Strategies to break through the bottleneck in catering marketing!

Let’s first talk about the formation and positioning of the brand team. This is 1. Regardless of whether or not it cooperates with an external team, the brand should have a reasonable brand team organization.

1. Brand team formation and positioning

In 2021, we entered into a strategic partnership with 7fentian to carry out more comprehensive marketing integration cooperation. At the beginning of the cooperation, we did not propose any marketing plan first, but started from assisting 7fentian to build a brand center team, because we both understood that without the coordination and promotion of the internal team, any marketing action would be difficult to promote from within.

When building a brand team, the brand side must clearly define the team positioning, the role positioning and functions within the company, and the role positioning for collaboration with external companies from the very beginning. Otherwise, it will become useless, with no internal authority and random external decisions.

The organizational structure of the brand team needs to match the brand's development stage and next development goals, and the team should be built with a goal-oriented approach. In the initial stage of construction, there can be fewer people and they can take on multiple roles, but the division of functions needs to be clear.

2. Opening Marketing Module

At present, many catering brands have the following significant problems in their opening marketing:

Discounts that are not relevant to the brand positioning and fail to drive repeat purchases;

Channel placement that is not related to the brand’s target audience touchpoints ;

· The opening and marketing plans of multiple stores of a chain brand are not connected and continued;

· Low efficiency and unclear purpose of using online platforms.

These problems result in opening marketing that can only simply boost popularity, but does not help build brand awareness and cognitive propositions, or it is just a passing fad of internet celebrity marketing. There are no standards, and the opening marketing plan needs to be re-formulated each time, which increases communication costs and makes it difficult for franchisees to implement.

Opening marketing is not a simple opening activity, it requires the formation of a standard system and refined management. Based on past experience, the granularity of the opening marketing module standards needs to be gradually refined at different stages of brand development.

First of all, we must fully consider that every opening is the best opportunity to spread brand awareness and product awareness. All discount activities need to be conducted around the mind. For example, Lao Xiang Ji’s opening marketing was centered around its key product, old hen soup, and consumers were invited to drink it for free. For consumers who were not familiar with Lao Xiang Ji, this not only established a mental preset, but also created a motivation for them to enter the store for the first time.

In addition, the action of receiving free coupons online allows consumers to become members of Lao Xiang Ji, which provides a traffic base for Lao Xiang Ji's continued repurchase marketing and lays the foundation for private domain traffic marketing. Based on this core strategy, combined with the continuous opening of new stores, Lao Xiang Ji’s mental positioning is gradually being consolidated while future marketing actions can be more precise.

Last year, 7 Fen Tian launched its national development strategy. When consumers in many new markets had not yet formed an awareness of 7 Fen Tian, ​​it also adopted the strategy of inviting local consumers to drink mango sago for free, which successfully helped 7 Fen Tian establish its mindset.

It should be noted that, depending on the product category, the key product can be a key period or an important matching product.

Second, after formulating the core strategy for opening marketing, we need to classify and manage the distribution channels, online platform selection, store atmosphere layout, and expense budget according to dimensions such as store channel distribution, city level, and new and old markets.

3. Product Launch Marketing Module

Compared with opening marketing, new product marketing is where many brands are most likely to make mistakes, but it is also an important marketing segment that many brands have been gradually strengthening in the past two years. First, tea beverage brands drove repeat purchases through high-frequency product launches and marketing, and then several major fast food brands also stepped up their product launch marketing.

Before talking about product launch marketing, we must be clear about the purpose of product launches. Product positioning is to build awareness and drive more new customers into the store, while product launches are to activate the consumption frequency of more old customers.

There are also many catering brands that are blind to product launches. They have unclear positioning of new products, an unreasonable sales atmosphere in stores, selling points that are not attractive to consumers, and limited or nonexistent communication methods. These will result in unsatisfactory sales share and sales of new products, not to mention driving sales growth.

The following points should usually be considered when launching new product marketing:

1. Qualitative research and development of new products

New product marketing begins when the product is established and developed.

Most brands only focus on product development, and do not consider new products with the mindset of a product manager. When developing new products, we must not only consider the supply chain, cost and product taste, but also not launch new products aimlessly by following the trend. Sometimes, we just need to reengineer and reorganize old products instead of having to develop new products.

Therefore, we need to look for clues for new product development from multiple dimensions: positioning-related R&D clues, season-related R&D clues, food-related R&D clues, consumer demand-related R&D clues, scene-related R&D clues, time period-related R&D clues, leverage-related R&D clues, and competition-related R&D clues. Only by considering these dimensions can the key conditions for whether a new product can sell well be met.

2. New product naming, selling points and pricing

The pricing of many brand new products is very strange, either follow the trend or have disorderly pricing. It is easy to cause consumers not to pay. In terms of pricing strategy, we need to consider and formulate from four dimensions: competitive environment, supply chain advantages, product positioning, and consumer awareness .

Naming and selling points are important factors in matching consumer needs and converting purchasing behavior. A good name and a good selling point can effectively connect with consumers and enhance product purchasing power.

3. Visual dislocation expression of new products

I still remember the new visual style of 7fentian’s products many years ago, which maintained a high degree of consistency with the store’s visual style. Although the brand vision was unified, consumers were completely unaware of the existence of new products and could only rely on the guidance of the waiters.

In fact, brand perception is not a fixed background, fixed color, or fixed font, but the consumer’s perception of the brand positioning and tone. Under the clear brand feeling style, the visual of the new product must have a sense of dislocation, breaking the accustomed "physical order" and "psychological order".

4. Amplify the atmosphere of new product sales

At present, the tea beverage industry can be said to be in a leading position in creating an atmosphere for selling new products. In the past two years, we can see that other categories are also gradually strengthening, but most of them have not done much.

In terms of the new product sales atmosphere, different categories will have slightly different in-store layouts, but the core goal is to magnify the display of new product materials on the facade and sales points (key sales contact points). This method should not only be applied in offline stores, but also in online stores, such as mini program stores, Dianping, and food delivery platforms.

5. Marketing communications at the finishing touch

After making the preparations for the above steps, marketing communication is just an action to accelerate and encourage consumers to try. Let's break this action down further. It basically consists of two parts. In the early stage of new product launch, a large amount of new product content is used to promote the product and build up consumers’ expectations for trying new products; short-term discounts on new products are used to convert consumers’ expectations for trying new products.

4. Brand Festival Marketing Module

We have done festival marketing for many brands, including Jingge's Chongqing Hotpot Festival/Beer Festival, Xinmeihua's Taste of Old Suzhou, Lanji's Hot Festival, and last year's 7 Minutes Sweet 77 Brand Day jointly with OKK, etc. We have encountered some problems and doubts in each of them, whether to do it or not, and how to do it. We have summarized some methods and ideas.

1. The purpose of brand festival creation

Before creating a festival, we must make clear the purpose or goal of the festival. Is it oriented towards short-term sales growth or long-term brand value, or finding a balance between the two?

In fact, the core goal of creating a festival is to maximize brand potential within a relatively fixed time. As long as these potential energies are used reasonably and in a concentrated manner, they can deeply convert consumers, and for franchise brands, they can also convert franchisees.

For example, the purpose of Jingge's "Beer Drinking Festival" is to increase store performance growth in the summer when hot pot is relatively off-season; the "Chongqing Hot Pot Festival" further emphasizes the connection between positioning and brand, allowing consumers to participate in this connection; and 7fentian's "77 Brand Day" includes product mental consolidation and brand strategy actions.

2. Time and name setting

Time has two dimensions. The first is what time to choose to create a festival, and the second is how long to create a festival.

When it comes to choosing time, we can associate it with existing knowledge, such as: associating it with peak seasons, associating it with off-seasons, and associating it with festivals; we can also set the time ourselves, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, using existing festivals to create festivals can occupy consumers' existing cognition and better promote the festival atmosphere, but it will face a situation where a large number of brands on the market will jointly promote sales, and the volume and traffic of the festival will inevitably be discounted.

The duration of the festival-building activities needs to be fully considered. The catering industry is different from the retail industry. Brands spend a lot of manpower and material resources. If the event only lasts a few days, it is difficult for physical stores to absorb the large traffic and generate performance growth. We generally set the shortest cycle to 1 month and the longest to 2 months. Neither too short nor too long is appropriate.

Based on the purpose and time, it would be much more reasonable to clarify the name of the festival. Because the festival activity is not a one-time event but needs to be repeated every year, a good name can help to repeatedly strengthen and deepen consumers' memory.

3. The feasibility of the plan

Generally speaking, brand festival creation is the most important marketing activity in the brand's annual marketing calendar. The budget expense is the highest marketing expense of the whole year, which requires high consistency and coordinated execution among multiple departments. This determines that although the activity cycle is longer than previous marketing, the activity links, communication links, and store execution actions cannot be too complicated.

5. Full-year marketing calendar module

As early as 2017, we proposed an effective marketing management method for chain restaurant brands. Any restaurant brand should manage all its marketing actions. So we believe that a marketing calendar is definitely not simply combining activities into predictable hotspots according to dates.

1. Marketing Calendar Composition

All marketing actions of a brand generally come from store management needs and brand management needs.

Further disassembly, there are probably the following modules:

· Opening Marketing

Daily store marketing

New product marketing

·Festival marketing

Hot festival marketing

· Franchise Marketing

We need to put these marketing actions into the form of a marketing memo, make it into the brand's full-year marketing calendar, and make reasonable budget allocation and management.

2. Daily marketing management of stores

Here I would like to focus on the management of daily store marketing. Brand headquarters often overlook the marketing solutions to daily store operating problems . Most marketing partners, faced with questions raised by hundreds or thousands of stores, are often overwhelmed or fall into passive execution. This situation not only fails to solve the problem, but also brings a lot of burden and negative emotions.

What problems will a store encounter at different stages after opening? For example, within three months after opening, within six months after opening, when a competitor opens nearby, when performance declines, etc., what activities should be done in these stages? Why do this? How to do it? Therefore, we need to conduct in-depth store interviews, develop a comprehensive daily marketing library, and update it regularly based on execution results. Such long-term accumulation can form a powerful store empowerment system. At the same time, we can use digitalization to visualize the classification of daily marketing libraries, so that operation-related personnel can more conveniently view, apply, download and execute effect feedback.

6. Digitalization empowers marketing

More and more catering brands are beginning to pay attention to digital construction. Some brands have set up digital marketing departments, and even many functions are developed internally. There are many advantages of digital construction, which I will not elaborate on here. Let me briefly mention three roles of digitalization in marketing.

· It can make all marketing actions targeted.

It can make all marketing methods more precise.

Can make all marketing effects visible.

7. Let’s talk about real marketing

Whether it is the grass planting by Xiaohongshu or the tree planting by Zhihu people, as well as numerous content platforms, they are all the battlegrounds for many catering brands to output content in the past two years. However, it also brings about problems such as content homogeneity, content virtualization, and separation from real scenarios. Behind Lao Xiang Ji’s earthy marketing is definitely not a low-level attempt to play brand marketing. Instead, it connected with consumers' real needs and real scenarios, and brought about phenomenal communication effects in a more simple way.

To be more specific, the check-in content, photo angles, photo editing methods, and text editing of many kol/koc are all the same and as boring as NPCs in the game. Brands cannot simply distribute content. They need to provide better guidance on content and conduct in-depth research on its presentation form to bring consumers the long-lost real experience. This is a direction worth considering in the brand's future content marketing.

Finally, I would like to thank all our customers and partners for their trust. We are anxious every day in the catering industry. We are well aware that the iteration of our capabilities and ways of thinking must keep up with the complex changes in the market environment.

Taking this opportunity to post, we have conducted a comprehensive periodic review of the marketing module business. Based on the principle of writing with simple words and simple knowledge, if you have any questions, you can also contact us for further communication. I hope we can really bring some help to everyone.

The future is left to the awesome people, we just need to change the present.