Hey! That new project I was teasing toward the end of last year? IT’S NOW AVAILABLE at all the usual outlets: Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble.
Here are ten little morsels/nibbles/crumbs, served on a little tray at the imaginary cocktail party celebrating the book’s release. Presumably reading these will make you want more, more, and ignite a hunger in you that can only be satisfied by buying the book, which is really reasonably priced.
1. FROM CHAPTER 1:
“And if you give yourself and your menu designer something interesting to write about— poof! You’ll watch all those boring words disappear. Next thing you know, you’ll be persuading people to buy what you want them to.
“It’s legal. It’s ethical. And it happens every day: convincing people to buy what they might not have otherwise. Some call it advertising.”
2. FROM CHAPTER 2:
“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: kids are whiny, so why try to engage them? Oh, wait, that’s why they’re whiny: the cynic didn’t engage them.”
3. FROM CHAPTER 6:
“Ideally you’ll give people what in my Psych 101 class they called a “schema”: a basic framework of expectations you keep in your brain. Train people to love having a schema of you. Get the staff to recommend the good stuff when they show up, and pay extra attention to them. You really need them to come back.”
4. FROM CHAPTER 7:
“All social media wants from a company is to find out they’re a bunch of decent human beings. Oh, and a deal.”
5. FROM CHAPTER 9:
“I love to peek inside a restaurant’s marketing, and glimpse a real person peeking backing, telling me interesting things in a venue normally reserved for a logo and tagline.”
6. FROM CHAPTER 11:
“Judge your next LTO upon whether it exemplifies or furthers a larger idea, a bigger point you’re trying to make about your restaurant.”
7. FROM CHAPTER 12:
“[Potential custmers] aren’t even aware, or able to express, why they prefer this restaurant to that one —but they’re looking for stuff like weeds in the sidewalk and streaks on the windows and dumpster-enclosure-doors-blowing-in-the-prairie-wind, without even realizing it. Are the lights in the sign flickering? Get up there and change them now. ”
8. FROM CHAPTER 13:
“Everywhere I look I notice missed opportunities to define their pizza chain, to create some kind of bond or belief, to establish their brand.”
9. FROM CHAPTER 14:
“They just tried to keep the money they spent below the money that came in. So when the people who were fans got tired of it and no new people came in, and an ever-dwindling number of people were giving them money, they had no plan.”
10. FROM CHAPTER 15:
“All my WebMD-style symptoms-to-watch-for are attempting to do is help you diagnose the creeping, silent killer of restaurant brands: Debilitating, Chronic, Generic Positivity.”
Hope you’re metaphorically hungry. There’s more where those came from.
