90% of Americans state that companies should be mindful not only of their profitability, but also of their impact on the environment and society.
More than 50% say they would be more likely to select an airline/rental car/hotel that uses more environmentally friendly products and processes.
54% assert they would be more likely to patronize hotels or resorts that they knew practice environmental responsibility.

With statistics like these, it would be a mistake to ignore the need for sustainable practices in your business. Check out some of the ways in which thinking green can boost your bottom line.

Distinguish yourself. Step out from the competition by showing travelers how your environmental concern is a step above the rest. By offering sustainability initiatives not offered by others in your competitive set, you can position your brand as a leader in this area.
Target ethical consumers. 35 million Americans are Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) consumers.* They tend to gravitate toward activities, products and services that are environmentally and socially conscious. By aligning your offerings with the values of these consumers, you can open up your target reach.
Consider carbon offsets. The consumption of natural resources and the generation of waste all cause carbon dioxide emissions and, ultimately, global warming. By offering carbon offsets (solutions for maximizing energy efficiency and reducing emissions), you can make your business a greener option for discerning consumers. Visit http://carbonoffsets.org for more information.
Tap into travel philanthropy. This movement comprises conscientious travelers and travel companies that donate time, money and patronage to protect the natural environments they visit. It also includes voluntourists, or travelers who visit a destination to take part in local volunteer projects. Think about partnering with some of these organizations to open up avenues for untapped market growth.
Get certified. A great way to market your brand is to advertise your accomplishments—especially with regard to sustainability efforts. Take the steps necessary to secure environmental certifications from respected organizations, so you can boast your credentials to the public.

”*Trends in Sustainable Travel and Tourism,” GreenMoney Journal, Winter 2011/2012

Imagine a big fish tank hundreds of gold fish. Pick the one you want and instantly you’ve lost it because they all look the same. Suddenly, you notice a slim, purple fish. He quickly stands out from the pack. His distinctiveness is obvious. He swims around with a unique confidence and a bold identity, while the others just seem to fade into the background.

Odd fish are memorable. Odd fish command a premium price.
Odd fish convey added dimensions of relevance. Odd fish finish first.

In business, understanding this metaphor is the difference between drowning in a sea of sameness and being a standout brand. Psychologists point out that vividly differentiated characteristics attached to a product can enhance the public’s memory of it because they have stayed distinctive in the mind of the consumer. In other words, if you are promoting a product or service, give the consumer a reason to choose it. This concept is so simple, yet many restauranteurs fight with applying it to their brands.

The problem starts with defining what distinction truly is and is not. Distinction is not that you love or care for your customers more than your competition does. It’s not that you are an affordable dining option, or even that your product or service is of the best quality. Those are all vital attributes, but they are also likely touted by 90 percent of the competitive players in your industry.

Distinction in branding is something that you do so well and often that it is truly different and has become your asset—so much so that your competition would be unlikely to try to copy your actions. It’s something that your customers identify as really unusual and, as a result, award your restaurant extra space in their over-crowded, over-marketed minds.

Creating a platform of distinction requires courage by leadership. Doing things differently can draw out herds of critics, from customers to employers to industry players, but that’s to be expected; because new or different requires the adoption of new thinking, and it’s human nature to resist it for some time. Have confidence and believe in your oddness. Believe in your brand.

Take the test
How distinct is your restaurant brand?

• Visually, does your restaurant look different than your competitors?
• If you covered up your logo on your Menus and Website with only the content visible, would anyone know it’s your restaurant’s brand?
• Does everyone working within your restaurant know your unique story or how you’re different?

If you answered “no” to even one of these, you’ve got work to do. As
you explore points of distinction for your brand, ask yourself about:

Your market: What’s relevant to the needs and desires of your customers?

• The competitive landscape:
Are any of your competitors occupying this concept (if so, think points of difference)?
• Social and world conditions: Are there current events, attitudes or recent wounds from an issue that would rule out open acceptance of your point of difference? (Like after a big local oil spill, serving up a local seafood item may not be the best thing)
• Copycat protection: Can competitors easily copy or imitate your point of difference?
• Longevity: Will your differences be sustainable for a substantial period, get better with age, or quickly become irrelevant and out-of-style?
• Do your differences have the legs to carry the brand? Can it be leveraged by many communication vehicles? Like in social media, publicity and an ad campaign?

Great ways to Think Like The Odd Fish Restaurant
• Make up a word for a special dish
• Use different ingredients
• Dress your staff in unique uniforms
• Deliver something quicker
• Protect the earth while you are at it, design eco-food choices
• Add humor to the experience, the menu or even a presentation
• Package your take out food in an unexpected way
• Give something big away
• Offer an astonishing guarantee
• Gift often, food samples, random drink certificates
• Offer an exclusive event invitation
• Create a mascot
• Charge a lot more (this can be a great publicity idea)
• Reward loyalty with a unique gift
• Co-brand a promotion with a complimentary brand
• Leverage a metaphor in your food item names
• Rearrange something in your dining space, restrooms or the hostage stand that stirs up conversation
• Sacrifice something important without losing flavor (low-cal deserts)
• Break the rules
• Consider a deadline for your offer, book your next birthday
• Conduct an annual poll (build this on your social media site and make it about dinning)
• Super-size it
• Get nostalgic (turn back prices for a day)
• Exaggerate the size of a food item
• Simplify a process (start a surprise menu item, you decide for the customer)

Consumers are smothered with restaurant brand messages each and every day and now with online deals, their emails are full. If you want to make your customer’s choice easy, you’ve got to be truly distinctive and communicate those unique attributes at all touch points, all the time.

Think about your food, your environment and your communications. The possibilities are endless.

Jobs offered a stunning glimpse of what makes a business work. The restaurant industry – just like any other industry – would be wise to study his work, and to execute several of the lessons he passed along. Below are 10 lessons to take away from the life and work of Steve Jobs:

1. The customer-user experience trumps everything else. Jobs was famous for focusing on the details that made Apple products easy – and for many, necessary – to use. If there were any product-experience barriers, he had a full army of employees in place to help. Apple’s Genius Bar, where licensed and trained employees troubleshoot devices and answer questions, is a perfect example of putting the customer first. While some restaurant chains have made significant investments in their customer experience, others have much to learn. Restaurants should treat front-of-house and back-of-house efforts equally, and should subscribe to the mantra that made Jobs famous.

2. Keep the brand simple and contemporary. What often gets lost in the long list of Apple innovations is the company’s basic branding. When customers walk into a store, they aren’t overwhelmed by design clutter, which allows them to better focus on the products. This is purposeful. Apple hired experts from outside the tech industry to conceptualize an outside-of-the-box approach that portrayed simplicity. As numerous restaurant concepts undergo brand and store makeovers, perhaps they should pull-in the fresh perspectives of industry outsiders.

3. Get inspired by the small things. Speaking of outside-the-box approaches, before Jobs dropped out of college, he took a calligraphy course. He credits the class as part of the inspiration behind the creation of the Macintosh. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” he said. Don’t overlook the small things. For restaurants, afterthought details – the seating, lighting, background music, etc. – can all affect a customer’s intent to return.

4. Embrace technology. The restaurant industry is notorious for balking at technological investments and adoptions. Often the ROI doesn’t come quick enough, or the bandwidth to train staff and customers doesn’t exist. But Apple is the largest publicly traded company in the world for a reason. It’s what consumers want and know, and it’s time for restaurants to embrace it.

5. Innovate past failure. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1984 after the Mac fell short of expectations. Fortunately, that didn’t flatten his drive to keep innovating. From a restaurant comparison, even McDonald’s has rolled out abject failures. Remember the McLobster?

6. Anticipate trends. One of Jobs’ favorite quotes underscores his successful philosophy. “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love: ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ We’ve always tried to do that at Apple.” Nearly every iDevice was created by anticipating future trends, sometimes at the risk of another signature product. The iPhone was invented with a potential trump of the iPod because market demand was barreling toward mobile, for example. Would restaurants be willing to drop a signature item in anticipation of something new?

7. Business is more than the bottom line. Revenue, profits, same-store sales and happy investors are important, but there are more pieces to the puzzle and Jobs solved it. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me,” he said. Everywhere you look, restaurant brands are putting forth time and effort to causes from breast cancer research to fire safety awareness. And customers are responding with their loyalty.

8. No man or woman is an island. Steve Jobs didn’t conceive or grow Apple on his own; he surrounded himself with the right people. He had people like Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook and John Lasseter to help him. Just like Fred DeLuca got a boost from Dr. Peter Buck to come up with the Subway concept. David Edgerton and James McLamore worked together to turn a struggling unknown restaurant into Burger King. Ray Kroc didn’t think of the McDonald’s concept, he purchased the rights from brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald. Never underestimate the power of teamwork.

9. Employees reflect the brand. According to Darrel Suderman, Ph.D., founder of the Food Innovation Institute, Apple’s sales philosophy is not to “sell,” but rather to help customers with their problems and understand their needs. Employees aren’t rewarded with commission, but are expected to sell service packages along with their devices. Those who fall short of sales targets are re-trained. “It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led and how much you get it,” Jobs said. Is your employee training sufficient? Are your incentives?

10. Keep it in perspective. Jobs relentlessly demanded perfection and occasionally displayed a temper, while also walking around the office barefoot and subscribing to Buddhism. He was the poster child for striking a balance between detailed focus and big picture perspective. “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” Jobs said during his iconic commencement address at Stanford University in 2005. “You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

Alicia Kelso is editor of QSRweb.com.

So what’s changing? As we continue to make the shift from print to online, mobile and social media continue to provide tremendous opportunities. However, the industry is still not in the clear, as this past quarter also saw a number of layoffs and consolidations. Here are some key highlights from this past quarter’s research.

Newspapers:
23 launches, 16 being online sites, all of which are Patch.com sites.
27 closures, including Manhattan Media’s New York Press.
Seattle Post Globe, which launched online when the Seattle Post-Intelligence folded in 2009, also closed after only two years.
Many layoffs: at least 100 this quarter.

Magazines:
36 launches versus 24 closures.
10 of the launches were online magazines.
Popular magazine trends include home, parenting, lifestyle and business.

Television:
Stations consolidating broadcasters to work both weekends and weekdays.

Radio:
Radio still number one way people listen in cars, although iPods and satellite are on the rise.
Radio consolidations continue with Cumulus buying Citadel.

Nearly 300 Bisnow readers showed up for our Restaurant Development Summit last week at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill. Panelists covered everything from the hot new neighborhoods to the big food trends.

Transwestern SVP Bill Miller, Linda Roth Associates’ Linda Roth Conte, Matchbox Food Group partner Ty Neal, Janet Cam Consulting’s Janet Cam, Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington president Lynne Breaux, and Venga co-founder Winston Lord.

• Janet predicts dim sum is the next big thing. She calls it “the original small plate,” appealing to carnivore, pescatarian, and vegetarian alike.
• Ty is seeing more restaurants running a business around just one item, whether it’s cupcakes, empanadas, burgers, or hot dogs.
• Linda notes that many restaurant groups are taking farm-to-table one step further by actually purchasing the farm. (Just look at Neighborhood Restaurant Group, Clyde’s Restaurant Group, and Eatwell DC.)
• And Lynne points out that more and more eateries are going 24/7. She believes The Hamilton, an always-open restaurant and music venue coming later this year, is going to remake downtown into a 24 hour place.

Each month, more than 100 million people in the U.S. use a search engine every day to find the latest information about a wide range of topics that interest them. When they conduct a news search, they often find relevant press releases along with articles from thousands of news sources.

According to Neilsen/NetRatings, the unique audiences of Yahoo News and Google News now rival the online audiences of other current events and global news destinations such as CNN and BBC News. If your marketing and promotion strategy includes the Internet, your press releases should be optimized for and distributed to the major news search engines.

How does search engine promotion work?

Optimizing News Releases:

Benoit Marketing works through PRWeb to know your business and understand your target audiences, whether it’s journalists, consumers, business-to-business customers, or investors.

We conduct keyword research to find at least two relevant search terms that your target audiences are likely to use for a news search. We optimize your press release by adding relevant search terms to give it more staying power in the news search engines. We also build links from your press release to relevant content on your website.

Distributing Your News:

Your press release is distributed via opt-in email to more than 250,000 RSS subscriers, 30,000 web publisher’s and 35,000 journalists who have subscribed to receive news from PRWeb. Yahoo News, Google News and other news search engines pick up your press release. We also use paid inclusion to get it into major web portals such as Yahoo, AltaVista, AlltheWeb and more. Your press release is distributed through PRWeb’s syndicated network news feeds. It is also promoted via PRWeb’s blogging technology and news standards like XML, OPML, ATOM, RSS, and NewsML. Finally, your press release is archived indefinitely on PRWeb’s site, which gets over 2 million unique pages views a month.

Tracking Release Results:

As news search engine users and others find your release, we provide you with the data needed to measure results and refine subsequent press releases.

You will see how many people view and click on your headline, and read your release. SEO data includes which news search engine readers came from, what search terms they used, and more.

What are the benefits of using PRWeb to optimize your news release?

PRWeb’s search engine promotion service is very affordable and provides you with a number of exclusive features and competitive benefits, including:

Get high keyword ranking for up to 28 days in Google News, Yahoo! News, MSN News and other news search engines
Build relevant links that follow Google’s quality guidelines and Yahoo!’s anti-spam policy
Increase the number of visitors to your site from news search engines
Increase the number of prospects who give you their email address, fill out an online form, or buy something on your site
Generate publicity, sales and ultimately revenue

WashPost Restaurant web sites)081411

The short story is stay away from Flash (not good for search anyway) and music. Keep it simple; telling folks what they need to know, price, location, hours. Keep the experience for when they get to the restaurant.

Starting off with summer cocktails, we tasted the Frosted Pom

Summer Cocktails

We tasted the most amazing appetizer “Picnic” on the Potomac, which was a combination of four items: BBQ Ayrshire Farms Beef Brisket, Collard Greens with a vinegary finish, Corn Meal Fried Ayrshire Farms Chicken Thighs, Watermelon and Cucumber Mint Salad topped with Pickled Watermelon rind. This was just the right flavors to make you think “picnic” and the presentation was very nice, with the chicken on top of the watermelon and the dark brisket along the Collard Greens. A nice combination of sweet and savory.

The Entree was a Summer Cassoulet made with no butter; the broth

Summer Cassoulet

And then we finished with a completely homemade ‘frozen Cannoli’

Frozen Canelloni

Look for more great entrees, cocktails and desserts at Lansdowne Resort’s On the Potomac restaurant.

But first, I needed to ‘kick the tires’ so to speak. Make sure the owner was committed to our marketing efforts, determine if he had a budget and how much that would be, and would be interested in listening to new ideas and strategies. Also I needed to be sure the place was ‘legit’…is it really a luxury property (everyone thinks their property is a luxury property); what is the arrival experience; are the rates worth the product; is the product marketable; is the owner reputable. And so many other questions.

So the owner agrees to my visit, a due diligence trip. To get from Washington, DC to Belize City takes about five hours; from Belize City, I took a ‘puddle jumper, prop plan” to Dangriga. The client met me at the airport, which was like landing on my driveway, and we drove to the launch boat, a big white, metal ‘working’ boat, nothing fancy.

The owner/client had spent the last seven years developing the island and it’s beautiful. Very private, beautifully landscapes with bungalows decorated by local Beligean furniture and amenities and are air conditioned. The island is perfect for couples, honeymoons, a small group up to 6 and anyone who wants a private, “unwind, unplug” vacation. A guest would not be on the island with people they do not know. The pricing structure is set so guests have complete privacy. I feel this is difficult to sell, and I think the client is ‘leaving money on the table’. We are helping him develop a clearer, more concise pricing strategy.

So next…what’s the plan and what to wear on a business trip on a private island? Watch for my next blog to learn more about my private Belize Island experience.