January 6th, 2009 — Uncategorized
We have just published an article at Restaurant Commando.com listing 5 (in our view) of the most important principles of restaurant marketing. All of them apply to marketing a Cajun restaurant.
Instead of repeating the entire article, here’s a link to the Restaurant Commando site:
January 4th, 2009 — Cajun Food, Cajun Restaurant Marketing
Marketing a Cajun restaurant presents some interesting challenges and also offers a number of great opportunities. As it is oftentimes the case, the challenges and the opportunities are the two sides of the same coin.
Here’s what I mean.
The major challenge in marketing a Southern-style cuisine is that in many geographic areas, the majority of the population is simply not familiar with it. They may have an idea about it, and oftentimes that idea is wrong.
So how do you educate your potential customers about your food and what they can expect to find and experience when they visit your restaurant?
Many of the Cajun restaurants we have spoken with try to overcome this problem in one of the following ways:
1. By expending their menu to include a variety of non-Cajun item such as burgers and pastas, or
2. By re-positioning their restaurant in a more generic seafood category, and
The intent of both methods is to make the concept more “familiar” to the general population, to make it “blend in” with the other restaurants in that part of the town.
And this is exactly why this is bad marketing.
Make The Focus Of Your Marketing On Making Your Restaurant Unique
In your restaurant marketing efforts, you should strive on making your restaurant unique and different because making it so will create a reason for customers to chose you over other restaurants in the neighborhood.
Let’s play a simple mind game for a minute. Let’s imagine that you owned a burger joint, a cafe, a pizzeria, or maybe even a steakhouse. And now think about all the hurdles you’d have to jump over to make that restaurant look unique and different in your customers’ eyes! After all, why would they come to your restaurant versus another burger place, cafe, pizza shop, or steakhouse? With about as much trouble, they could buy some burger paddies at the grocery store and throw them on the grill out back!
Now, let’s look again at your situation: You own or operate a Cajun restaurant, and that fact alone makes your offer unique! All you need to do is ensure your menu has integrity and authenticity, and then you need to educate your customers on the type of food you serve.
And there is so much to tell about your food!
Cajun Food Is Food With A Story
When it comes to playing the restaurant marketing game, you have a very strong hand. You just need to play it right.
Each dish on your menu has a story. You don’t have to invent it, or embellish it, or add “romance” to it like they almost always have to do with coffee. You just need to tell the story. You don’t even have to tell it well. Just tell it, and you’ll see more first-time guests become regulars, and more of your regular customers start telling your story to others, referring more guests to your restaurant.