Sometimes it doesn’t pay to follow the leader.

It’s sad really, but 80% – 90% of restaurant marketing budgets are spent  getting a new customer to visit for the first time.  This is the least effective place to spend your money.  The majority of new customer efforts are spent in mass media advertising, which is costly and has dismal return on investment.  The fact is, new customer acquisition is 7-10 times more expensive than building restaurant sales through increased frequency, check average and party size.

But restaurant marketing isn’t always about what’s most effective, more often, it’s about what everyone else is doing.  Restaurant operators see that their competitor is on television or in the yellow pages or on a billboard and that they should be too.  They do this without regard for what’s working.  Restaurant owners have to wear so many hats that sometimes they just do what’s easiest – they write a check for mass media advertising and hope for the best.  Mass media is often more about feeding ego than driving sales.  It’s also impossible for most companies to compete in a toe-to-toe battle with the big guys.  Subway spends $290 million per year on television.  They can do that because they are a multi-billion dollar enterprise – a title less than 100 restaurant corporations in the world can claim.  The question you’ll have to ask yourself is do we want to jump off the bridge just because so many other people are?