Restaurant Marketing, Bertucci's Style

A lesson in marketing from a family restaurant that achieved 3000% growth in its first 5 years

Bertucci's is a US chain of Italian family restaurants. They're kind of like the American version of La Porchetta, but with a brick oven in every restaurant. 

The original restaurant was opened in 1981 in Somerville, Massachusetts. Ironically, the reason it was opened in the first place was because the founder, Joseph Crugnale, bought the property to stop any competitors moving in on his Ice Cream empire, which had an outlet a couple of doors down. Ooookay...

The restaurant took off fast, and within 5 years it had developed into a chain of 20 locations throughout Massachusetts. Crugnale sold the chain for millions to a restaurant conglomerate in 1998 and today there are over 6000 employees working in more than 200 outlets throughout the US.

So while the Bertucci's of today is not exactly a small business, there are lessons we can take from some of its marketing strategies that can be used by smaller hospitality businesses like yours.

Here is the latest Bertucci's "advertisement." It's a two minute pre-roll ad on YouTube, which means it's one of those (usually annoying) ads that comes on before the video that you actually came to see. Two minutes! YouTube gives the option to skip the ad after the first 5 seconds, but if you watch the ad you'll see why Bertucci's marketing people are counting on the fact you'll stick around to watch the whole two minutes:

What's different about this ad?

Well, for one, it doesn't actually try to sell you anything. Throughout the entire ad, hundreds of words are spoken by the chef. The actual name of the business only gets mentioned twice in passing during the first minute or so, and it's only written on the screen a couple of times as well. And even then amongst a bunch of other words. Words that have nothing to do with trying to sell you anything.

So why is this ad good?

It helps people. It invites them in, asks them to gather close and learn something that they may not have known before. "But it's just a guy chopping up some herbs!" I hear you say. A lot of people already know how to do that, it's true. But the average YouTube user may not know parsley from basil, and now they just had a two minute lesson in the basics.

This campaign would be costing Bertucci's bucket loads of money. All this air-time and they hardly even mention the business! A lot of old-fashioned marketing people would be seeing this as burning money. But here's why it works. It does something much more than just shove the brand down people's throats. That's what everybody else is doing, and that’s what people have learned to filter out. Bertucci's though, via this ad, is actually building a relationship, both with their existing and potential customers. They are becoming your friend. They're offering a helpful service and not expecting anything in return. Just because they can.

What this does is create a connection with their audience. Suddenly they're no longer a national corporation. They're now the friendly chef who showed you how to properly prepare rosemary (and a bunch of other how-to videos on their website). So next time you're trying to decide which of the 30 restaurants in your suburb or town you're going to tonight, what's going to help you choose? That's right, I'll go to the place where I know the chef. Where the chef showed me how to prepare herbs for cooking. Where the chef is my FRIEND.

What can I do?

Okay so you don't have a million dollar marketing budget to produce professional videos and have them shown as the pre-roll on thousands of Youtube videos. But you CAN take a leaf out of Bertucci’s book (or should that be menu? ), and start using a similar strategy for your restaurant or cafe. Provide more than a meal to your customers, provide them with an ongoing service. Become their friend. Become indispensable. 

One obvious way to do this is to start a mailing list in your restaurant and send out a weekly (or fortnightly, or monthly) newsletter, with insider tips from the kitchen.

Your first installment could be about how you make that famous, most popular, dish of yours, and how can people make it at home themselves.

But wait a minute! If I teach them how to make it why would they come to my restaurant again?! Good question, and one that stops a lot of people embarking on this kind of marketing adventure.

There are two main arguments against this point of view.

For the first argument against, I’m going to cite something that we see every day and which stops that question dead in its tracks. It’s the phenomenon of the celebrity chef. Sure, you can buy a Jamie Oliver cookbook, but is that the same as having a meal cooked by Jamie? Of course not. Besides, people don’t go to your restaurant just for the great food. They go for the experience. Dining out isn’t all about the flavours, it’s about luxury, it’s about spoiling oneself. The food is a nice bonus.

So being able to cook your favourite restaurant’s best dish at home isn’t going to stop you going to that restaurant. In fact it may well have the opposite effect. They are paying you for the service of cooking that food for them so they don’t have to, not because you happen to know the recipe. If it were that simple there wouldn’t be any restaurants still in business because Jamie, Gordon, and Heston would have made them redundant years ago with their books and TV shows.

The other point against is that if sharing one or two recipes is going to be imparting everything you know that’s of any value, then you’re probably in a lot of trouble to begin with!

Besides, the newsletter doesn’t have to have your insider tips in it. That’s just one angle. You could send out vouchers, special offers, news of recent events, stuff that other business you admire are doing. Anything you can think of really. Just find some way to connect with your customers and be helpful to them.

When you do this, who do you think they are going to choose next time they go out for dinner? You, or the restaurant next door that is competitive on almost every level except that they aren’t looking for new ways to engage with their customers? I can tell you, you’ll be streets ahead in no time. And it’s not even something that requires a lot of time, effort, or expense. The mailing list could be an email list or a traditional mail out (yes real mail still exists!), depending on your clientele.

Once you have a mailing list, and it doesn’t need to be huge, there are several free services (Mailchimp is the one I use and one of the most popular) that will help you co-ordinate an email list and send out a bunch of emails to different people at the same time. They even let you track stats like who opened the email and who clicked on which links. There are lots of tips for creating a good email newsletter, from who to put as the sender, to the subject line (many people regard the subject line as the most important part of the email), to the body of the email itself. But that’s a whole other subject.

For now, that’s just one idea to start engaging with your customers. I’m sure you can think of lots more and may well be doing lots of things like this already. Keep doing it, and don’t worry about giving information away for free. You’ll soon find that the benefits come back many times over. 

Use the comments section below to let us know what strategies you're using to better engage with your customers.