Which form of restaurant marketing should you apply for your establishment?
What kind of marketing (Institutional verses direct response) is better for a establishment that is trying to:


1. Building it’s brand?
2. Generate customers through the doors?


No marks for guessing the right answer. Brand marketing may not necessarily be a magnet for inquiries from prospective restaurant customers in the second case; while immediate response marketing may not work in the first. Thus the right option for the first is brand marketing and that for the second is direct marketing.

The key problem with direct response marketing is that owing to some dishonorable practices adopted by some companies in the previous years it has acquired a bad name for itself, however during the past two decades direct restaurant marketing has come to make up for about 54 per cent of all marketing outlays. In addition, more than 270 of the Fortune 500 firms are now members of The Direct Marketing Association.

Direct Response Restaurant Marketing verses Institutional Marketing
Direct response marketing makes the restaurant guest to make a response. It calls for an action. It informs the reader to do something, why to do it, how to do it, and when to do it.
In this particular instance, a standard restaurant marketing direct response campaign is led by  one goal:

Either to entice the customer to buy something ie. get them to turn up to your restaurant or cafe, ask for further information like a function or wedding kit, or perform some other action. However a call to action is always implied and is a central element of this sort of a restaurant marketing campaign.

Typically, the important components of a direct response advertisement for your restaurant or café are:

1. A headline that searches to grab the potential restaurant patron’s attention.
2. A copy that seeks to build quick rapport with the reader.
3. A listing of benefits in your ad; and last but not the least,
4. A call for the reader to do something like call a reservation number.

Amuzingly, regardless of its tarnished name, direct response campaigns are the only marketing campaigns that are track able and this is crucial to your restaurant marketing campaign.

Institutional (Brand) marketing in comparison makes no call to action; it doesn’t inform the potential restaurant patron’s what to do, how or why to do it. Better known as "image" advertising, its intention is just to reinstate the great image of the business. The business already has a high recall positioning in the minds of its potential customers. Institutional marketing simply re-establishes that positioning.

By this reason, since brand restaurant marketing/advertising, requires less amount of persuasion and effort (Remember, it’s already a strong brand), the media delivery for this type of branding is often television and outdoor billboards; whereas for direct response marketing, flyer's and print ads are more appropriate.

The issue with brand marketing nevertheless is that it has no accountability. This is because; its intention is ordinarily to be catchy, or clever, for the aim of entertaining the consumer, and not to get them to take a certain action eg. To be a guest in your restaurant or cafe. So it’s conclusion or effectiveness cannot be dependably measured in fixed terms.

However, big players quite often go for image marketing, or what is also known as ‘big brand advertising’ while the smaller fries are only able to manage to pay for direct response restaurant marketing not just since its more cost efficient but also because it serves their purpose better. They have to first develop their business brand and then reinstate it in the minds of their customers.

For supplementary information on how to improve your restaurant revenue click on the following restaurant marketing link.