Food is food, right?
Some would say that restaurants are the hardest business to keep alive, primarily because it's incredibly difficult to make your eatery be different than everyone else's.
That doesn't seem to be a problem for one Racine Wisconsin restaurant - Chubbies.
Chubbies has one thing that makes it very different than everyone else - they give huge servings.
For example, if you want a hamburger, instead of a quarter pounder, you get a Chubbies Burger - a massive pound of beef served up on a roll that's just under the size of a typical dinner plate.
Or, if you want a meatball bomber, you'd better be hungry, because it'll be about four times larger than the one you'll find at a typical eatery.
Not that hungry? Order a Chubbies Junior, and only get a half pound of meat...
Want fries with that? Plan on getting a plate with four times the fries that Mickey Dees will hand you.
Not a bad positioning for a restaurant in the state rumored to have the highest average weight in the nation.
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And a perfect place to take Ryan (who beats even me in the amount of food that he can consume in a sitting, even though we're both skinny as rails) for his farewell lunch.
He finished his.
I decided to bring my last quarter pound home for the next day's lunch.
We went at 2:00 PM. 5 tables were full.
Most places would be empty at that time.
They've been happily fattening up Wisconsiners now for 7 years and are a favorite stopping place for business lunches (nothing like a pound of red meat to make you drowsy enough to agree to almost anything in negotiations that afternoon!), family dinners, and teenage after-school snacks (followed by a full dinner in an hour, you know how teenagers are - I currently get to feed 3 every night!)
And this also gets them a 3/4 page article written about them in papers as far away as Milwaukee and Chicago about once a year.
What PR lessons can we learn from this?
1. If you want to succeed it's vital that you differentiate yourself.
If you look just like everyone else, people never notice you or quickly forget that you exist. Choose something and focus on that!
Chubbies chose big servings. Not everyone wants that, but those who do, love them.
Now think about this for a minute - you can get a triple burger at Burger King, which is probably 3/4ths of a pound. Do the big eaters out there know that? No.
Plus, Chubbies consumers gladly pay double to triple the amount for a pound of meat than Burger King can get out of their customers for 3/4ths of a pound. Not bad!
2. When you've got it, flaunt it.
Chubbies sign outside says "You'd better be hungry."
McDonald's says "Over 99 billion served." Who cares, I'm hungry.
Chubbies does well on their signage, but here's where Chubbies can learn a lesson.
They have a great picture hidden behind their cash register. It's a Chubbies Burger next to a McDonald's Quarter pounder.
It sort of looks like a picture of an NFL lineman standing next to me - a big difference!
I wanted to show you a picture - so I asked them for a flyer with that picture on it.
Nope, they don't have one.
Did they have anything with that picture?
No - just that one snapshot, but they said it was ok for me walk across the street and make a photocopy at the gas station. I did, but since it's black and white, you'll not get the full impact.
(By the way, this is one of the reasons why I live in Racine, not New York - she actually let me, a stranger, take her only copy of the picture across the street to make a photocopy!)
And as it turns out, they've had that picture for years, without ever doing anything with it.
The most powerful differentiations are those that you can show visibly. If people can see it, show it to them!
Get it, then flaunt it!
3. Make sure that you differentiate yourself in your story pitches too.
If all the reporter ever sees from you is a media release that looks like everyone else's, you'll get the same result as everyone else does.
Nothing.
That's why we preach
- Developing a relationship with the key reporters that cover your beat
- Teasing reporters with information - getting them to call by showing that there's something else, something very desirable for them when they call for more information
- Giving away story ideas about your competition and industry so that you become a resource for them
- Writing articles, tips and briefs yourself, to make their job easier
And much much more!
Here's a couple of resources to give you ideas and more information on how to do this:
Secrets of Perfect Pitching to Reporters
Creating Powerful Press Releases: 11 Steps To Creating Press Releases That Get Printed!
See you at Chubbies! I'll be the skinny one with 1/4th the burger still on my plate.
Posted May 19, 2004
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