Brand Tactics: Book Smart

Cookbooks can be a good marketing tool, but few chains have taken advantage.

By David Farkas, Senior Editor -- Chain Leader, 4/1/2003

Sales of cookbooks, perennial favorites, total more than $10 billion a year, and the figure is growing, book publishers say. Many food watchers believe consumers love to collect cookbooks, even if they rarely use them, and that home cooks want restaurant-quality recipes. So why aren’t more chains taking advantage of this opportunity?

The conspicuous lack of chain-related cookbooks makes some industry experts wince, as if a big marketing opportunity is being missed. “I’m surprised there aren’t more,” declares Christopher Muller, associate professor and interim director for the Center for Multi-Unit Restaurant Management at the University of Central Florida. “For example, why hasn’t the Hard Rock Cafe published one? They have such great expertise in retailing.”

An official at the Orlando, Fla.-based chain says it has produced a book, though it doesn’t contain recipes. “With a cookbook, we’d be one of several. But how many other chains can do books on memorabilia, which is one of our points of differentiation?” says Christopher Tomasso, vice president of marketing.

“The question isn’t whether a cookbook is a good idea; the question is whether it’s the right idea to build the brand, and good cases can be made for certain brands,” says marketing consultant Karen Brennan of Brandscapes, Columbus, Ohio.

Publishers agree. Workman Publishing, for example, has cranked out hundreds of successful cookbooks over the years, including the 1987 Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream & Dessert Cookbook. But that was the last time the New York firm hooked up with a chain. “It’s a case by case thing,” says Executive Editor Suzanne Rafer. Still, she adds, restaurant companies haven’t approached her. And she’s interested. “I can tell you, [a proposal from The Cheesecake Factory] would be seriously considered,” she says. An official at the Calabasas Hills, Calif.-based chain maintains its menu is too complex for a cookbook.

Not for Todd Wilbur, who has written the highly popular Top Secret Restaurant Recipes (Plume, 1997). Sales of that book rank higher than chain cookbooks on Amazon.com. The 322-page cookbook is a virtual instruction manual for making smash hits like Cheesecake Factory’s Avocado Egg Rolls, Chili’s Fajitas for Two and Hard Rock’s Filet Steak Sandwich. Publisher’s Weekly called the cookbook “a gold mine of information.”

Customer Request
Chevys realized that its own cookbook could be a gold mine. Customers had long been telling Chevys they wanted its made-from-scratch recipes, according to Bruce MacDiarmid, chief marketing officer of the Emeryville, Calif.-based chain. Chevys executives thought a cookbook would be a good way to share them. After looking through several cookbooks, MacDiarmid discovered that Ten Speed Press, a specialist in culinary arts books, was based a few miles away, in Berkeley. Food and Beverage Director Peter Serantoni reformulated the recipes for home cooks while an in-house graphic arts team designed the pages. Although Chevys’ contract required a guaranteed minimum of books sold, it wasn’t a hardship. “We didn’t have any concerns,” MacDiarmid recalls. “We’ve sold 80,000 cookbooks so far.” Chevys & Rio Bravo Fresh Mex Cookbook was released May 5, 2000.

Placating customer’s appetites wasn’t the only reason for the venture, by the way. “Doing the book dovetailed with our effort to get the message out that [our food is] made from scratch,” he explains.

Face Time
California Pizza Kitchen had much going for it when it decided to publish its first collection of recipes, The California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook (John Wiley & Sons, 1996). That is, it had the personalities of founders Larry Flax and Rick Rosenfield, former government lawyers who had already appeared in a nationally aired American Express commercial. “They were just chillin’ on the beach, talking about how they started this restaurant,” remembers New York-based food editor Justin Schwartz, who worked on the book. “They were real people, and we could put them on tour.”

Publishers inevitably insist on someone promoting the cookbook, preferably someone intimately connected to the chain. In the case of Chevys, it was Serantoni, a personable chef. The colorful co-founders and former owners of Ben & Jerry’s, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, were born promoters.

“You have to have a face, and that face has to be mediagenic and personable,” advises Rafer, “and willing to put in the time to get the book out there.”

Translation: doing a 15-city book tour, which often includes mind-numbing radio interviews and silly TV appearances. If that’s not bad enough, who’ll replace the “personality,” who ostensibly has an important job at the chain? Management at California Pizza Kitchen wasn’t worried about doing without its co-founders because then-owner PepsiCo had already installed one of its own as CEO. Flax and Rosenfield were free to do PR.

Senior managers at chains may not appeal to publishers, even if managers believe they have the right look and personality. Says Schwartz: “I got a few calls from chains after the CPK book came out, and if they told me the CEO or vice president of marketing was going to promote the book, I wouldn’t even talk to them. And if they didn’t have a real story, I wasn’t interested.”

Funny, but that was more or less the case with Buca di Beppo. Invented in the ’90s, the concept is about as Italian as Bennigan’s is Irish, but customers love the shtick nonetheless. That was enough to prompt Buca’s Italian-American CEO, Joe Micatrotto, into launching Into the Sauce (Tiger Oak Publications, 2002), which has sold about 20,000 copies since November. (December’s longshoreman’s strike held up delivery of thousands of the books over the holidays.)

Management’s own family history forms the basis of the cookbook. To wit: Micatrotto’s immigrant relatives from Campobasso once owned a popular Italian restaurant in Cleveland; Buca Inc. Corporate Chef Vittorio Renda hails from a food-obsessed family in Calabria. The recipes come from their families.

“[The book] is the story of my immigrant family coming to America and weaves in a lot of personal stuff about Vito and me,” explains Micatrotto, who with Renda promoted the book in 15 cities. “At its heart, this isn’t a cookbook. It’s a guide to being Italian.”

Time Taker
Many chains have a great story to tell, but they might be reluctant to do so once they discover how much time recipe testing and writing absorbs.

“The person who’s nominated within the company to head the cookbook project has to be amazingly available. After testing each recipe, I might have 20 questions to ask of the restaurant,” says Brigit Blinns, a Venice, Calif.-based cookbook writer and author of the forthcoming The Palm Cookbook, due out this September.

“That may be a problem because I really can’t ask anyone else in the organization,” adds Blinns, who spent five years on the project. She says it sometimes took management months to make decisions about what to include in the book.

And there are those who argue chains have no business publishing cookbooks, particularly young companies with little track record. “One lesson for chains in this challenging operating environment is to stick to your knitting,” declares analyst Allan Hickok of US Bancorp Piper Jaffray. “Everyone’s attention is best applied to what they value most—hanging on to traffic.”

No doubt that makes a good deal of sense to some restaurant companies. But others, like 142-unit CPK, which had only 65 restaurants when it published The California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook in 1996, say damn the torpedoes. “Cookbooks are a lot of work,” concedes CPK Senior Vice President of Marketing Sarah Goldsmith Grover. “But the rewards outweigh the workload by a landslide.” Indeed, CPK published a second one three years later.