Chinese-style catering marketing: How many bosses are blindly following the trend? We talked about price reduction promotions in the last issue. This is just one of the catering marketing methods. There are many other marketing activities, such as full discounts, group deals, flash sales, etc.

Although it sounds very attractive, many people find it difficult to use it.

Mainly reflected in two aspects: poor customer attraction effect and loss of profits.

Why is this?

For example, during the Chinese Valentine's Day that just passed, I asked many bosses, why do we do activities?

The bosses' answer is to grab customers and increase turnover.

In fact, this is just a superficial reason. Most bosses do not dig deeply into the reasons for conducting marketing activities at that time.

If you think carefully about "why you are doing this activity," many people will think, "Everyone is doing it, so I can't lag behind."

So in most cases when we do a marketing campaign, we are just subconsciously imitating others.

Let’s take a look at what we mentioned earlier. Marketing activities include price reduction promotions, full discounts, group bookings, etc.

There are so many marketing methods, which one should you imitate?

Can you imitate it?

Does the activity you model solve a current problem?

You're not sure which one to use and what the effect will be.

So many people bite the bullet and just feel good about themselves.

Are customers stupid if they don’t take advantage of it?

Nowadays, there are many strategies for catering marketing activities, but they are all technical things and do not tell us how to make a choice in the face of many strategies.

Today we will focus on facing countless marketing methods. Compared with clueless imitation, we should learn an ability: anti-imitation ability. When most people are still imitating unconsciously, you can still maintain clear judgment ability.

1. The ability to identify the effective prerequisites for activities. After the Xibei kiss discount became popular in 2016, many restaurants followed suit every Valentine's Day.

The current situation of this kind of novel marketing is that you spend a lot of energy and time doing it just because you see others doing it, and the results are not bad.

They did not ask these questions: What are the prerequisites for this activity to be effective?

Does the current restaurant situation meet these premises?

Take Xibei for analysis. What are the prerequisites for Xibei’s successful marketing?

Compared with small restaurants, the most important prerequisites are geographical advantages and brand effect.

First of all, Xibei restaurants are mainly distributed in first-tier or provincial capital cities. In terms of audience group, the number is larger than that in second- and third-tier cities.

The second is the brand effect. The scale of Xibei chain has formed a huge combat group.

All restaurants held events together and the publicity was evident.

This is something that small catering companies do not have.

This means that we are not strategically using a certain marketing method to achieve a certain marketing purpose, but simply imitating other people's marketing methods.

In addition, why do we refer to many strategies and learn many theories and become dogmatic?

Because we haven’t thought about what is the prerequisite for an activity to be effective.

This is also the reason why "subconscious imitation" and "paper talk" exist.

The identification and judgment of the premise of an effective marketing activity includes at least the following two aspects.

1. The purpose of marketing activities: "I recently conducted an activity, and the repurchase rate of old customers of the restaurant has increased." But how do you know that the most important purpose at present is to increase the repurchase rate?

I saw a restaurant before that gave discount coupons to member customers.

I asked the boss why he thought of issuing discount coupons?

The boss said that business has been bad recently and there are fewer customers, so he wants to recruit some old customers to support the business.

The question arises, why is business not doing well?

Are old customers no longer coming, or are they unable to attract new customers?

We all know that the steps for customers to place an order are to eat - find a restaurant - compare - enter the store.

For regular customers, it is the second half that plays a decisive role, because customers already know the restaurant and only need to compare it with other restaurants before entering the store to make a purchase.

However, this restaurant is surrounded by office areas. Unlike community restaurants, there is a large loss of customers. Therefore, the current main purpose is not to increase the repurchase rate, but to convert new customers.

Catering activities have their own purposes, such as attracting new customers, increasing repurchase rates, increasing brand awareness, etc. This requires us to ask ourselves based on our current situation: What is my current business focus?

2. Marketing activities now come in many forms, and not all of them are suitable for us.

For example, Xiaomi’s hunger marketing uses low-volume mobile phones to attract a large number of customers to snap up them, thereby enhancing brand effect.

After this model became popular, even cake shops followed suit and launched flash sales.

However, research has found that when a product lacks substitutes, it has a good effect on increasing brand awareness.

If customers feel that there are obvious substitutes, they will reduce their favorable impression of the brand.

For example, if a roadside noodle shop does hunger marketing, will customers be willing to wait in line?

It would be different if it was Haidilao.