Differentiation in the restaurant business.
Today me and my family walked around Stockholm City for 15 minutes to find a descent place where we could have some good lunch.
Then we decided to go to a place we have been to before. That might sound boring but listen to this.
When the functional competition is massive, within the restaurant business, how can someone be different? So I started to think about different factors/variables that could be modified or changed and thus be able to build a solid ground for differentiation.
I tried to play with the type of food, the quality of the food, the design of the food, the interior design, the price, and many other variables. But I didn’t seem to get something good out of this.
After reading many books on cognitive psychology, habits, emotions, neuroscience, neuromarketing, and others I found the vital variable… or variables!
We can be satisfied by a very good meal, the variable “taste”, and that is good. But it will not be a good differentiating variable. Since many places have very good food.
If you have 4 restaurants to choose from. They all serve fantastic food and they all have great interior design. They are all equally close/far to/from your current location. So how does your brain calculate now?We do have a reward system built into our brain. That’s what keep us going.
This is where neuromarketing and the science of cognitive psychology together with neuroscience comes into play.
When all the functional variables are equal, your limbic system (emotional brain) takes over. What happens now is that you will decide where you will go and you honestly think that you based your choice on rational calculations. But you did not do that!
You see, the conscious mind is not aware of the subconscious mind. We can’t “know” if we are affected by our subconscious or not. So when you say “I like the color blue”, you think that you base this stand on conscious thoughts. But the fact is that the conscious answer you just said is based on “inner calculations” that you brain made in a fraction of a second. Without you “knowing” anything about that.
So back to the restaurant story. When all the functional variables are equal your mind goes to emotions, habit and memory. So the strongest variable that people in the restaurant business must think about is customers “experience” while inside the restaurant. It’s not in the food or the interior design, it’s about the emotional and social impact imprinted in our mind.
We go to the place where we feel welcomed, helped, assisted, loved, smiled at, etc. Good restaurant owners know that what they need to think about, except from good food and lovely interiors, it’s how they welcome and treat their customers during the whole stay. A smile will help more than extra food on the plate. A question if “everything is alright”, “would you need anything else”, makes more sense to our brain than a nice table with modern chairs. And the concern has to be genuine since our inner mind knows when someone is faking! Our intuition is a very good lie detector, it can know if the owner is more interested in money than your satisfaction.
When we feel good somewhere, we tend to go back to that place, even if there might be other places serving better food. But remember that you need to distinguish between functional and emotional variables!
So we said “let’s go to that restaurant, they are always so nice to us…”
I’m more into neuro-entrepreneurship, but I saw your blog on Sprouter. Are you on Facebook or Twitter?
Anyway, NICE blog!
Norris
@entrep_thinking
norris.krueger@gmail.com
Never mind the food, setting or the location.
The social factors are the most mentally rewarding.
You want to eat were the most prominent members of your social
group eats, because of just that reason.
Herd-behavior is a fact among humans. We go where “our likes” go or sometimes we go to places where we “want” to be because of who is there. But in my post I break out these factors and focus on the elements of reasoning, isolated from the heard. It’s logically possible to assume that a place where the most prominent members of your social group eats is owned but “bad people”. No one notice this but you and hence you feel “bad” when you go there. Now you will have to break out from the heard and think in isolation relative to your approximate environment.