Restaurant Trade Area Research

Forget having a good brand image. Forget about having a good product at a fair value. Forget having excellent store operations or effective advertising. No, the apparent way to customers is giving the food away for free (of which the promotion itself usually results in long service delays and perceptions of poor operations) sometimes without even the need to purchase a drink or side.

Is this the best strategy the chains can come up with? Even in these down times - scrapping along with consumers adjusting their frequency of fast food and overall restaurant usage? And, if one chain every 10 days or so is offering - free - how about a price offer that doesn’t give away the house and all profits?

How about a different tack - say - 79 cent ice cold soft drinks all summer long. Such a tactic would make the reduction `not permanent’; yet would offer real value - even allowing the customer to pay full price for a sandwich without feeling ripped off. Or, do the 79 cent drinks only on weekends to target the more `local’ home customers (and making your business base continue to give some profits during the week).

Hello, welcome back to Restaurant Trade Area Research - and today - that is just what will be discussed.

Markets which use my MarketView marketing research design find out the information needed to have truly effective billboard advertising. And, no, I’m NOT talking about `what’ is even on the billboard - I’m talking about placement.

Yes, placement - one of those  P’s of marketing. How you ask?

Well, the MarketView maps your trade area for each of your stores in an ADI and more importantly for this `effectiveness’ - finds out important customer information which determines the actual customer base size of an individual store in a market.

While it may seem counter-intuitive, your store with the largest volume may NOT be the store with the largest customer base - indeed, some of your lowest volume stores may fit that characteristic. How you ask?

Well, any store, and often lower sales volume stores - have LARGE customer bases with INFREQUENT users - indeed, some Fast Food Units may have 10-15,000 or more infrequent users compared to other units. And that is a lot of extra users being exposed to a particular billboard ad.

Additionally, because a unit (and market) has had its customer base Trade Area mapped as part of the research of the MarketView, even the side of the street for most exposure to the most customers can easily be selected for better billboard effectiveness.

Read here for more about Customer Base Size: http://restauranttradearearesearch.com/2008/08/10/customer-base-size-it-can-be-calculated/

http://restauranttradearearesearch.com/category/customer-base-size/

Here’s another restaurant link - a good news story:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_16/b4127068288029.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_small+business

Just a short one today. So, I see a TV ad for Checkers advertising their new fried chicken wings and an enticing - get 3 free wings - (giveaway date I believe was last Wednesday) on a selected day. So, being a lover of wings and thinking that this might be a good brand extension for Checkers - I make a mental note to check it out with my daughter.

So, on selected day - we travel into the main Woodstock Ga. fast food strip to Checkers about 4:30 PM — and indeed - see on the reader board for the unit — FREE WINGS today. So, excitedly we get in the `inside line’ - the one where the passenger (me) will be dealing with the food. No one is even at Checkers in either line.

We immediately see on the orderboard that there are varieties of wings - and are again - excited. And, then - we wait. And wait. And wait. Even while no car is in line that we can see (they could have been waitng on a car in the other lane at the window).  Indeed, as we wait, another car has now pulled into the `other’ outside lane. And we hear their orderspeaker go off - followed moments later - by ours saying “you will need to get into the other line”.

So, bummed out - having been there at least 3 minutes - we back up and maneuver (first bait and switch) into the other lane — to be quickly pinned in from behind by another car.  Yikes.  But, about a minute later, we pull up and are greeted with `do you want to try our wings today’ - yes, we call out. We explain that we have two folks in the car and can we get 6 FREE wings.

To that, we are told - “to get FREE wings you have to make a purchase” and also that for 6 wings we would need to purchase TWO items - and that - oh yeah, only 1 of the 5 varieties was available for FREE.

Now, we were really trapped - the car that had pulled ahead was still waiting for food and looking into the rear I could see the other car behind us. BUT, the car behind us, evidently, heard our conversation (about having to make purchases for the free samples) and was beginning to back up and out of the parking lot-  even before we decided what to do.

Now having a choice to leave made our decision easy - so,  we said - with anger — `forget it - that is not free’ - and backed out of the unit ourselves.

I doubt we will return for wings.

(This reminds me of Quizno’s screwed up giveaway only months ago.)

Make sure to keep reading down the page for more posts.