Arjun Sen, co-founder and CEO of marketing consultancy ZenMango, has had a prestigious corporate marketing career, holding senior executive positions in several Fortune 500 companies. He has 20 years of experience in marketing, branding, consumer research, strategic planning and operations at restaurant and retail companies including Jillian’s Entertainment and Papa John’s International Worldwide. He now works with a variety of restaurant groups.
When you look at the success of a restaurant, what is the one thing that you always consider?
To me it is all about transactions or traffic. That is the one number that is real.
Think, even for a single store operator, success is defined by how many times he opens the cash register and how much he puts in every time. If he is opening the cash register fewer times every day, he should be worried right away.
What happens if traffic starts to decline?
I have seen that there is a lag between traffic starting to decline and the realization that something is really wrong. In many a case, when traffic starts to decline, there is a dial that marketers have easy access to, called price. Often they will increase price to offset the traffic decline. As a result, sales remain flat and look like there are no eminent danger or challenges to the restaurant.
Now think from the consumers’ point of view, what is going on. Of course the restaurant is not operating at its best, and because of that a group of customers are not coming back, causing the traffic decline. The remaining customer groups, who are loyal through the tough times, are “taxed” with a price increase to maintain sales levels. The higher price may push a sizable group of the loyalists to stop coming in, and that will cause further decrease in traffic. At that point, there is no price increase that will help sustain sales.
How do you reverse a traffic decline?
First and foremost, detect it when it is in its early stage. Find where it is concentrated: if it is happening in a few specific markets, newer restaurants or some other focused area.
Once you have a clear idea where the problem is stemming from, the most important thing you can do is to decide what not to do. I always advise marketers to stop putting marketing dollars in a down market. The reason is very simple: putting money in a down market is similar to inviting customers to come and experience the brand when there are service challenges. You will create rejecters at a higher rate if you do so. So pause marketing, invest in learning why customers are not coming back, and fix that. Then and only then should you invest in marketing to ask customers to come back and experience the brand again.
You have talked about learning from customers. All brands do it. What in your opinion is doing it right versus doing it wrong?
I would not go that far and call an approach to be wrong. I think listening to consumers is very important, but you need to understand what all can a customer speak about. Here are a few golden rules I follow:
1. Customers can react to a stimulus but not solve a problem. Asking a customer what will make you visit the restaurant makes him/her think like an expert. He/she does not have the job of driving sales; that is your job. Don’t outsource it to the customer.
2. Customers react emotionally and justify rationally. When listening to customers, try to find out what connects to their emotions more than what makes sense. If you can touch customers with an action and make them smile or nod their heads, you have been much more successful than simply getting a high score on a survey question.
3. Customers do not lie. Yes, if you ask them something that they cannot or do not want to talk about, they may tell you something that won’t make any sense to you. If a customer says something that comes across as strange or bizarre, just pause and think, “Why is the customer thinking this way?” That thought process will help you connect to the customer better.
When you moved from the role of a marketer to a role in marketing and operations, what did you learn?
I have to say, I was humbled when I was directly interacting with operations, as I learned they have a 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year shift. That is very different from me sitting in the corporate office staring outside my big window and thinking of the next big idea.
Here are two examples that will put things in perspective. In one tour to a market, I asked the restaurant manager what he thought about the marketing programs that came from corporate. He was very polite and took me to his tiny office at the back of the restaurant. Every wall in that tiny office had every poster marketing had ever generated. Before I could take pride in the fact that every poster made it to the restaurant, he asked me, “If you could tell me what not to do before the next big idea came our way, that will be very helpful.”
In another instance, corporate reporting had built this color-coded, one-page KPI report for store operators. It had every benchmark and history you can think of. It was color-coded so that the reader got it easily. After it was presented to the operations managers in a market, I asked them for their feedback. One manager stood up and took a dry-erase marker and put a line in the middle of the table. Then he said, “If you can put the managers who are below the market average on one side of the line, the rest of us can see who is bringing the average of the market down and plan how to work with them. Next, instead of the report being full of graphs and charts, can you simply tell me two things I am doing well and should compliment my team on, and two things we need to be better on. That is all I can act on. I would appreciate if you gave me only that.”
There have been other similar experiences. I have never forgotten how difficult the operators’ tasks are and how our job as marketers was to support them.
Helping marketers differentiate
You work with different kinds of restaurants, as well as brands outside the industry. Does that come into play when you assist a restaurant?
Let me give you a specific example. You want to build an amazing loyalty program for your restaurant. What do you usually do? You will get the loyalty program of your key competition and see how you can better that. If your competition gives one free dollar for every 20 dollars spent, you offering one free dollar for every 19 dollars spent is a mathematically better program. But can you not do better than that?
If you looked at the loyalty program of an airline, a casino, a national massage chain, an online floral retailer and a few other examples, and put them next to each other, all of a sudden you start looking at the solution completely differently. You see different elements of the program that you may have missed earlier. You may arrive at a breakthrough solution that connects with consumers.
I suggest all marketers get outside their job and category at least once a week. First, look at your restaurant from the consumers’ point of view, then look at other categories. The macro view will inspire you to come up with bigger solutions.
What will help marketers differentiate themselves?
I am glad you asked, as many a time we marketers follow a cookie-cutter style of marketing. We have an annual planning session and develop a marketing calendar based on that. We then plan each window based on previous years’ plan and get that into execution. We also have times and budgets for listening to customers.
If you are trying this to build a relationship with customers, just ask if this strategy will work with your significant other. You look at what you bought her last year for Valentine’s Day, Christmas and her birthday and do something similar again this year. Could you have done better? I think so.
I think the drive to something better starts with stopping the urge to do the same thing as last year. That pause will put you in an uncomfortable position. Once you feel that, you have taken the first step to a breakthrough marketing initiative. Doing the same thing as last year nearly ensures that you will not fail. Is that good enough? As Michael Jordan said in the famous Nike ad, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot…and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
So put yourself in positions where success is not guaranteed, and only then you will surprise yourself by discovering the Jordan of marketing in you.
Last question: What is your favorite quote and why?
It connects to the last question you asked. "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." —Samuel Beckett