And most of those were in restaurants.
Laughing, being laughed at, being laughed with. Making big decisions about life. Making little decisions about the nerdy details of favorite movies and books. Connecting with people I care about, or realizing that I care about someone I barely knew when we sat down.
I think this aspect of restaurant marketing is generally missing from most communications. For years I’ve thought this.
It didn’t help that the restaurant’s most fervent disciple was famously overweight and eventually lost the ability to eat. His eloquence made up for it.
Today I take as my inspiration an article in The New York Times, which I “rabbit-holed” my way to while reading one of the many encomiums that have come pouring out of the internet upon the passing of Roger Ebert.
Here is the passage of the the Times piece that applies here:
But he remembers everything about the food at the Steak ’n Shake. In the hospital, he told me, he ate Steak ’n Shake meals a bite at a time in his mind. Still, what he longs for most is the talk and fellowship of the table.
“The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss,” he wrote…
If you poke at this blog you know I had a nearly two-decade relationship with Steak ’n Shake, developing marketing. When I was a dedicated promoter of Steak ’n Shake (it’s very important to me that the apostrophe be a true apostrophe, not a hash mark, and that it scoop to the left like an apostrophe and not to the right like an open-single-quote, which is what your computer wants to do if you don’t control it), I was pleased and proud of Roger’s love of the brand, because I felt it, too. And he was always so eloquent about it.
There is something vivid about moments spent bonding in the spaces provided by a certain kind of restaurant that cannot be exaggerated.
This is why “Home Meal Replacement” and carry-out have only been small profit centers for most restaurants. It’s those tables that make your restaurant valuable. In a lot of cases, your delicious food that you spent months researching in the test kitchen and thousands maybe millions bringing to market is nothing more than rent.
People agree to pay the rent and eat the food just so they can sit there in your place of business.
Those renters who have Big Moments are fans for life. They develop a love and an attachment that goes beyond anything you could reasonably ask.
So why don’t more restaurants actively promote or enable these moments?
Sonic does a good job suggesting it (even better when the campaign featured three or four different recurring pairs of customers enjoying their time in the car instead of just the two guys). Olive Garden does such a ham-fisted job of falsely, manipulatively evoking restaurant-table-camaraderie it’s become a punchline.
Friday’s does a good job with its kid menus, encouraging parents and kids to relate to each other.
But this is an area that could stand more deliberate leveraging, in my opinion.
The Fellowship of the Table.
Okay, not literally.
