Understanding the Path to the Plate

A few details to consider when crafting and customizing the restaurant experience.

You’ve got them to the restaurant. Great. Now what?

Restaurants don’t just provide food. They provide experiences. Guaranteeing a quality, memorable, repeatable experience for your guest is not just about what you put on the plate, but about everything else. It’s about understanding the whole customer journey.

Great Point of Sale/Purchase strategies can help you attract and delight customers, convert them to brand loyalists, and, from there, generate higher revenues.

When Ad Cucina crafts or customizes restaurant experiences, there are a few things that go into the mix.

What do they see first? You know what they say about first impressions. Guests spend less than 2 minutes browsing your menu, so it’s crucial to make that time count.

How do they feel? Is your environment as enticing as your entrée? Don’t forget, tone & imagery reinforce a brand’s distinct character. Instead of speaking to “who” and “what”, think “when” and “how”. Be mindful of the response you are striving to achieve at every step of the journey.

Is that all there is? How are you leading your guests to further engage, explore and upgrade? US consumers spend $5400 annually on spontaneous purchases, and over 70.5% name food as their biggest impulse buys. This helps signify how intersecting at moment of purchase can drive a restaurant’s bottom line through upselling (CNBC, 2018).

Will they be back? How can you extend the reach of your brand and make the experience something your guests crave? A loyal customer is 14x more likely to return vs. a new customer. Even more, if you increase loyalty by 5%, profits can increase from 25%-95% (Forbes, 2020)

Soft Science Backed up by Hard Data

This isn’t mood lighting and aromatherapy. A good POS/POP strategy involves close attention to consumer behavior data, informed zone merchandising, eye tracking studies and more. Sound analytics and careful scrutiny go into everything we put before you.

Make Tech Your Friend

This should probably be its own separate blog post, but technology drives nearly everything in the restaurant space these days. Online ordering is a crucial component of integrating into your POP strategy as consumer behaviors continue to shift in this direction. Understanding how that customer journey fits within your restaurant’s operational needs is key to building a successful POP strategy that integrates the new ordering channel seamlessly.

If you’ve nailed the online order experience, think bigger. Immersive experiences, 3-D environments, virtual, voice and app-mediated interactions: When you’re ready for it, we’re ready to bring it.

And then there’s “COVID.”

Let’s face it: “Business as usual” has been anything but normal, predictable and “usual” lately. Restaurant design, ingress and egress flow patterns, and opportunities to connect with customers at point-of-purchase are dramatically different, and communicating safety protocols competes constantly for the customer’s attention. We are (highly) aware of this new environment, and have helped numerous clients successfully navigate through it. It’s all about streamlining messaging while marrying brand with functionality.

Show Me Something

The best way to show you what we can do is to, literally, “show you what we can do.” If there’s a specific problem you’re facing, throw us at it. We’d love to help out with a FREE consultation and our best recommendation. In the meantime, you might check out some of our past Point of Purchase and Point of Sale work here.