Wouldn’t it be great if you could read your customers’ minds—just a little?  On top of offering restaurant owners fine restaurant equipment found at Serv-U (like Frymaster fryers, Garland ranges, Ice-O-Matic ice machines, Scotsman ice machines, and more), the folks over at Enodis can also offer some insight into restaurant customer trends for the year to come.  They sponsored an extensive study about the habits of today’s eaters and their entire PowerPoint report can be found at the Enodis web site's technology center.

In summary, Technomic Information Services breaks these consumer trends down into two groups: behavioral and demographic.

The four main behavior trends they cite are:

1. convenience
2. balance
3. customization
4. social consciousness

 The three demographic trends are:

1. multi-generational demands
2. the minority influence
3. diverging incomes

For each trend, the researchers over at TIS offer specific suggestions for finding a good middle ground between pleasing customers and running a profitable restaurant.

I thought their assessment of the importance of technology, especially, was spot-on.  The study notes that nearly 3 out of 4 consumers go online to find information about restaurants and more than half of those people use search engines like Google and Yahoo.  (Just a week ago, my little sister used the web to decide where I should take her out to dinner; too bad the site had posted incorrect hours of operation!  It’s important to keep your restaurant's website current for good search engine rankings and customer confidence.)

Most consumers decide where to eat out within two hours before eating and for many people, this is while they are still at work.  The most likely conduit to reaching people who are at work is through the Internet; marketing isn’t just about branding and signage around town anymore, but also about getting your name out around cyberspace.

Getting people in the door has a lot to do with marketing, but keeping them coming back for more is a restaurateur’s ultimate goal.  In the Enodis report, some suggestions for customer retention had to do with ambience and price.  For a testament to Serv-U’s pricing, read a few of our customer reviews.  For ambience, check out photos of the turnkey work we do on our Flickr account.  If you like what you see, chat with us, email us, or call and we’ll help you get started on that project you’ve had in mind.