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Branding Your Company from
the Inside Out
By Jim Sullivan Copyright  2005 Sullivision.com

I’ve seen it happen way too often at the chains and independent restaurants I work with. The snappy new customer marketing campaign, seasonal food and beverage promotion or Limited Time Offer (LTO) gets brainstormed at HQ, partners climb aboard, POS gets printed. The big bucks get approved and committed, the ad agency gets giddy, the promotion gets branded, the new ads get developed, the marketing department gets frantic, the program soars with expectation, rises with hope and then…klunk, it inexplicably fails miserably. Brows gets knitted, fingers get pointed, and usually, the product is blamed since the customer can’t be. Wherein the Marketing department then learns the grim reality of Sullivan’s Seventh Law of Hospitality: “whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed”. 

The truth is that when most restaurant marketing promotions fail, neither the product nor program was wrong, nor was the customer uninterested. The real reason is that managers (or vendors) overlooked the first commandment of marketing: the employee is your first customer. New policies, promotions, special events and LTOs tank when managers, marketers, and vendors fail to first brand the program internally to their customer-facing employees before rolling it out externally to their guests. Call it “employee branding” if you will; recognizing the value of employees in helping a restaurant company properly position itself, market its products and reinforce brand messages.

The antidote? Successful external marketing programs are the result of successfully marketing internally first. “Sell” every current or planned promotion, new policy or procedure—no matter how big or small--to your service and kitchen team with the same zeal, enthusiasm and detail of an advertising agency trying to land a large account.  In fact, here’s a few strategies and tactics that can help your team embrace your next new program, promotion, policy or procedure...

“So What and Who Cares?” is your first challenge. How many GMs, managers and servers reading this article have seen that box of table tents, posters, and point-of-sale related to an upcoming promotion show up one Monday morning from a vendor or HQ without explanation or context? Or maybe the Home Office excites the GMs about a seasonal promotion in partnership with a manufacturer, brewer or vintner, but then fails to supply them with a toolbox of tactics on how to educate, excite and execute the program with their customer-facing crew. Don’t blame the service team. If they haven’t caught it, you haven’t taught it.

Pre-shift meetings must be married to sales contests. I’ve designed over 70 food and beverage sales contests for servers at restaurant chains nationwide in the last 5 years. And if you’re planning on tying in an employee sales contest to your promotion, remember two things. First, you’ll get the best results with contests that last no longer than 30 days at a time (the “short attention span” syndrome). Second, the truth is that the majority of employee sales contests are effective for only nine days—the first five and last four of the month. So be sure and emphasize the contest and promotion daily in your pre-shift meetings to get the maximum effort and interest in your program for all four weeks. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Keep it simple. Communicate clearly. Strategy cannot be executed if it cannot be understood. It cannot be understood if it cannot be described.