Increasing Traffic Takes More Than Good Scents
My favorite pizza restaurant, Faccia Luna in Arlington, Va., has been a neighborhood fixture for close to 20 years. The problem is that in the last five of those years, a lot of other “fixtures” have opened close by.
“Take a walk on the four or five blocks here and you’ll see about 50 restaurants now,” Faccia Luna owner Joe Corey told me last night, shaking his head. Corey was standing on the sidewalk in this young-professional and busy Clarendon area of Arlington, offering pizza samples to passers-by. “So we have to try things to get people in the restaurant.” He’s put in Happy Hour deals for the first time—an excellent antipasto for about $4—and this morning I opened my email to see them selling group coupons, another first.
“The competition is really having an effect,” Corey said. “People don’t want to wait anymore either. If you tell them 15 minutes, they’ll be off. So I’m out here giving away pizza.”
To say life has changed is quite the understatement these days. The great Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein wrote Sunday about pining for the clam chowder of his New England seacoast youth. Apparently, thickness now equates for taste and Pearlstein has had enough of it. He quotes Greg Carpenter, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, who says that consumer preferences—be it for chowder, cars, wine or yes, pizza—are “learned and largely formed by social norms and expectations that producers have a strong hand in shaping. Moreover, such preferences are anything but fixed, susceptible to changes in technology, culture, fads and the business strategies of companies competing in the marketplace.”
So what’s a restaurant—or company—to do? Market research? If it’s good. But that’s the tricky part. “The curse of bad market research,” writes Pearlstein, “is that it lulls companies into the kind of complacency that eventually makes them vulnerable to an upstart challenger who comes along offering a more fuel-efficient car, a stronger cup of coffee, a more healthful soft drink, a more interesting hotel room or—let us hope—a tastier and more authentic chowder.”
Offer free product? A restaurant gives away something free for much the same reason that a SIPA member would: to get the customer in the door and familiar with the high quality. So given that, what would the equivalent be of you standing on the sidewalk as Corey was doing last night? That might be where Google Analytics enters the equation—so you can determine how to draw the most traffic. (Corey’s strategy was to let the pizza scent waft into the night air.)
“If I had to pick just one thing [that we are doing to be successful],” says SIPA member Judy Doherty of Food and Health Communications, “it is paying attention to what Google analytics is telling us—not for landing pages, bounce rates, new users or anything like that but for what people are actually searching for. What do they want? What words are they using? This was the biggest surprise; we overlooked some really simple products that have brought in a lot of money, and we found a lot of new keywords, some of which were misspellings or different ways of titling things. We were making some really innovative things for our customers, but Google told us that the rest of the world and a lot of new customers wanted basic stuff.”
In his Post column, Pearlstein included a “Real New England Clam Chowder” recipe, a neat element for a Business Section article. He ended the column by saying that he did indeed find the tasty chowder of his youth, but they don’t sell as many as they used to. Likewise, Corey’s flavorful pizza and presence on the sidewalk may only take him so far.
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