Music Case

The service delivered by your employees is a very important el- ement of value. It is also an area where you can distinguish yourself. If you do it well and do it consistently, you will also differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd.

To be successful at marketing, you must create a service culture in your organization. Your culture should be focused on serving and satisfying your customers. All employees should embrace this cul- ture, which means you must recognize and reward employees who help create value for your customers.

In Service Management and Marketing, Christian Gronroos re- lates a comment from Roger Dow, Marriott's vice president of sales and marketing services: "We used to reward restaurant managers for things that were important to us, such as food costs. When have you heard a customer ask for the restaurant's food costs? You have to re- ward for what customers want from your business." Today, measur- ing and rewarding customer satisfaction is part of Marriott's reward system.

All in all, in order to provide excellent, consistent value to your guests, you need to adopt the marketing concept. This concept consists of three parts:

1. Everyone in the operation must be customer oriented. Restaurants sell service; supermarkets sell food.

2. Marketing must be integrated throughout the organiza- tion. Everyone must embrace marketing and its concomi- tant customer orientation.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

Differentiation is a journey toward uniqueness. It requires considerable dedica- tion. Providing customers with what they value and doing this better than the competition creates excellence.

MARKETING CONCEPT This consists of customer orienta- tion, integrating marketing throughout the organization, and meeting company objectives.

1084.ch01 8/11/03 10:59 AM Page 9

10

RESTAURANT MARKETING FOR OWNERS AND MANAGERS

3. You must meet company objectives. Roger Dow is not sug- gesting that we shouldn't be concerned about costs. However, managing costs, producing profits, and creating and maintaining customer counts are equally important. If you create temporary profits by reducing customer value, you will eventually see a steady decline in cover counts and profits.

When creating customer value, you need to add benefits that are worth more to customers than what it costs you to create them. These benefits don't have to be overly elaborate or expensive. A ben- efit might be something simple, such as putting a special sauce on a grilled salmon dish, making it a house special, and charging $2 more for the item. It might involve developing a specialty dessert at a cost of 75 cents and selling it for $5. Or it might mean developing

...