San antonio restaurant gift certificate

ORLANDO, Fla. - Independent and small-chain restaurant operators are advised to be on the alert; their neighborhoods are crawling with opportunities for alliances, tie-ins and media events that can be used as marketing weapons in the market-share battle against bigger rivals, according to one group of panelists at the Marketing War College here last month.

The operators on the panel, called "Giant Strategies for Small Unit Operators," shared an arsenal of tactics and strategies that centered around maintaining a close relationship with the communities in which they operate.

"If you're little, you've got to be involved in your community and you've got to be known for your involvement," said panel moderator Gerry Durnell, president of ProTech Publishing & Communications Inc., which publishes Pizza Today magazine.

The panelists offered a plethora of practical neighborhood marketing tactics, ranging from gift-certificate sales techniques to spontaneous charitable contributions.

"It is so important that you focus on the news; it's right in front of you," said Barry Cohen, chief executive of Old San Francisco Steakhouse Corp., a four-unit Old West-themed concept in Texas. "You need to read your local business journals, you need to read your local newspapers, you need to read your local magazines and stay in touch. This way you can be watchful for opportunities."

Cohen, whose restaurants showcase such distinguishing quirks as 1 2-pound blocks of Swiss cheese placed on every table and dueling grand pianos, calls his neighborhood marketing philosophy "W.O.W." - for watchful, open and willing. One tactic that grew out of that philosophy was put to use in San Antonio during this summer's scorching heat wave in that part of the country. The Old San Francisco restaurant there raised money to purchase window fans for those families in the area that could not afford them. It teamed up with a local radio station and pledged to donate 10 percent of every guest check on Monday nights for a month to purchase the fans.

At the end of the month, the restaurant stacked up all 300 fans in the lobby and invited the local media in to witness the donation.

While such spontaneous alignment with charitable causes can generate thousands of dollars in free publicity, the panelists suggested that charity should be done for charity's sake and that whatever publicity you receive is just icing on the cake.

"If you hear on the news that someone's house has burned down, you send them over a meal, and maybe you do it 20 times, and nobody notices. Then on the 21st time somebody does notice, and you get a newspaper article," said Larry McAllister, the manager of Testa's of Palm Beach in Florida. "That's great that you got some publicity, but the important thing is that your heart was in the right place.

"Even if you didn't get any publicity out of it," he added, "your staff knows you did it, and it makes them feel good."

One local program that McAllister said has been effective at his restaurant is an incentive program for hotel concierges. Whenever a concierge makes a reservation for guests to eat at Testa's, the restaurant gives the concierge 10 percent of the party's check total in gift certificates.

And when those concierges come in to the restaurant to eat, they are given special treatment -- the best table, the best server -- so that they might be even more inclined to recommend the place. He cautioned that in order for such a program to work, however, the manager of the restaurant needs to call the concierges a few times a year, thank them and invite them over to the restaurant.

"Like every other marketing plan, you can't just put it in place and leave it," he said. "It has to be nurtured."

The panel also stressed the importance of employee involvement in the planning of a restaurant's marketing program as a way to encourage their acceptance of it.

"The key is to get people involved from the beginning so it is their marketing plan," McAllister said. "So that way they can't say. 'This is silly,' because they were involved from the beginning."

John Frenzel, corporate marketing director for Cattleman's Inc., which operates a 10-unit dinner-house chain, said he mails a newsletter to the homes of the marketing team members of each of the restaurants. It contains all results of the previous promotions and news about upcoming promotions so that they can start thinking about how to implement them ahead of time.

All the panelists also praised the effectiveness of gift certificates, and Durnell pointed out that they work particularly well if they are given high-end finishes, such as gold embossing or specially textured paper.

At Cattleman's, Frenzel said, one method for selling gift certificates was to package them with logo merchandise, such as a coffee mug filled with gourmet coffee beans -- provided by a vendor -- that Cattleman's offered for free with the purchase of a $15 gift certificate.

Rob Haimson, owner of Potato Brumbaugh's and the eight-unit chain of Colorado Grills, also cautioned operators to make sure they were prepared to provide guests with a great experience before trying to drive traffic through promotions.

"Before you do anything, you've got to get your house in order operationally," he said. "There's no way to be successful marketing people to a bad place. There's no point in bringing in folks just to disappoint them."

Or, as McAllister put it, "There's nothing worse for a bad restaurant than good marketing."