New App By Consuming Louisville Author

If you are a local Louisville restaurant, than there is something coming out of whic

The Conclusion of the Matter

This is the second and final part of the Domino's Marketing Debate going on between myself and one of our other employees here at Prima.

Domino's: "Our Pizza Stinks". Good Marketing or Bad?

As you may well be aware, Domino’s Pizza is a company that has made some drastic and gutsy marketing moves in the last couple of years.

QR Codes Are Growing In Popularity & Will Prove To Be An Invaluable Tool For Restaurant Marketing

Pop Quiz: What does "QR" stand for? If you answered "Quasar Re-invigoration" then you are close... not really, it just means you watch too much Star Trek. The "QR" in QR Code stands for "Quick Response". Up until recently, when a company would attempt to draw a consumer's interest to a certain product or service, it would use various channels such as newspapers, billboards, tv advertising, the internet, and many other methods. Unfortunately, one of the problems with these methods is the dreaded time in-between the interest sparked by the ad, and the conversion action taken by the consumer. A person might be interested to see that Southwest Airlines is advertising cheap flights on a billboard in Times Square, but then is immediately distracted by the guitar playing man in underwear, not to mention that report he needs to get on his boss's desk by 3pm. By the time he gets home to his computer, he has totally and completely forgotten about the ad.

David Hayden is an expert on blogging and restaurants. He is the author and creator of The Hospitality Formula Network, a series of five blogs covering multiple facets of the restaurant industry. Four of his blogs were recently included in a listing the top sixty restaurant industry blogs, including two in the top ten. His first book, Tips2: Tips For Improving Your Tips, has been receiving rave reviews throughout the industry. We asked David to write about how a restaurant can better leverage its blog for success, so sit back and enjoy learning from his years of experience in this area!

If You Want To Lose Trust From Loyal Customers, Follow the Example of Netflix

If you don't use Netflix (or perhaps live in a vacuum) then you have probably missed out on all of the excitement around its announcement on July 12 of this last year regarding its change in policy and rates. There has been much debate about whether the price change was legitimate, but what has been less-debated is the manner in which Netflix presented its changes. The social media atmosphere literally exploded over the original July announcement and many (admittedly including myself) threatened to remove or downgrade subscriptions. As a Netflix subscriber myself, as well as a marketing strategist, it has been interesting to analyze the mistakes that were made in these announcements in an attempt to avoid the same mistakes.

The Top 10 Things You Should Never Do To Your Restaurant/Cafe Website

It's tempting. You are a successful chef and business-person who rules your restaurant with a tight (yet understanding) grip. Whatever you says goes and you have a very specific idea of how things should look. You designed the layout of your cafe and people love it. You decided what colors to paint the walls and whether or not your ceiling would be tiles or would display the industrial-modern look. You decided that a website would be good for business and, by george, you will have the last say in its design (and it will most likely look exactly like the inside of your establishment). Here are the problems. (1) What looks good in a restaurant doesn't always look good on the web. (2) You need to consider more than just "design" on the website (sure, your personal taste in design is crazy and frightening but your food is amazing... unfortunately, no one has yet invented a way to taste food over the internet and people who are terrified -or worse, bored- by your website might never find themselves making their way into your doors to taste that amazing food). (3) The purpose of a restaurant website is primarily for attracting and/or educating new patrons, but they are generally designed only for those who are already customers.

My goal in writing this post is to give you a list of things that you should avoid in designing your restaurant website, and to give you suggestions for what will help attract potential customers to your physical location through your website. In lieu of this, here are the Top 10 worst things you can do to your restaurant website (in order of my opinion of their importance) as well as some suggestions for how you can change (or avoid these mistakes!):