Question

Molly’s Home Cooking, a regional restaurant with locations in three small Southern towns, one of which is a college town, specializes in comfort foods and regional specialties. Two of the restaurants have been open for over five years. The Molly’s located in the college town opened in May 2018. The restaurants are either freestanding near other businesses or in a strip shopping/eating area. With a menu consisting of all fresh, cooked-to-order foods, Molly’s features different items daily and serves traditional Southern desserts. Some of the menu items include meatloaf, turkey cranberry salad, specialty sandwiches, salad options, barbecued beef, and fresh pecan pie. While open for lunch and dinner daily, Molly’s also offers breakfast, featuring homemade biscuits, on weekends. On the drink menu, customers will find tea, coffee, soda, and water. A couple of beers and wines are on the menu, but Molly’s does not want to be thought of as a bar. The restaurant also caters special events such as weddings and business lunches and sells boxed meals (barbecue) that feed four to six people for outdoor events such as tailgates.

Menu items are reasonably priced, but are more expensive than many fast food restaurants, while less expensive than most “sit down” restaurants. Each restaurant has the same setup, where customers place and pay for their orders at the front counter and then get glasses for drinks. They fill their own drinks and get their silverware and napkins at the back of the restaurant. Customers select their own tables and servers bring food to the table. If ordered, desserts are brought to the table at the end of the meal so that it may be served hot and with ice cream or whipped cream, if preferred. Customers may add desserts at the end of the meal and pay at the counter when finished eating. If customers prefer take-out orders, they may call in advance and pick up the order. Servers let them know how long it will take for the order to be ready.

Prior to opening a restaurant, the owners have a week of “test and training” days where they invite people from local communities for lunch or dinner. For example, they may offer local businesspeople a free lunch or invite owners from other surrounding businesses to bring their families. For the Molly’s in the college town, the owners and employees extended lunch invitations to several faculty, staff, and students and asked them each to invite a few guests. Molly’s wants to introduce members from each target market to the delicious foods on their menus. Not only does this strategy generate brand awareness, but it also creates word-of-mouth and positive public relations.

With regard to promotion, Molly’s Home Cooking, like many other small businesses, has a limited promotion budget. They use social media, primarily Facebook, where they promote daily specials. For the restaurant located in the college town (about a mile from campus), Molly’s placed an advertisement in the university’s student newspaper early in the fall semester. They also placed signs in front of the restaurant to attract visitors.

Molly’s has many repeat customers at each established restaurant. Those restaurants also attract consumers who are traveling or sightseeing in nearby areas. The newest Molly’s in the college town opened right before the majority of students went home for summer internships. Many faculty do not teach in the summer, so the town becomes very quiet during the summer months. Molly’s Home Cooking wants to increase awareness, get more repeat customers, and increase profits.

1. For Molly’s Home Cooking in the college town, what promotion strategies do you recommend to attract faculty, staff, and students from the university?

2. Without spending much on promotion or changing menu prices, how can Molly’s generate loyal customers in established markets and in the college town?

3. Other than running one ad in the student newspaper, Molly’s has the same setup, menus, prices, and promotion (Facebook page) in each market. Given that Molly’s has a very limited budget, should the restaurant change anything for different target markets (e.g., travelers, families, local businesses, college population)?

Answer 1

Mollys Home Cafe

Home Cafes have started to gain momentum over the past few years. There are quite a few reasons for that. conventional joints or hotels, always keep pre-prepared food for their daily menu to be active. for example, you have a restaurant catering Indian delicacies like tandoori chicken, chicken tikka, chicken paneer etc, the chicken would always be kept half-boiled ready to be added spices and flavours according to the order on the table.

However, with a home cafe, the food items would be prepared as per demand or there would be a daily menu set in place for the customers without change. So the customer who comes to the coffee shop knows what would be there in the menu instead of ala carte. A survey done with a sample of regular restaurant-goers resulted in one important finding which is that they get easily fed up of going to the same cuisine every day. The sample survey was done amidst a group of regular office/college-goers who depended on motels or restaurants for their two-day meal especially their breakfast and dinner. The reasons are because every restaurants or hotel have a code of preparation for their food on their menu. Or in other words, the menu items would be defined by some leading chefs with each ingredient in place to the last gram. Whoever comes and goes as kitchen staff has to follow the same menu that is already designed or in place and they are not allowed to improvise on their own.

However, in a home cafe environment, usually, the owners are involved in the day to day affairs of the joint. They also take part actively in the cooking process, where lot of improvisations happen from time to time. Let us understand with an example of a season. In hot summer, you cannot have a choice of your spicy dish since it will just add on to your perspiration and acidity. Instead, this type of cuisine will go during the autumn or winter season. A home cafe understands seasonal changes quite a bit and modifies their existing menu by increasing or decreasing the pre-defined flavours. So the end result of such improvisation is that people do not feel that they are eating the same food over and over again. In short, they feel more homely if the ambience also suits well on such occasion.

Molly follows exactly the same strategy in her advertisements but should give more importance to the points mentioned above. Campaigns through Facebook, inviting members of faculty and students from colleges for primary evaluation of a newly opened shop are all good for market entry. She can consider the following points along with the existing channel which is as follows.

1. Molly’s cafe serves fresh food every day with zero half-cooked food stored or processed at any point in time
2. Molly’s cafe will stop serving food for its customer once their purchased inventories for the day are over.
3. We understand the clients and make sure that bulk quantities are not prepared and stored expecting a demand.
4. They can have a campaign which says “Feel at home when you are work as we bring to you the homely taste”

They should also explore new markets as well. Understand the fact that such ventures will not gain big business by advertisements on banner or billboards or by celebrity endorsements like a restaurant. Molly’s cafe cannot think of having a celebrity who endorses for a brand lets say Grand Hyatt hotel. The strategy should be positive grapevine communication and existing customers endorsing the brand for newcomers. Always if you go to such home cafe’s and watch carefully, you will notice that a new customer will come in one day and if they like the food, they will bring their friends or colleagues along with them, next time they visit the same joint. This progress like a Fibonacci series if the tastes really good. Some of the areas they can focus would be

1. Homestays: Homestays are taking over business or leisure holidays for budget travellers. The success of Airbnb portal is a good indicator for this. Bigger business clusters, be it a college, IT parks or other institutions will all have such homestays within five kilometres periphery. Molly’s cafe should think of associating with such homestays for their daily food requirements which they could include inside the package of stay billed by them and paid later to Molly’s cafe
2. Meal Packs. There should be a sample survey conducted by the motel to understand where the maximum footfalls come from. This can be possible by a direct questionnaire (usually it requires manpower to have the information entered as most of the people will hesitate an entry during their meal times) or a dropbox to have their visiting cards dropped in. (Here again, everyone who comes may not have a visiting card). There are quite few methods to overcome. If you have a place identifier like a Pincode (case in India), you can install a touch screen system which just has a general scoring emoji and a text field to enter the pin code from which the customer has come. This survey can run over weeks to get a sample geographical area clustered. If they have such information, then they can think of a lunch package for them. For this either they can outsource this to food aggregators (cost will be a constraint) or they can have an inhouse facility like a food truck. If properly planned, lean months of a college can also be managed by extending the periphery of food truck delivery.
3. Social Events and Presentations: Being a Home Cafe, they should be aware of the social events that happen within the college. You have a welcome event, thanksgiving events or send-off event in every college. Snack counter should be operated by them by offering homemade snacks. Even bigger Eatery joints are now offering snacks at these venues which they don’t usually do in their space or restaurants. Such get-togethers can have a great impact as it offers Molly’s cafe free advertisement about their existence and the unique homely taste it can offer. They can even narrow down their deliverable to just a welcome drink which should be unique in their taste. One of the unique blends of taste for example that is seen recently is a doughnut house along with a barbeque restaurant. Their caption is “we are there from 12 to 12 to offer you the best meat and the best sweet”
4. Sponsoring a noble cause: sometimes, colleges come out with a cleaning campaign week where the students do a cleaning on the college compounds. Molly’s cafe can think of offering free bites and lets say drinking water (both branded or co-branded) to reach a larger crowd.
5. Molly’s cafe can also think of a business lounge in one of their joints with larger revenues. They already have good taste in place. There are other international coffee shops which cater meeting place or a family get together space with a rich blend of coffee. Discussions and meetings are quite often in colleges, if they have such a space with small meeting rooms and let’s say an OHP or a projector, it can attract more crowd to those premises.

Proactive strategies are required for such home cafe’s since larger brands are also thinking of entering this space. For a larger brand, their strategy would be to increase the volume of business they do and not on the profits but they can kill smaller players in the region if proactive strategies are not done. This is because a larger brand may try to cater a larger segment or territory whereas a small home cafe knows the pulse of the local market and business and they can strategize an easy entry to colleges or institutions of similar nature.