Promotional Marketing Master Pieces Are No Accident
By Stu Leventhal
Restaurant Promotion, advertising and marketing ideas are a dime a dozen. New methods and strategies of the best food and beverage marketers are hardly a secret for long since they require publicity to work. Once a new technique of promoting a hospitality venture is put into use everyone in the hospitality marketing and ad industries know about it fast. Copying a marketing genius’s promotional tactic would seem quite easy yet cloned marketing campaigns never seem to reach their peaks like the original ideas. This is because a lot more goes into the planning of a promotional master piece than is apparent. After all, the final goal is to make the piece appear as smooth, unforced and unpretentious as possible and this takes tact.
We are all familiar with those exciting times when funny, controversial or suspenseful and dramatic postings online get delightfully and un-expectantly embraced by the public then virally shared at hyper speed through all the social media platforms and thus catapulted into instant stardom and the promotional hall of fame. Duplicating those phenomena, leveraging the advertisement value of that mass promotional mania and creating word of mouth frenzy is what marketers have been attempting to do for thousands of years.
Great promotional campaigns are tailored to leverage to the max everything already going good concerning a company’s situation while negating everything that is negatively damaging the company rep in their perceived public’s eye. Thus what appears at first glance to be simply a cute and clever idea dreamed up by a marketer with a keen imagination is really a thoroughly researched and decisively planned campaign that has been carefully crafted then tested and honed then tested and reworked again and again.
Promotional master pieces are custom designed per project to touch the emotions of a specific audience and achieve a particular intended response. Attempts to clone promotional ideas are short cuts that result in the marketing strategy losing its spunky edge. Unique marketing tactics are created with accomplishing the exact specific goals of one company in mind. Powerfully performing campaigns are thoroughly prepared so they instantly grasp the attention of their targets. Promotional master pieces cannot hope to command their audience’s attention for long by rehashing old, over played, boring, borrowed and cloned marketing ideas of past campaigns no matter how successful they were since innovativeness and suave is a prime ingredient of the successful marketing piece recipe.
Today’s public does not have the time or patience to pay attention long to anything that does not have real value you can sink your teeth into. Things have to be truly cutting edge and pure quality if you expect people to go out of their way to talk them up to friends, family and coworkers. Anything less gets left in the dust.
The lack of predictability of promotional methods has miffed hospitality marketing professionals and the hospitality industry’s business experts for centuries, giving advertising and promotion as a whole a stigma of unreliability as well as a mystique to its successful Masters.
This phenomenal, overwhelming, negative and skeptical impression towards marketing, advertising and promotions has been attributed in part to the many complications of human nature itself. Meaning, since humans are for the most part very unpredictable and their motives are often difficult to understand then selling and pitching to people will always be just as unpredictable and unreliable. This myth that successful marketing is just a crap shoot, mostly luck and never ever a guarantee is reinforced by the Psychiatric fields who perpetuate the mysteries of understanding the complex human mind and predicting peoples’ behavior as being quite more complex than it needs to be! Even powerful governments plead ignorance of being able to decipher to a T what the people want!
Thus, many restaurants, bars and hospitality entertainment organizations conclude their marketing strategies and promotional department’s to be a smaller less significant factor of their business’s success or failure than their other departments such as production, product development and even human resources. These companies go on to delegate and commit less of a budget to their promotional futures and neglect their marketing efforts and divisions. This is the biggest mistake in business management today! Spending your efforts, time and money on cutting costs, coming up with innovative ideas, hiring or firing key employees, making changes to products and services or making any other major business decision without considering all the marketing implications will most likely result in counter productivity, loss of revenues and most importantly misused, valuable and irreplaceable time.
Marketing when done properly is the premier force of any hospitality business’s growth and development, expansion or change. No other department has anywhere near the influence on a business’s future than a properly run marketing department. Businesses, especially hospitality businesses, fail miserable when they do not consult their marketers before they make vital decisions. New products and services should never be considered without a proper market analysis. The new product division does not bring new ideas to the marketing department! The marketing department informs the new product division what they should be developing and working on based on their in-depth understanding of what the customers are looking for and where the potential opportunities exist for more sales.
Through marketing analysis one concludes what tweaks to make to their current products to make them more competitive, which products should be considered for replacement and which products should be prioritized for extra advertising and promotion. Pricing should always be done through the marketing department! Marketing tells you which of your other departments are producing to their potential and what departments are under producing. Through your marketing efforts and analysis you realize what direction the company needs to move in and where your priorities should be placed. Everything business wise has to be coordinated around your marketing campaigns to get maximum sales and revenue results.
Most of the cleverest promotion schemes work rarely on their own accord but that does not mean they are not good tactics. The real secret for business sales building success is in understanding and accepting that effective marketing rarely happens in a vacuum, meaning a single campaign like a radio ad is never responsible entirely for its own successes. Real profit producing mechanisms have to be coordinated to work with every aspect of a business to be successful. A company’s standing in the market place has to be considered as well as its customers’ perceptions of its products and services. What the company’s competitors are up to needs to be factored in. Technological advancements must be leveraged. A company’s past history good or bad must be incorporated into the scheme of things as marketing efforts attempt to move the company forward. The company’s perceived personality, outside factors like the current economic or political situation and a whole slew of other factors must all be taken into account.
The truth is every restaurant, bar, club or entertainment business is unique, their neighborhoods are unique, their clientele are unique, their staff is unique, their challenges and situations are unique and thus their marketing plan should be custom tailored to meet their specific special needs.
If you are confused about marketing and its role in guiding all your major business decisions or if you need some help setting up or managing your Philadelphia area hospitality company’s promotional strategy so it is coordinated to work with all your other business efforts and conforms to what is happening in your market place plus takes advantage of your Philly neighborhoods trends, contact Philadelphia Restaurant Consultant: anewtale191@live.com
*We will be happy to help you set up a clear, concise, fruitful and achievable company vision plan.
We can manage your roll out, implement your crew training and be there for you every step of the way!
philadelphia restaurant consultant 