Lane Cardwell

Creatures of Habit

By anyone's count there are a lot of restaurants in the U.S. If you are the National Restaurant Association you put that count at 945,000 restaurants and foodservice outlets. So many restaurants, so little time. Or is that really the case? Amazingly, the average person goes to very few restaurants on a regular basis. How few? By some reports, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of published data on the topic, the number ranges from 6-10. We seem to be, more than we care to admit, creatures of habit.

Every customer goes to many more restaurants than 6-10 over the course of the year. A restaurant opens in our neighborhood, or a restaurant in the city gets a great review, and we go try it. Do we go back again and again, and make it a regular part of our routine? Usually not. People try to make order out of disorder. 945,000 places to eat represents a lot of disorder. To keep from going crazy we repeat what works for us. When it no longer works we replace it with something that does work.

The battle that we face in the restaurant industry is to become, and remain, one of the 6-10 restaurants that our customers visit on a regular basis.

I know what you are thinking. "I go to a lot more restaurants than 6-10. I probably go to 6-10 in an average week." But how many of these do you go to over and over? Not the ones that you tried and never went back to, even though you enjoyed them. Not the ones that you go to on every anniversary to celebrate. Not the ones that you went to with friends and never went back. Not the ones that you went to two, three, even four times in a short period, and then for some hard to figure reason, never returned again.

Think about all of the restaurants that are within a two mile radius of where you live.  These are the restaurants that you see every day. You drive past them without even noticing most of them. You may have lived for years in your current residence and only tried a fraction of the restaurants around you. But once again, how many of the ones that you have tried do you go back to at least once every 1-2 months?

Outside of our 6-10 restaurants, we save a percentage of our restaurant visits for trial and experimentation. If you are in the industry, this might be a high percentage of your total visits. For others, it might be a very low percentage. But when you strip out these trial visits, you are left with routine.

What makes up this 6-10? Lunch places that we visit on a recurring basis when working. Dinner places that solve certain problems. Quick, close, cheap, and good are high on most people's list when solving a problem of where to eat. Do you have kids? This will skew your selections in a certain direction. Do you like to unwind over a meal with friends or a spouse? This moves you in a different direction. But at the end of the day, and I invite you to do this, when you add up the places that you go to over and over and over again, the number will usually be less than 10.

I spent the day recently with Arjun Sen, the founder of the Restaurant Marketing Group, and his team. Of course we talked about restaurants. I mentioned this phenomenon to Arjun and expected to get the usual surprised look about the topic. Not this time. "Eight" was the answer I got. Apparently during Arjun's time as chief marketing officer for Papa John's they had researched the issue and determined that eight was the norm for most people.

What does that mean for those of us in the industry? For one thing, once we have a regular customer, it is hard to lose them. It also means that it is hard to acquire a regular customer. Let's say that you own a Mexican restaurant. Most likely, for you to develop a new regular customer, some other restaurant, most likely Mexican, just lost a regular customer. You just don't keep adding restaurants to your regular list. You prune. There may be a transition period where you are alternating between both places, but when it is over you will either keep going to your old favorite, or start going to your new favorite.

Let me close by stating what I hope has become obvious during this discussion. The economy today is causing customers to scrutinize their spending in a number of industries. Ours especially. If we lose a regular customer during this period because of price value or quality concerns, we have probably lost them for good. You can't expect people to pick back up where they left off when the economy gets better. Why? They have developed a new list of 6-10 and will continue to visit them on a regular basis until one of them disappoints and new tryouts are held. After all, we are all just creatures of habit.

Posted by Lane Cardwell on November 23, 2008 | Comments (7)