Want Lunch? Just Expense-A-Steak!
October 20, 2009
The following is a guest post written by Greg McGuire from the foodservice industry blog, The Back Burner. It’s an entertaining look at a creative, tongue-in-cheek campaign to generate buzz about a restaurant.
All over the country food service has been suffering from a decline in business meals, and the upscale eateries of midtown Manhattan are no exception. Manhattan steakhouse Maloney & Porcelli’s is fighting back with a deceptively simple tool it recently made available to its customers that has the entire business district suddenly willing to spend their lunch hour enjoying a hearty meal in the restaurant.
It’s called Expense-A-Steak, and it allows you to enter any dollar amount online and then download and print receipts for essential office supplies, effectively wiping away that $150 lunch you just enjoyed. Simply return the manufactured receipts to your boss and tell him you already dropped the printer ink toners off and return to work.
Of course, anybody checking the company credit card will notice that the “Office Supply Hut” receipt doesn’t match the Maloney & Porcelli’s name on the statement, but those couple weeks of bliss before the hammer comes down may very well be worth it.
Expense-A-Steak produced over 88,000 receipts in its first week. The gadget is generating a lot of buzz around the venerable steakhouse, making Expense-A-Steak look more and more like a brilliant PR play.
Greg McGuire blogs about the foodservice industry at The Back Burner, which is written by the employees of Tundra Specialties, a company specializing in restaurant supplies and food service equipment.
Who Needs $40K?
October 19, 2009
I’d wager (I guess there’s still a bit of Vegas lurking in my psyche) there are quite a few people who read the title of this post and are now frantically waving their hands in the air, chanting “me, me, please pick me!!” I’m pretty sure I could find plenty of things to do with an extra $40,000 given the opportunity.
Why $40k? That’s the amount of revenue that we estimate we could generate for a restaurant brand represented at the National Restaurant Association’s Marketing Executives Study Group in Las Vegas last week. Prior to attending MEG, we researched and compiled a mini case study entitled [Download not found] which was part of a packet given to the attendees of the conference just before the panel discussion regarding social media. Below is a snippet of the data outlined in the document:
For each city listed in the subsequent table, we summed the number of queries for the top search phrases utilized for that market in one year. We assumed the conversion rate for a top-10 organic listing at 3.14%, an average per person check of $38.25 and average table of three.
We feel these numbers are truly conservative figures and that in reality, we could probably generate more for this company. Read the full case study and if you’re wondering what kind of revenue your business could realize from search engine marketing, contact us for a free audit of your restaurant’s web presence.
Vegas, We Hardly Knew Thee
October 15, 2009
…and more than likely never will.
Yep, we’re currently sitting casino-side in the Luxor Hotel & Casino on the strip. We’ve been afforded the opportunity to present some materials to the folks here for the NRA’s Marketing Executive Study Group. Vegas, as you may have guessed, is not really our style, although we certainly don’t mean that in a snooty way. Whatever floats your boat, my friends.
For a peek at a portion of what we’ve been up to, please download our short paper entitled [Download not found]. We’re also conducting a small Wonka-esque contest for the attendees. Should be fun and productive; we’ll let you know how it goes…