Today’s Marketing Daily offered some insight with regard to challenges facing the restaurant business. It cites NPD research suggesting that while the recession has hit the restaurant business hard, there are other factors impacting out-of-home dining. In addition to customers who are brown-bagging and dining at home with greater frequency, cultural and generational changes were underway that began long before the economic downturn. Click here to read the summary.
Update: Here's a link directly to the Harris briefing.
Implications: In some categories and companies, the economic downturn was not so much a message, but a messenger. Rather than creating a new set of problems, the great recession served to reveal, aggravate or amplify challenges that already existed.
This is another story crediting social and generational shifts for fundamental changes to a category. Among other factors, the formerly reliable restaurant customer is now growing older and dining away from home less frequently, and their younger counterparts not as likely to make restaurant dining a natural part of their week.
It might be time for the restaurant owner/manager to re-examine the motives that lead to an out-of-home dining occasion. Family bonding time? Special occasions? Social networking face-to-face? Convenience? Flavor? An experience that is difficult or impossible to cook-up at home? Certainly, each successful organization will have found and served those benefits which their customers most enthusiastically want.
Mike Anderson
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