Determing your unique selling point

Marketing is the process of having the right products and services at the right time, to the right people and in the right place. The whole idea of marketing is to attract and retain satisfied customers in every restaurant. To my dismay, some people see marketing as a process of just advertising and selling their products and in the end, -they refer to that as marketing. The idea of marketing is identifying a customer’s wants, desires and needs to match or exceed them in a satisfactory way. All policies should be directed towards making a customer satisfied in his needs and here, profitable sales volumes are more important than maximum sales volume. It’s worth noting that restaurateurs, managers should determine the needs of their customers and satisfy them. This will in the end be there unique selling pointsYou can determine the selling point yourself by analysing the features of your products into benefits to your customer; here you consider each benefit in turn and indicate whether this benefit is: • Standard to all competing suppliers’ products –provided others(S) • Something that is different and special to you –not provided by others (D) – these are candidate unique selling point. If all your benefits are rated ‘S’, then this indicates that there are no obvious differences between your products and those of other restaurants. What you can do best now is to find out from the customers themselves why they end up dining at your restaurant and not to others in a slickest way. You can sit with a customer for not more than 10 minutes and ask them why they come to your restaurant noting clearly what is being mentioned in the process. You also do the same to your staff without discrimination and ask them why they think customers visit the restaurant and still why they think others don’t come. Here you will be able to find that some points have been repeated and what is now left of you is to choose the best five (5) out of the many to make a tagline for your restaurant and that will be your unique selling point. It can be location, customer care, food, ambiance, the interior décor, good service, cleanliness, reputation, menu variety etc After making a tag line, this will be your unique selling point and stick to it plus getting ways on how to develop on the others which were not mentioned. Remember it’s cheap and easy to attract customers but very difficult to retain them. Restaurant success depends on how big your customer base is and a big customer base means good customer retention and vice versa. seb1225@gmail.com