Restaurants Don't Need Marketing – Ep. 7
ZilckSound. You're tuned in to ZilckSound, where business gets real, trends get broken down, and you walk away sharper than when you hit play. Brought to you by zilk.com. Practical news for the modern entrepreneur. Now here's your host, Rob Henley.
Rob:Welcome to ZilckSound. I'm Rob Henley. Thank you for joining us again for this podcast. We appreciate you tuning in each week. Tonight, we talk about restaurants and marketing.
Rob:Recently, one of my favorite series ended The Bear. Five seasons, a show that convinced millions of people to feel real anxiety about a restaurant they'll never eat at in a city most of them have never visited, run by people who don't exist. Go watch it. Some of the best television running right now. I watched the finale.
Rob:Like everyone else, I came away thinking about Carmi, about Sydney, about what the show was really about, which was never the food. But something else has been sitting with me, something that has nothing to do with the show and everything to do with what the show stands for. Here's the thing. Nobody on the bear ever talks about marketing. Nobody runs a Facebook ad.
Rob:Nobody optimizes a Google business profile. Nobody AB tests a subject line. Five seasons and there's no scene where Richie sits down and says we need to work on our local SEO. Quick pause. First official spoiler alert in the show.
Rob:Minor spoilers from here on. You've been warned. So let's continue. Nobody works the marketing angle. And yet inside the world of the show, the restaurant succeeds Michelin stars, lines around the block, a cultural object people care about.
Rob:You could say it's TV. Of course, they skip the boring parts. And you'd be right. But I think something else is happening. And if you've ever run a restaurant or worked in one or just loved one, you might already feel this.
Rob:And even if you've never said it out loud. Most of what we call restaurant marketing isn't marketing at all. It's a tax you pay for not having a reason to exist. There's a restaurant in my city that closed last year, not naming it. I ate there three times opening a year in near the end.
Rob:First visit, I remember thinking this is fine. Competent food, a room that looked like someone had done their homework on what a fine restaurant should look like. The menu had the right words in the right places, locally sourced, seasonal, handcrafted, built by someone who'd study this craft. Last visit, two months before it closed, half empty on a Friday. Food, still competent.
Rob:Menu still had the right words. Nothing had gone wrong exactly, but nothing had ever gone right either. The place had never become necessary to anyone. Here's what I noticed that last meal. They had an Instagram active, three posts a week, maybe less, professional photos, right hashtags, real investment, And not one post ever made me want to come back.
Rob:Because the posts were photos of the food, and the food was fine, and fine is not a reason to leave your house. The restaurant didn't fail because it was bad at marketing. It failed because it never answered the only question that matters. Why should anyone care that you exist? Marketing didn't fail them, and it's a bigger issue than that.
Rob:The issue is that they gave marketing nothing to work with. Now, the restaurant industry does have a marketing problem. Just not the one you think. There's an entire ecosystem telling owners be better at social, better at email, better at SEO, better at influencer partnerships, loyalty programs, SMS campaigns, branded hashtags, whatever the platform demands this quarter. And look, some of that works short term on the margin.
Rob:Now, if you already have something worth talking about, platforms help you say it louder. But here's what that ecosystem never says out loud. The restaurants that survive past year three, year five, year ten aren't the ones with the best Instagram strategy. They're the ones that gave people a reason to show up that had nothing to do with a post they saw. Every day owners trade tips on Reddit about Google Business Profile categories, whether TikTok's worth the effort.
Rob:I've read those threads. I'm not saying they don't matter. But most restaurant marketing is a tax you pay for being interchangeable. Serve an experience that could happen anywhere. Competent food, a well lit room, a menu that sounds like every other menu, and marketing won't save you.
Rob:It'll just cost you money while you wait for the math to catch up. The restaurants people remember didn't master the algorithm. They gave people a story. Here are two examples. Let me give you two.
Rob:One fictional, one very real. Same destination. On the bear, Karmi doesn't market the restaurant. He obsesses over it. The menu, the system, the culture in the kitchen, how the food tastes, how it feels to sit in that room.
Rob:Everything in service of making the thing itself so good, people can't stop talking about it. The show dramatizes it, the chaos, the yelling, the genius, that's television. But the principle underneath is real. There's a real chef who actually appears on the show, a very famous one. His name is Thomas Keller.
Rob:Thomas Keller didn't build the French laundry with better Facebook ads. He built it by deciding relentlessly for thirty years that one guest, one night, one table was the only thing that mattered. His philosophy stated plainly, a great meal isn't about the food and wine. A great meal is an emotional experience. That's not a slogan.
Rob:That's an operating principle. Operate that way and the marketing takes care of itself because everyone who eats there leaves with a story they'll tell for the rest of their life. The French Laundry doesn't need to convince you to come. It needs to be worthy of the trip and that's the deal. Now you might say, easy for Keller, Michelin stars, international reputation, thirty years of career.
Rob:What does that have to do with the independent spot on a side street trying to survive the next six months? And I get the instinct, but I think it gets the order wrong. Keller didn't start with the reputation. He started with the principle. The reputation followed.
Rob:The restaurant became a story. People told themselves about what food could mean, and then they told other people. That's not marketing. That's meaning. The restaurant industry treats marketing as a visibility problem.
Rob:If only more people knew we existed, if only we reached the right audience, if only the algorithm found us, the people will love us. I don't think it's visibility. I think most restaurants, not all, but most have never done the harder work of deciding what they're actually for. Not the cuisine, not the price point, not the neighborhood, what they're for. The French Laundry is for people who want a meal they'll remember on their deathbed.
Rob:Extreme, right? That's very specific, not for everyone. And that's the point. The bear in the show's fiction is for people who want to feel part of something still becoming itself. The mess, the brilliance, the family dysfunction, not bugs, the product, that place down the street with a line every Friday at 6PM.
Rob:Maybe it's for families who don't want to do dishes tonight or first dates that need to feel safe or people who just want the one pasta dish they've ordered for fifteen years made exactly the same way by someone who knows their name. None of that requires marketing. It requires clarity. That's the difference. And then the theory isn't the issue.
Rob:The issue is the weight. The weight of believing that if you just post more, spend more, optimize more, customers will come. And when they don't, you blame the marketing. But marketing was never the problem. You were asking it to create desire where none existed.
Rob:Marketing can amplify a story, but it cannot invent one for you. Here's what I'm really saying. And simpler than that and much harder. Restaurants that last understand something most business advice skips. Marketing isn't a function you bolt on after the business is built.
Rob:Marketing is what the business is, whether you're paying attention or not. Every mediocre experience that costs you a repeat guest, that's your marketing. Every conversation a server has at a table, marketing. The cleanliness of the bathroom. How the phone gets answered, the texture of the napkins, music at a volume that lets people talk.
Rob:Those ninety seconds after the check arrives, when someone forms an impression, they'll carry for years. All of it is marketing. And guess what? None of it happens in a Facebook ad or an Instagram reel. The restaurants that market well are just the ones that gave people a reason and let them do the rest.
Rob:So here's what I'd ask you. If you run a restaurant or any business, honestly, and you've been wondering why the marketing isn't working, stop asking about the marketing. Ask about the last time someone walked out of your place and said, I have to tell someone about this. Not that was good, not nice place, but I need another human being to experience what I just experienced. If you can't remember the last time that happened and you're being honest with yourself, the answer isn't more social posts or more carousels that nobody reads.
Rob:The answer is somewhere in the food, the room, the service, the feeling, somewhere in the experience itself. That's the only marketing channel that has ever actually worked 100% for sure. The next right move isn't a better ad strategy. It's making something worth telling a story about. It's showing how much you care about the little details.
Rob:Care applied to the right thing is the only marketing strategy that's ever survived the algorithm. Funny, right? Think about it. Finally, that's all I got tonight, guys. Thank you so much for listening.
Rob:If this landed, if it made you think about something you'd been outsourcing to a platform that was never gonna solve it, Let us know your thoughts on social media. I'm Rob Henley, and this is ZilckSound. See you in the next one.
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