Remember these five "proverbs" before building a catering brand!

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

First, always tell yourself not to fall into the trap of self-satisfaction.

According to relevant data, the proportion of catering people caught in the "self-satisfaction trap" is higher than that of other industries. Why?

1, I used to be self-centered and fantasize about customer feelings.

I think customers like this style, I think customers like this setting, I think customers like this service, I think customers like spicy dishes ... It is a common phenomenon that catering people are mostly self-centered and impose their feelings and assumptions on customers. They do this just to please themselves, and the result is getting farther and farther away from customers.

If you always think that your food tastes the best, you can succeed.

The catering industry is an industry with low barriers to entry, and the education level of practitioners is uneven. Many people tend to ignore things other than products, so they simply think that eating food well is enough, but there is no defined standard for delicious food.

Nowadays, delicious taste 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. A restaurant with a bad taste is not qualified to survive at all, so a good taste is not a capital worth showing off, nor is it a complete condition for success, it is just a basic condition.

I like to express my brand with gorgeous modifiers.

We often see many restaurants promoting themselves like this: "Enjoy with dignity, experience with luxury, stimulate taste buds, enjoy a different life ..." These slogans used many adjectives and shouted for a long time, but customers didn't know what they wanted to express or received any information that could stimulate their desire to buy. It's not like Banu's vernacular that "service is not Banu's characteristic, but hairy belly and mushroom soup are".

4. Talk to customers through different channels.

In the eyes of customers, for a wide variety of catering categories, each category can remember the top three at most. If catering enterprises want to occupy a place in customers' minds, they 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 to buy again; (6) strive for customer recommendation; (7) make customers like it; (8) Let customers trust.

Many catering enterprises often unconsciously talk to customers through different channels. For example, some restaurants are not well-known and have no obvious characteristics, but they always speak some emotional slogans. In fact, these words and customers can not produce * * * sound at all, because customers' understanding of restaurants is still very limited.

Second, the target customer base was not determined quickly.

We have met many such customers, and when preparing the restaurant, they must have determined the future target customer base of the restaurant. For example, a restaurant defines consumers as "post-90 s" and "post-90 s" groups, thinking that they like shopping and watching movies, love life, love to go to Starbucks, and have personality ... When you ask what special dishes the restaurant has, they talk eloquently and tell a lot of dishes that they think young people like. But when they opened a restaurant, they found that young people didn't like such dishes.

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

For example, Le Kai Saduri Pizza, Banu Maodu Hot Pot, 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 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 many 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 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 base has gradually increased.

This is a typical change in customer groups caused by changes in the model. At the same time, due to the formation of new customer groups, brands must constantly optimize and upgrade their products, and Xibei's dishes are much more streamlined and optimized than before.

In the process of focusing on the target customer base, trial and error is inevitable. At the beginning of the establishment of the restaurant, even within a year or two, it is impossible to quickly determine the target customer base. Mistakes are never caused by unilateral factors. Every contact of the brand has a problem, which will lead to the change of adjacent contacts, thus triggering a chain reaction and eventually forming a deviation. For example, product quality problems will inevitably affect customer experience, customer experience will be impacted, and target customers will be reduced, resulting in a decline in turnover and profits. At this time, what we should do 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.

When a customer goes to a restaurant to eat, the first thing is to solve the basic food and clothing, and the second is to solve the social needs. When making innovations, restaurants should always confirm whether they meet these two basic needs of customers.

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

In addition to not doing pseudo-innovation, don't blindly follow suit. Although it is necessary to follow suit, we should not blindly follow suit. Borrowism is not terrible, but blind plagiarism. For example, when grandma's business was booming, many cottage shops sprang up all over the country, from logo to decoration, from dishes to publicity, all copying grandma's ideas. Therefore, Wu Guoping found a company to sue another company and closed dozens of fake grandma's houses. Haidilao, green tea, yellow, Banu hot pot, etc. There are shanzhai stores. Although these "cottage shops" imitated the "shape" of others, they didn't learn the essence, and 95% of the "cottage shops" finally closed down.

Fourth, start-up catering brands should not be benchmarked at the beginning, and it is easy to fall 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. Facing competitors, enterprises have four ways of playing: defensive warfare, flanking 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.

It is meaningless to benchmark the enterprise from the beginning. When you don't know who you are, everything you do may lead you to a fork in the road. Banu Hotpot 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 20 1 1 that Banu decided on his own special category "beef omasum hotpot" that he began to be himself seriously. Suddenly one day, people found that Haidilao actually began to learn from Banu.

Why is there such a reversal? Haidilao is known as the "invincible catering aircraft carrier". How did you lose to Banu in Zhengzhou market? You know, 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 the field of Sichuan hot pot, there are still many schools, some win by soup base and some by butter. 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. It is better to lower expectations than to raise them.

We have come into contact with many catering entrepreneurs. Through talking with them, we found that they often imagined a bright future before the store opened. Due to high expectations, as long as business is not good or management is not good after opening a store, people will lose confidence, so they will go to the hospital in a hurry and 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 of opening a restaurant. Every link that determines the success or failure of catering has many connections, such as site selection, production, management, environment, marketing needs and so on. As long as we try our best to work towards the goal, we will certainly achieve the expected results. The failure probability of the first venture is high, but it does not mean that entrepreneurs are not suitable for failed catering. It may be caused by problems in one or more links. As long as you correct your mistakes in time and find the right target, you can still succeed. Managing your own expectations is a compulsory course for every catering person.

This article is transferred from Li Restaurant Design:/.If you have any questions, please contact us.