Diners should remember the following five "proverbs" in order to better start the journey of brand building. Wan Li shared the following.

First, always tell yourself not to fall into the "self-attraction trap"

According to relevant data, the proportion of catering people falling into the "self-attraction trap" is higher than that of other industries. Why?

1. I am used to being self-centered and imagining customers' feelings

I think customers like this style, I think customers like this kind of setting, I think customers like this kind of service, I think customers like spicy dishes ... Most catering people are self-centered and impose their feelings and assumptions on customers, which is a common phenomenon. They do this just to please themselves, and as a result, they are farther and farther away from customers.

2. You can succeed if you always think that your food tastes the best.

Catering industry is an industry with low entry threshold, and the educational level of employees is uneven. Many people easily ignore things other than products, so they simply think that it is enough to eat the food well, but there is no defined standard for delicious food.

Today, delicious food has become the basic condition for the success of opening a store. If you want to make a restaurant brand design, you must first let most customers recognize your dishes. Restaurants with bad taste are not qualified to survive at all, so good taste is not a capital worth showing off, nor is it all the conditions for success, it is just a basic condition.

3. I like to express my brand with gorgeous modifying words.

We often see many restaurants advertise themselves like this: "Enjoy with dignity, experience with splendor, stimulate taste buds and enjoy a different life ..." A lot of adjectives are used in these slogans. After shouting for a long time, customers don't know what they want to express, and they haven't received any information that can stimulate their desire to buy. It's not as good as Barnu's vernacular "service".

4. Talking with customers on different channels

In customers' minds, for a wide variety of food and beverage categories, each category can be remembered as the top three at most. In order to occupy a place in customers' minds, catering enterprises need to work hard in the following eight aspects:

(1) Let customers know what you do; (2) to know whether their products meet the needs of customers; (3) let customers try to consume; (4) let customers recognize and generate satisfaction; (5) Strive for customers' repurchase; (6) Strive for customers' recommendation; (7) make customers like it; (8) Let customers trust.

Many catering enterprises often unconsciously talk with customers on different channels. For example, some restaurants are not well-known and have no obvious characteristics, but they always tell some slogans with strong feelings. In fact, these words and customers can't produce * * * sounds at all, because customers' understanding of the restaurant is still very limited.

second, the target customer group can't be determined quickly

We have met many such customers, and when preparing the restaurant, they definitely determined the future target customer group of the restaurant. For example, a restaurant defines consumers as "post-91s" and "post-91s" groups, thinking that they like shopping and watching movies, love life, love going to Starbucks, and have personality ... When you ask what dishes the restaurant specializes in, they are eloquent and tell a lot of dishes that they think young people like. But when they opened the restaurant, they found that young people didn't like such dishes.

first of all, we should understand that in the initial stage of a restaurant, the target customers are attached to the products, not the products. This is not difficult to understand, because your customer group has not yet formed and stabilized, how can there be a clear customer group? Product is the foundation, and the expression of product features and selling points are the basic conditions for forming customer experience and communicating with customers, while the presentation form of products constitutes a part of customer consumption scenes. However, the cycle of product update iteration is as short as one year and a half, and as long as three to five years.

For example, Le Kai Sardurian Pizza, Banu Maodu Hotpot, Awu Yellow River Carp, Wangshunge Fish Head Bubble Cake, Xijiade Shrimp Dumpling, etc. have all completed the focus of product categories after years of operation, thus forming their own customer groups.

at the same time, the target customer group is not static, and it will change with the product iteration and the change of store model. In recent years, the catering industry in shopping malls has risen rapidly, followed by the transformation and upgrading of many street shops. For example, in the first few years when Xibei Youmian Village opened the Beijing market, the storefronts were all community shops or street shops, with a large area and a variety of dishes, and the customer groups tended to be elderly community residents. Since they began to focus on shopping malls, the store area has been reduced, the unit price of customers has increased, and the decoration style has become warm and simple (abandoning the northern Shaanxi style of the previous community stores), as shown in Figure 2-2. At this time, because the dining scene has changed a lot, the number of young people in the customer group has gradually increased.

this is the change of customer group caused by typical mode change. At the same time, due to the formation of new customer groups, brands must continue to optimize and upgrade their products, and Xibei's dishes have been streamlined and optimized a lot compared with before.

in the process of focusing on the target customer group, trial and error is inevitable. In the early days of the establishment of the restaurant, even within a year or two, it is impossible to determine the target customer group quickly. Errors are never caused by unilateral factors. Every contact of the brand has problems, which will lead to changes in adjacent contacts, thus triggering a chain reaction and eventually forming deviations. For example, product quality problems will inevitably affect the customer experience, and the customer experience will be impacted, and the target customers will be reduced, resulting in a decline in turnover and profits. What we should do at this time is to reflect on rectification, instead of trying to increase gross profit, change dishes, discount sales and so on.

Third, pseudo-innovation and blindly following the trend will eventually be eliminated

Customers go to a restaurant to eat first, to solve basic food and clothing, and secondly to solve social needs. Restaurants should always confirm whether they meet these two basic needs of customers when making innovations.

At one time, many restaurants with novelty emerged in China's catering market, such as "toilet restaurants" and "fun restaurants", which were well-known, but later closed down. At first, many customers tried it, but unfortunately, they did not form repeat customers. The main customer base of a restaurant is the crowd around three kilometers, and after all, the famous ones are a few. Although this kind of restaurant satisfies some people's curiosity, it does not form a good dining experience and will not form a repurchase.

besides making false innovations, don't blindly follow the trend. Although it is necessary to follow the trend, you can't blindly follow the trend. The doctrine of taking is not terrible, what is terrible is blind copying. For example, when grandma's business was booming, many counterfeit shops sprang up all over the country, which copied grandma's ideas from logo to decoration, from dishes to publicity. Therefore, Wu Guoping found one company suing another and shut down dozens of counterfeit grandma's houses. Haidilao, Green Tea, Huang Jihuang, Banu Hot Pot, etc. all have cottage shops. Although these "cottage shops" imitated the "shape" of others, they didn't learn the essence, and 95% of the "cottage shops" finally closed down.

4. Start-up catering brands should not do benchmarking at the beginning, which is easy to get into a dead end.

Jack Trout talked about the importance of competition in his book Relocation, and he thought that competition and benchmarking were very important. In another famous book, Commercial War, trout made a more comprehensive analysis of competition theory. In the face of competitors, enterprises have four ways of playing: defensive warfare, flank warfare, offensive warfare and guerrilla warfare. So, do all enterprises have to do this? I think the answer is no, because solving our own problems is more important than solving competition problems.

There is no point in benchmarking an enterprise from the beginning. When you don't know who you are, everything you do can lead you to a fork in the road. Banu Hot Pot has been benchmarking and imitating Haidilao, learning various business models of Haidilao in Zhengzhou catering market, but with little effect, customers still prefer Haidilao. It was not until 2111 that Barnu began to be himself seriously after determining his own characteristic category "hairy belly hot pot". Suddenly, one day, people found that Haidilao actually began to learn Barnu.

why is this reversal happening? Haidilao is known as the "invincible catering aircraft carrier". How did it lose to Banu in Zhengzhou market? We should know that Zhengzhou market used to be the base camp for Haidilao to get rich, and its listed company Yihai supply chain is located in Zhengzhou.

to find the answer to this question, we must first understand that no matter how powerful a catering enterprise is, it is impossible to cover everything. There are many food and beverage doorways, even if it is accurate to Sichuan hot pot field, it is still subdivided into many schools, some rely on soup base to win, and some rely on butter to win. Every catering enterprise can identify and shape its own characteristics. As long as the characteristics are extreme, it is possible to win in the segmentation field.

5. I'd rather lower my expectations than raise them.

We have met many catering entrepreneurs, and through talking with them, we found that they often imagine a bright future before the store opens. Due to the high expectation, as long as the business is not good or the management is not good after opening the store, people will lose confidence, so they will go to the hospital in a hurry and eventually end up in a mess.

how to avoid the material and spiritual damage caused by the failure of opening a store? The answer is to manage your expectations skillfully. The same is true for opening a restaurant. There are many contacts in every link that determines the success or failure of catering, such as site selection, production, management, environment, marketing demands, etc. As long as we do our best and strive towards the goal, we will certainly achieve the desired results. The failure probability of starting a business for the first time is very high, but it is not that the entrepreneur is not suitable for catering after failure. It may be caused by problems in one or more links. As long as we correct mistakes in time and find the right goal, it can still succeed. Managing your own expectations is a compulsory course for every catering person.

this article is transferred from Hua Wan Li's catering design:/,please consult us if you have any questions.