In a recession, markets contract and the weakest organisations fail enabling the survival of the fittest. This story is about some hotels and restaurants and begins with my introduction to a marketing manager for a large hotel. She was looking for business development ideas in dire market conditions. I had plenty to suggest but her excitement was quashed by central marketing policies at national head office.
Meanwhile, I had recently circulated a marketing letter in the area and amongst the respondents was another hotel. This one had recently passed into administration and the administrator had appointed an interim General Manager.
The General Manager and I set about business development with gusto. We devised ways of making sure something about the hotel featured in local media EVERY week. One of our favourite stunts was getting a smiley picture of the GM with a semi-retired celebrity published in the local paper.
The core of our work was looking at every potential profit centre in the hotel and fully exploiting it. We shifted the focus from selling a facility for others to promote, to becoming promoters of our own events. More control, more margin. Interlaced with our celebrity scheme, we devised something themed for every date in the calendar. Never out of the public eye, always something going on, we cleaned up.
The local hoteliers used to meet from time to time and the failed hotel suddenly rising from the ashes certainly drew attention – to an extent, its gains were others’ losses. The marketing manager from the first hotel asked the GM of the phoenix who was doing his marketing. You can imagine how that went.
That same marketing manager then moved to a hotel in Central London, a real problem case. Her first phone call was to me. We would need to start with Christmas which was historically a bad time for its mediocre food and beverage operations. Selling Christmas dinner as a commodity – pretty much the same price as everyone else – means that customers’ buying decisions are based on factors other than the food itself, if the food is of equal price amongst the choices. In such a pageant, the hotel would not have been any right-thinking person’s first choice.
I took a lateral view of the difficulty: I suggested we sell a party, not dinner. Dinner was of course included, but party elevated the offering away from being a commodity. I proposed an amusing theme, hiked the price by 50% and developed some lovely marketing. To their great surprise, the Christmas season sold out.
Not only did it sell out the first year, but almost half the party-goers advance booked the following year blind. When the new theme and marketing was released the following August, the price was lifted 30% – now double the original commodity price for a dinner. It sold out early. We repeated the feat for a third year, with another 30% uplift, after which the hotel was sold – its Christmas season results playing no small part in the value of the business.
Anyway, after the pleasant surprise with that first Christmas, the marketing manager came to me with another thorny problem: a bar-restaurant within the hotel complex was performing abysmally and she wondered if I had any ideas. We met in the [empty] bar for coffee and I almost collected a parking ticket just waiting for our drinks to arrive. It was bad, and I truly thought ‘any ideas’ meant she was planning to gut it and start again. But, no, there was a budget to print some new menus. She was serious, not joking.
Located in the heart of the theatre district, it should have been thriving from lunch time onwards with the surrounding office workers and pre-/post-theatre diners. But everything was wrong with it. Its name was a second choice, rushed in when the first choice was found to infringe copyright elsewhere. It was decorated with props that did not fit with either of the names. There was no obvious cohesive theme so it just looked tired, full of junk and vintage posters. The food on the menu was uninspiring, the service so appalling you would be a brave theatre goer to risk waiting for food before a show or the last train.
Change the menus… And then it occurred to me in the bath one Saturday morning: what if everything wrong with it could be switched to everything right with it? I only knew the meaning of the bar’s name because I had asked, nobody else did. So, I created a fictional biography of the ‘character’ whose name was on the sign and scripted his life story to account for the eclectic props. Now it made sense. I then sourced vintage images to support the story, and captioned them (the image above was captioned ‘Theatre goers wait patiently for their supper’).
The most important finishing touch was devising the ’13 minute menu’. Thirteen was a totally arbitrary number but it defined a service standard for both the staff and the clientele. 13 minutes …or refund. Staff did not want to catch the blame for a refund; the clientele could trust it.
The menus themselves were made large and rigid, printed on thick card that could stand up – they added to the decor when stood on the bar and tables. Of course, standing some new menus on the tables would not, alone, help sales much…
The marketing trick was to utilise the advantage of print run-ons. The set up costs of the print run were already covered in the run of 500 menus. To leave the printing plates on the press and switch to lighter paper allowed another 2,000 to be printed for next to nothing. These were then put into bespoke oversized envelopes and mailed to every office and theatre in the vicinity. It would have been the biggest piece of mail anybody received that day, it looked beautiful and the humorous illustrated biography made people laugh. It was also the whole menu: recipients could see exactly what was on offer.
Customers began arriving as if a tap had been turned on. Virtually instantly, it became a £1 million per year bar-restaurant.