and comfort were all heavily invested in.

The movies stayed exactly the same.

Profits came back and the cinemas flourished.

People loved Odeon again.






Many restaurants are owned by chefs.

That’s not a bad thing at all.

Chefs cook the food, which is important in a restaurant.

Some chefs, however, sometimes fail to see that what they create is not the be all and end all of the restaurant’s business.

In fact, it’s usually just a part of it.

If you are a restaurateur you are not in the food business.

You are in the hospitality business.

The being nice to people business.

The looking after people business.

The ‘do you have everything you need?’ business.

Niceness is your business.

Sell your niceness.

If you’re a restaurant, Tripadvisor has to be your friend

(First published by A.I.R. Hospitality in March 2017)

Boo! Hiss! Everybody stand up and denounce the villain of the restaurant industry: Tripadvisor. It’s shit, right? All those idiots, whining and lying, with their made up reviews, sabotaging the competition, what a bunch of wankers. Ban it!

I’m the first to admit, Tripadvisor is a pain in the arse at the best of times. An unregulated, unelected free-for-all, lawless pit of pompous judgement, like the wall of graffiti in the school toilets, but written by people who read The Daily Express.

Sure, It has its fair share of idiots and bullshitters. There’s also the clichéd vision of the typical Tripdavisor reviewer, very similar to mine, which is a cross between Nigel Farage and Howard and Hilda from Ever Decreasing Circles. The idea that anyone the least bit informed would use Tripadvisor is a bit of a joke, or that’s how we all like to imagine. It’s also the root of all restaurant marketers’ problems, with the dreaded ‘one star review’ morning notification welcome less than a tequila hangover.

But has anyone taken the time to look beyond the criticism, and analysed the real impact and influence of such a behemoth on this industry?

My personal enthusiasm for the dreaded TA is well-known. Quite often I’ve stood up in restaurant marketing discussions and been the sole lonely voice making the case for everyone’s favourite pain in the arse. So I’m going to stick my head on the block and make the case:

If you’re a restaurant, Tripadvisor has to be your friend.

Welcome to the world, user generated content

One of the most interesting things is how quickly we’ve all adopted the online review as part of life, like they’ve always been there. TripAdvisor began its life in 2000. To get an idea of how early this was, Google only moved out of their garage the year before, and Facebook and twitter wouldn’t happen for 5 years. It was never intended to be about users’ opinions. Originally it was to focus on a mix of official words from guidebooks or critics reviews in newspapers and magazines. A helpful digital combination of all. So far so good, everything works fine, just like many other guides.

Then one day, someone added a little button for visitors to add their own reviews, famously the feature Amazon pioneered only a couple of years previously for books.

Take-up went crazy. Website visits and registered users skyrocketed. Do you know what happened? People were more interested in the user opinion than the ‘professional’ opinion.

Basically: welcome to the world, the user-review.

The opinion consensus

As a restaurant marketer I’ve been trying to make sense of guest influence in restaurants for 20 years, and the user review has been the single biggest game changer in restaurant marketing in that time.

What’s clear to me is this: People trust other people.

People trust people like themselves. It’s part of the opinion consensus, the internet or specifically Tripadvsor has simply provided a platform for this.

The old media has obviously been disparaging: you don’t have to look far to find journalists sneering at ‘hoi polloi’ and their stupidness. See how they guffaw at Mr Smith and his good lady wife from Tunbridge Wells, the ‘opted for’/‘melt-in-the-mouth’ brigade. It’s the same snooty attitude which is heaped on ‘comment warriors’, the same ‘comment warriors’ who have driven arguably the biggest revolution in how media effectively earns money since the battle of Wapping in 1986.

But this self-satisfied sneering needs to be watched. AA Gill seems almost Luddite now when heard quoting ‘Citizen Journalism’ back in 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1FOJTpy0ss (00.23)

‘Would you trust a citizen dentist?’ he cries, chuckling smugly to himself (I love how he proudly puts journalists in the same bracket as the medical profession). His ‘leave it to the professionals’ point is a good one, and granted not simply taking about critics, but sadly this attitude all sounds a bit twentieth century now.

The usual complaints

Let’s start with the addressing the usual complaints about TA. To begin, we hear a lot about the ‘no control’ angle. Nothing we can do, no reasoning etc etc. What’s funny to me is how nobody has a problem when they get a nice review. Only when they get a bad one. So instead of thinking about the reason someone posted it, they moan about TA like it’s got something in for them. Like having a suggestions box, not liking the suggestions, so you shout at the box. And don’t start the ‘but that’s not public information’ argument. This is 2016. Transparency is King.

Another argument frequently trotted out is, ‘if you have a complaint, you should make it at the time’.
Well, call me British, but I’m not one of those people who likes to treat every commercial or hospitality experience as a live confrontation session for raising problems with service. I go out to enjoy myself. Nobody likes the complainer, not your friends, guests, colleagues or anyone else. The only people who complain in restaurants are frankly arrogant, self-entitled tossers who relish this pathetic bit of power they manage to uncomfortably ejaculate over some poor young server. No, normal people keep these things to themselves.

So what can we do about it?

Now that the restaurant industry has begun to realise the user review cannot be ignored, its time to think cleverly about the positives. TA is quite possible one of the industry’s best sources of feedback one could ever wish for.

It was Gordon Gekko in ‘Wall Street’ who famously said ’the most valuable commodity I know of is information’. Well, feedback is your information. We all know it’s crucial, which is why every serious consumer business in the world invests so heavily in it. Tripadvisor gives people the best chance to let you know what you are doing right or wrong, and that information should be relished. Ignore it at your peril.

Lastly, there is customer loyalty. Think about the process of leaving that review. The guest has paid their bill, then left, gone home, and then taken the quite boring and tedious process of entering their review. They really wanted to do this. Why? Quite honestly I don’t know myself. But they do. Good or bad (but usually good, it has to be said) the urge to share is there. If it is a bad point they want to share, we have to consider why they want to do this. Spite? Pure vengeance? I’m not sure. I like to think it’s mostly a cry for help. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve contacted guests after they’ve left bad reviews, reasoned with them, killed problems with kindness, and they’ve become our best ambassadors and most loyal regulars to this day. People feel let down, unloved perhaps. TA gives you the chance to love them again.

I believe what we have to accept is Tripadvisor and the user review is here to stay. The way I see it is its all part of an evolving situation. Tripadvisor is not perfect, but if you are looking for pure unbiased guidance then neither is the highly corrupt PR/Journalist self-preserving model that has existed in old-world press and reviews for years. People are not stupid, they don’t go to Tripdavisor for the last word, it just provides another opinion.

And maybe they just love reading the hilarious home-made reviews about Nazi Maitre d's and dirty loos in hotels.

Forget What You Think You Know

At college I studied fine art.

It was quite a traditional course, and they still had a drawing class.

They would ask us to draw all sorts of things you might expect - fruit and vegetables, household objects, fabric, glass, all to encourage us to broaden our drawing skills with different textures and surfaces.

We all became very adept at reproducing all of these things.

One day a new teacher arrived.

She asked us to do a very simple thing.

She asked us to draw a cup.

So we all drew our cups, neatly and obediently.

When we were finished she asked us to draw the cup again.

But this time we were to turn the cups upside down.












Suddenly it was very difficult.

The handle didn’t curve they way we were used to.

The top was not hollow. there was no rim to draw.

There was nothing familiar about this object.

It was just an object.

Our brains had to completely reset itself to make sense of the structure.

Everyone struggled with the drawing and took twice as long to draw the cup.

The problem was, we’d all been drawing with our memory, rather than our eyes.

We’d been drawing what we remembered was familiar about a cup.

Not what our eyes told us about that particular object.

After using this technique several times, we all became better artists.

We’d taught ourselves to forget what we remember and trust our eyes.

This lesson can be taken with all creative processes.

Quite often we subconsciously fall back on comfortable creative rhythms and processes familiar to us, it’s easier and we don’t have to use any energy challenging ourselves.

Try moving yourself out of this comfort zone.

When designing that menu, try doing it freehand using a fountain pen or a piece of charcoal or an old 1980s Letraset.

If you’re producing photographs, forget those instagram filters and try finding an interesting way of making it beautiful or memorable before it gets to the camera.

If you’re making an email newsletter, try ditching that template and making something look so different and arresting you would have to share it with all your closest friends.

Turn off or hide every piece of equipment you normally use and try doing the job with what ever you have lying around.

Forget what you think you know.

Or turn it upside down.

Hospitality marketing post-Trump…. do restaurants need to be more anti-establishment?

(originally published in Code Bulletin February 2017)

Not long ago, letting a business owner loose on twitter was a PR death wish. But 2016 was an eventful year. Politics has proved that to communicate effectively, we don’t do things the old way any more. Maybe restaurant marketing needs to embrace the anti-establishment?

Ever since I can remember, the hospitality industry has towed the line following the rules of communication obediently. Traditional media was courted by traditional PR companies typically looking after 20 or more clients who would be carefully positioned in this week’s ‘hot lists’ or ‘roundups’ and customers would duly follow suit.

This industry ‘establishment’ has sailed a very steady ship for years. Who would want to upset this applecart? Everybody gets paid. The PR company gets its monthly retainer. The journalists get their constant flow of freebies. The media keeps its authoritative status and its flow of advertising revenue continues.

Today however, I can feel customers are beginning to sense this is a thinly veiled act. The endless puff pieces, the sickly adoration, the brown-nosing matey reviews, the relentless spew of ‘I’ll scratch your back’ lists, guides and restaurant finders - both printed and digital - has ended up as choreographed noise.

Because just like the voting public, the consumer is no different. Today’s restaurant goers are cynical. Dubious. Sceptical. They’ve grown weary of the act, the strategies, the orchestrated spin. Highly polished press releases and carefully planned lead times feel awfully contrived, and bandwagon-jumping gimmicks are regularly screenshotted and publicly ripped apart by the sniggering twitterati. The 21st century customer can see right through it.

They want transparency, truth, warts-and-all honesty. And if this means unmanaged social media accounts, bad grammar, drunken outbursts, public squabbles and all-out handbags on a Sunday afternoon, so be it.

A few of my favourite people in this industry are already becoming known for being just this. What would have been commercial suicide is now become a way to earn affection. The late night tirade against the arsey customer, the angry exchanges, the public inter-industry fallings out, all would have been advised to keep quiet because ‘that’s not the way things are done’.

Is this Donald Trump marketing? Nigel Farage Marketing? I shudder at the association, but you can’t help but create the analogy.

This is all good news for the little guy, as independents don’t have the layers of red tape to clear before communicating. If anything, they’ve created this new era for restaurants.

And the big players are quick to follow suit, with their marketing increasingly taking up a more ‘unkempt’ approach. See Wetherspoons publicly calling out Jaimie Oliver over his closing restaurants announcements, for example.

And how influential is the establishment anymore anyway? One of the more well known food journalists recently was being criticised for giving a certain clean-eating guru ‘publicity’ via the paper’s instagram feed. I found this hilarious, especially when the person concerned had almost ten times the follower count as the newspaper. Who’s publicising who here?

But from being an anti-critic piece, this is quite the opposite. Some critics too have learned that the direct-engagement approach curries favour with their own readers. While a few still take the ‘I don’t do comments’ snobbish aloofness, the more clever roll up their sleeves happily and get stuck in, arguing publicly like one of the masses with anyone who weighs in with an opinion. Good on them.

However it was a past era of critics you could rely on for being regularly acerbic, and today’s feel rather meek in comparison. The 3 star reviews arrive every week, safe and inoffensive, perhaps themselves now in fear of a comments war or chef twitter tangle? One cannot help but feel yesterday’s critics wouldn’t have had such fears.

The dreaded Tripadvisor review should also get a mention here, too. My acknowledgement of the positive influence of user-generated reviews and sites is well-known, and guess what, this plays directly into this idea. The user-review is about the most anti-establishment form of marketing there is. The pure unadulterated, unmoderated uncensored, fake-news, crack cocaine of marketing. The jaded consumer adores the user review. It’s Amazon, it’s Uber, it’s AirBnb. The fact that a restaurant can fake it actually makes it more real, more post-2016, more populist, like the fake-news twitter feeds, because the consumer likes to know they can spot the fake. They feel more in control.

So maybe the evolution of influence is inevitable, and the smart are already adapting.

Old media will stop fretting about the shrinking pool of ad revenue and unbutton its shirt. Critics will sharpen their knives and say what they really think. PR companies will take a more loosey-goosey approach and stop gagging their clients. A new era of anti-establishment restaurant marketing is here and it’s up to the smartest to find a way of taking back control.

Don't feed the Sharks

The most cutting you can say to an in-house PR or marketer is ‘You’re not on my radar, I never read about you’.

It cuts to the bone.

It bites like a shark.

Well, sharks are unique in wildlife.

They are the only fish without a swim bladder.

A swim bladder is like a little balloon of air inside a fish, which shrinks and enlarges according to the pressure of the water.

That’s why fish can stay exactly where they are in the water without floating up to the surface, or sinking from the bottom.

Sharks don’t have one.

How do they stop themselves from sinking?

A shark has to use its fins like an aeroplane for buoyancy, but essentially it has to keep moving, constantly using energy.

It cannot sleep.

It has to keep constantly swimming, and to fuel this relentless energy expense, it has to keep eating.

If it stopped swimming, it would sink and die.

When you’re a little restaurant, there is a temptation to be the top of peoples’ lips at all times.

Is everybody talking about us?
Are we the place of the moment?
The plat du your?
Are the right people being seen here?

It’s painful sometimes when you look around and see the latest places, top of the lists, mentioned repeatedly in the press, tweeted and instagrammed.












The problem with always trying to be the latest place, today’s place, is that you are always one new opening away from being yesterday’s place.

Where the celebs don’t go to anymore.

Where the paparazzi don’t hang outside anymore.

Where the bloggers don’t bother with anymore.

I can think of at least ten places who paid for super high octane PR and coverage and were THE places to go when they opened.

For six months.

Most have now faded or closed.

As Mick Jagger said, “Who wants yesterday’s news?

The only way to maintain this kind of No.1 profile is to keep paying.

A lot.

You pay the PR company to keep you in the roundups and lists.

You pay the celeb agency to keep sending their people down (and not forgetting paying their bill).

You keep offering the freebies to bloggers and influencers.

You pay for the Facebook ads to keep you in peoples’ feeds.

You’ve become the shark.

It’s shark publicity.

Only with shark publicity you’re not constantly swimming, you’re constantly paying.

And if you stop paying, you sink.

Look at how much you pay, week in week out just to keep on peoples’ radars.

Think about those people, and if their radars are even worth being on.

Whether those fickle radars would jump ship to the next cool place that seduced their radars with more lavish publicity.

How many times did it turn into a happy customer?

Maybe it’s time to look at how much of your expenditure is shark publicity.

Make it special

Some time ago I was thinking of buying a bag by Louis Vuitton.

There were lots of places to buy this bag, it was a well-known bag and had been around for many years.

First of all I looked around online.

The bag was easily available, on various shops and platforms.

It would be very easy for me to buy it, and the price would have been very good.

But something stopped me from buying it.

Maybe it was the guilt of buying such an unnecessary expensive luxury.

A week or so passed, and I still wanted to buy the bag.

I was at an airport, in the luxury goods department, and there was the bag.

The price was good again.

I didn’t have much time, and there was a long queue in the shop to see an assistant.

I got impatient waiting to see the bag.

Finally, the assistant was free.

He took the bag down from the shelf, and put it down rather casually, dumping it down like a bag of potatoes.

The bag looked a bit sad and sorry.

The leather tag was still clumsily wrapped in protective plastic, the zip half closed.

The assistant didn’t seem to care less.

I didn’t buy the bag.

Another few weeks passed, and I still wanted the bag.

I was in Mayfair, and I decided to go to the Louis Vuitton shop in Bond Street.

It was six o clock in June, and the light shimmered on the gold hanging display they had on the building at the time.

The uniformed doorman welcomed me in with a smile.

The carpet felt soft and new, like it had been vacuumed thirty seconds ago.

The light seemed golden, the brass and gilt details in the shop fitting glinting like candles in the mirrors.

The subtle smell was leather and perfume, sophisticated and sexy.

The bag was displayed in its own niche, lit from three separate angles.

It looked beautiful. Exactly as I’d dreamed.

The price was a lot higher though.

An assistant came over.

‘Hello, I’m George. Would you like some help?’

I said I was interested in buying the bag.

He went to a cupboard and very slowly took out a large cloth bag, and holding it with both hands like an art expert might hold something very rare and precious, placed it softly on the counter.

He then gently opened it revealing my bag inside.

The protective cloth bag was whisked away and folded. A pair of white gloves was put on, and any tiny bits of white lint were brushed away.

The bag sat there, perfectly formed, exactly as I imagined the person who put the final stitch would have wanted.

I bought the bag, because they made it special.

Restaurants are no different.

If you make things special, go the extra mile, think about all the little details, like you really care, your guests will feel special.









Presenting yourself as special is not all about lavish, expensive design, armies of staff of grand statement furnishings, it’s more a state of mind.

It could be the polite and reassuring note you receive to confirm your booking.

A thoughtful generosity in table spacing or sound levels.

The remembering of a guest’s dietary preferences before they mention them.

Willing service which appears instantly available the moment the guest needs it.

From the moment they book their table until the moment they leave, the guest needs to feel like they are fulfilling or reconfirming any dream they had about you.

When things feel special, they feel good value.

Nobody complains when they feel good value.


Make it special.

Expresso

In the 1950s, a style of coffee became fashionable in Britain. Tiny cups of steamed, strong coffee evoking everything that was Italian and cool at the time.

‘Expresso’ bars arrived all over Soho and beyond, with a whole beatnik counterculture supporting it.

Over the years a debate formed as to the correct spelling of the word ‘expresso’.

People argued about how in Italy, nobody says the ‘x’, they call it ‘espresso’ so that must be correct.

More recently, coffee became an elitist hobby.

‘New wave’ coffee fanatics opened coffee shops, and to pronounce it as ‘expresso’ would have had you laughed out of the door.

Snobby ‘baristas’ even produced T-shirts, so strong was their chagrin.

But do a little research and you find their snobbishness is built on shaky foundations.

Actually the word ‘Espresso’ is an Italian corruption of the Latin root exprimere - “to press out’.

It also has a nice second meaning - referring to speed, and doing something ‘expressly for you’.

So you can see the little ‘x’ has its roots firmly in the word.

The only reason they replaced the ‘x’ is because x is an old fashioned letter in Italian. They prefer the smoother ’s’ and replace almost all Latin ‘x’ with an ’s’.

But when the term originated in Italy, the ‘x’ was still pronounced.

In certain parts of Italy, and many other Latin-based European languages, such as French and Spanish, the ‘x’ is pronounced.












So by pronouncing expresso with an ‘x’ is in my view, perfectly acceptable.

It’s also huge fun to watch snobby baristas wince when you say it.

Don’t always think that because everybody does something a certain way, that’s the correct, best or only way.

It’s frightening to be the black sheep, or the only one daring to challenge the status quo or do things differently.

But having faith in your convictions, being different, is what will set you apart from the crowd.

I now feel like a coffee.

Double expresso please, barista.