Louisville restaurant gift certificate

From sponsoring youth mariachi bands to offering free-dinner door prizes as high-profile champions of charity, restaurateurs are pursuing eclectic and eccentric marketing initiatives to promote their brands and give back to their communities.

Operators say the benefits of those strategies are two tiered: They help benefit the community through fund-raising, and a charitable initiative can help spur business by drawing new customers.

Although some restaurant managers say it is difficult to spot a tangible result from community marketing efforts in the form of sales up-ticks, they contend that any effort that disseminates a restaurant's name to potential customers justifies the necessary investment of time and effort.

Over the past year the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club in La Jolla, Calif., has reallocated 20 percent of its marketing funds toward efforts involving charities. The critically acclaimed Marine Room, a 2003 inductee into the Nation's Restaurant News Fine Dining Hall of Fame, is one of three foodservice outlets run by the club, which also owns the adjacent Sea Lodge Hotel and its Shores restaurant.

The club's charity-oriented marketing strategy revolves around the idea of utilizing the aggressive resources of the charities that have approached the club for assistance, general manager John Campbell explains.

"The thought is that you have consumers that are not traveling and are not spending," Campbell says. "The reality is that by yourself you probably can't get people to do something that they don't want to do."

Rather than making cold calls or sending out letters to organizations on behalf of the club's businesses, a more effective method, Campbell says, is to cooperate with charities that solicit free dinners as prizes for their fund-raising events.

"There is an organized effort of marketing people out there trying to find you," he says. "You can use that in your favor" by using "your marketing skills to market your restaurant back to them," Campbell observes.

The beach and tennis club's efforts have included sending a salesperson to charity events, placing a large poster of the restaurant at the events, and placing ads and coupons in charity newsletters in exchange for the donations of free-dinner prizes.

Although Campbell concedes that his "free food and promotions" expense line may increase as a result of the shift in marketing dollars, he says the visible fruits of the effort can be seen in the form of customers who come to the restaurant with a prize certificate in hand. By comparison, he says, he can't always see the tangible benefits of a magazine ad.

The club for several years has given several hundred coupons each year to members of the International Visitors Information Center of San Diego, entitling them to a free lunch for two at the casual-dining Shores restaurant. Because those volunteers work at San Diego's airport, answering visitors' questions about the area, the initiative has the benefit of sparking personal recommendations that send vacationers to Shores, Campbell says.

The Santa Fe Springs, Calif-based Folly's Bakery Cafe chain gives back to its Orange County communities through a highly original effort begun by co-owner Eddie Sheldrake.

For several years the 14-unit family dinner house chain and fresh-pie specialist has been sponsoring a program that teaches children about mariachi music and history while creating a youth band. Sheidrake estimates that up to 60 kids ranging from 5 to 18 currently are in the program and practice with band director Gabriel B. Zavala every Monday night.

Sheldrake, who also is a franchisee of 16 KFC units, supplies the instruments to The children and Their families often may pay only $1 a month in return. The band, which Sheldrake dubs the Mariachi Kids, has played at such Southern California tourist attractions as Disneyland. The young performers often hang a banner bearing the Folly's logo on stage and thank the chain at the conclusion of their shows.

Though difficult to quantify, the mariachi program is nothing but beneficial to the Polly's brand, Sheldrake asserts.

"I just know that when you look at any of the national studies on building your brand, this kind of community sponsorship always is acknowledged as very important," he says.

Sheidrake insists, however, that the most visible and rewarding results come from giving back to the community.

"It gets into you, and you do it basically because you're helping people," he says. "You feel good."

For the second year in a row the Mariachi Kids will play at the Railroad Days weekend event in Fullerton, Calif., this month, in connection with Folly's spearheading of food donations from suppliers. The fundraising goal this year is to raise between $25,000 and $30,000 from the event, which will benefit three charities, of which the Virginia K. Crosson Cancer Center at the St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton is the main beneficiary.

For more than 12 years, the Old Chicago casual-dining chain, owned by Louisville, Cob based Rock Bottom Restaurants, has been marketing its "Pizza Palz" program to help schools and other nonprofit organizations raise funds. Groups purchase gift certificates for large pizzas at $6 each and sell them for $11 to make a $5 profit, says Stephanie Steil Hoppe, director of marketing for 56-unit Old Chicago.

The coupons, which are for dine-in redemption only, often have the benefit of creating new customers, most of whom purchase other items in addition to the pizza, Hoppe says.