Retailers have Xmas, restaurants have the NCAA

With the match-ups set, teams from coast to coast are braced for the tip-off that officially starts March Madness. Some even play basketball.

Far, far more are restaurant staffs braced for what was once merely the NCAA playoffs, the rapid-fire series of elimination games that determines the nation’s best college basketball team. Today, the multi-week stretch clearly reigns along with Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and New Year’s Eve as one of the restaurant industry’s biggest promotional opportunities.

The big chains try to squeeze traffic out of the contest through tie-ins that extend far beyond traditional advertising. Papa John’s, for instance, is the official sponsor of the official March Madness bracket, the schematic that traces who wins or loses at each level of elimination, on Facebook. Arby’s announced a sandwich giveaway that kicks in only if one of the lesser-ranked NCAA contestants should beat a top seed in the first round of games.

Taco Bell has one of the stronger connections. The Taco Bell Arena in Boise, Idaho, is hosting the first series of games.

Raising Cane’s, the chicken-finger specialist, is using the NCAA Tournament as a touchstone for its first-ever targeted marketing campaign. The effort plays off dunking—in its case, the type that involves sauce and chicken-finger-dipping. Fans who want a quick party meal are encouraged to take home one of the 80-unit chain’s Tailgate ready-to-serve platters.

The chains try to connect their brand name to the high-profile tourney. But countless independents and small multi-units use the event as a direct source of business, encouraging fans to watch the games in their booths and bar stools. The Berghoff, a landmark restaurant in Chicago, will be offering $3 “Bar Bites,” free raffle tickets, and beer and bourbon tastings between 2 and 7 p.m. everyday for the next 16 days.

Restaurants in Annapolis, Md., are joining forces in a March Madness-meets-Restaurant-Week sort of promotion, which in turn is tied into a larger sales push by the Annapolis Business Association. For a three-day stretch starting March 27, local merchants will conduct a sidewalk clearance sale, while their foodservice colleagues offer food and drink specials. The intent is to pull residents downtown, where one spouse can shop while the other warms a bar stool, yells at the TV screen, and has a beer.

With the increased reliance on March Madness as a key promotional opportunity has come stepped-up risk as well. Buffalo Wild Wings has warned investors when Ohio State was eliminated early from the tournament. The chain’s units in Ohio are popular places to watch the Buckeyes, and if they’re out of it, who cares how Michigan State might be doing? The fans stay home. (OSU is ranked third in its division this year.)

The rules of promotion are also being formalized. Establishments in Kansas City are reportedly being warned of a crackdown by NCAA enforcers on the unlicensed use of the athletic association’s patented trademarks, including March Madness, the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.

It's not exactly a key concern for my alma mater, New York University. Once again our team, the fierce-sounding Violets, have yet to be invited to the dance.

The tournament begins Thursday.

Memo to Domino's: Think AIG, dammit

Domino’s has been hooking its marketing efforts to high-profile developments in Washington, like Obama’s appointment of a cabinet (the pizza chain now has a Secretary of Taste) or the bank bailout (today it launched the Big Taste Bailout, a promotion of $5 pizzas and sandwiches). But it’s squandering an opportunity by not jumping on the obvious take-off: The AIG Bonus Package.

“A deal so good they’ll try to overturn it,” the voice-over would explain. “No matter how badly you’ve screwed up, you deserve a payout for the ages. Now, at Domino’s, a soda’s only $1.65 for the first million served—or until the government stops us.”

Think I’ll send it off to Domino’s CEO David Brandon. There could be a free pizza in this for me.

Blue Sage gives patrons final say in pricing

Coming from a restaurant family, Chris Dussin presumably knows all the tricks for pulling first-time customers into a place. But the one he started using last week at The Dussin Group’s two Blue Sage Cafes in Portland, Ore., is probably a first for the son of Old Spaghetti Factory founder Gus Dussin. Indeed, the ploy is novel enough to snag headlines in several local media outlets, helping to achieve the desired end without a separate outlay for marketing or public relations.

Not that the technique is unkonwn. At least one restaurant in the United States has similarly let patrons set the price of what they’re served. The approach has more recently snagged publicity for restaurants in Toronto and the United Kingdom. It may be a matter of time until places embrace the name-your-price tactic as a standard promotional device for the Great Recession, similar to product giveaways in fast-food or the bundling that’s now widely evident in casual dining.

Dussin’s approach has a little more structure than some of the early pay-what-you-want incarnations. In at least a few of those pioneering efforts, patrons were asked after eating to fork over whatever they felt the meal was worth.

Dussin provides guests with what amounts to a manufacturer’s suggested retail price for food items. Customers are presented after the meal with a tab listing the prices of what they ordered. They in effect decide whether that price was worth it. If not, they counter with their final offer. Dussin told OregonLive.com that some guests had indeed penciled in a zero for their charge, but that others had volunteered to pay more than the listed price.

The Your Price is Right promo is scheduled to run at the two casual restaurants until early next month.

The Dussin Group also operates the Old Spaghetti Warehouse chain and another full-service concept called Fenouil.

Obama set to encourage restaurant lending

I’ve slipped on my thick plastic glasses with the tape on the nosepiece because it’s Geek Time. With the possible exception of insurance policies and nuns—wait, scratch nuns—nothing is less sexy than the Small Business Administration and its loans process. Tax forms read like porn in comparison.

Yet the White House is expected to make an announcement today about the SBA that’s of crucial importance to restaurants, and that needs to be noted. Press reports that hit in a flurry yesterday say President Obama will channel some $375 million from the stimulus spending kitty into the SBA’s loan program, a pipeline regularly used by restaurant franchisees. Indeed, the restaurant business is reportedly the most frequent user of SBA loans, which are channeled to small enterprises through designated local banks.

In the world of grassroots restaurant financing, this is hot. Angelina Jolie hot.

Lending to small businesses would also be helped by the infusion of $10 billion in stimulus funds into the secondary credit market. The planned injection is intended to encourage the flow of capital to small businesses by increasing lenders’ confidence they can sell the loans on the so-called secondary market, thereby turning that deal into cash they can then use to make another loan.

Unfreezing capital for restaurant expansion or renovation would be a tremendous boon to the industry. Obama appears to have a blowtorch in one hand, the match in the other.

Germ Fighter in Chief

It was probably just an innocent oversight. “The United States is one of the safest places in the world to buy groceries at a supermarket or pills at a drugstore,” President Obama observed during his weekly radio address this morning. And meals from restaurants, an option apparently appreciated by our Consumer in Chief? Why wasn’t that thrown in there? Did his speechwriters get burned in the Quiznos giveaway fiasco and now harbor a grudge?

It may be an academic point. The President used his address to announce the formation of a Cabinet-level task force, the Food safety Working Group, to hammer out ways of better safeguarding our food supply. Presumably our whole food supply, including that branch of the pipeline that ends on a restaurant plate or sandwich wrapper.

Given how many things must be starred on Obama’s to-do list, the inclusion of “Improve food safety” underscores just how off-kilter the food protection system has been knocked. It should also stop the industry’s grousing that the party it traditionally favors isn’t sitting in that big cornerless office on Pennsylvania Avenue. Coming on the eve of what food safety specialists know as E. coli Season, the efforts by a Democratic White House can only be a good thing for a business that makes its money by selling food.

Best of all, the Administration is spending $1 billion on an upgrade of food-safety labs and the hiring of more Food & Drug Administration inspectors. It’s the additional funding that all stakeholders, from consumer advocates to food manufacturers to trade associations, have cited as critical to reinvigorating a withered FDA. The only party that seemed to disagree was the one previously occupying the West Wing.

More funding is still needed to help local jurisdictions hire sanitation inspectors, the individuals who visit restaurants to ensure they’re helping themselves in averting food-borne illness. Some towns have cut back or altogether eliminated those frontline watchdogs because of forced cutbacks.

Seems to me the industry has never had a better chance of making sure those grass-roots safeguards are in place.

Diet group vows to go gut-to-gut with fast food

An advocacy group called Corporate Accountability International sent letters today to the Big Four U.S. fast-food companies, basically telling them, “You’re mine, bitch.” As a simultaneous press announcement explained, the group is commencing a war to secure such concessions as having McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s/Arby’s and Yum! Brands pick up the health-care expenses for diet-related illnesses.

The Boston-based organization has targeted those companies and their nine chains, but its mission extends to the whole fast-food sector. For instance, it wants to stop fast-food advertising and promotions aimed at minors. It’s also calling on the business to “not interfere” in efforts to ban or limit fast-food sales.

“The campaign aims to stem the global tide of diet-related disease, in which fast food giants are playing a central role,” states the press release.

The 32-year-old CAI claims it’s been successful in curbing past abuses by corporate giants (and foodservice industry vendors) like Nestle and General Electric. Tobacco and bottled water, a major product line of Nestle, seem like particular areas of pressure.

The text of the letters was not disclosed, so it’s unclear if the tone was cordial, demanding or out-and-out threatening. I’m putting my money on the latter. Check out the group’s special industry-related website to find out why.

Bourbon burgers further blur the lines

Be careful where you stand in today's restaurant market, because the ground appears to be melting. Turf that once defined a segment is oozing into other realms, blurring consumers' perceptions of where they can get a certain product and what they'll likely pay. That's good news if you're a fast-food concept catching consumers on the way down, but more reason to whine and thump your chest if casual dining is the ground you've homesteaded. Witness, for instance, the advent this week of fast-food whiskey--available just as a flavoring at this point.

Ribs or burgers flavored with bourbon or Jack Daniels were once the signatures of casual dining. Indeed, T.G.I. Friday's Jack Daniels grill menu was undoubtedly one of the most successful undertakings of its time.

But as of today you can get a Kentucky Bourbon Burger at Carl's Jr. Yesterday, Burger King unveiled its Bourbon Whopper, one of the new sandwiches showcased at the chain's new Whopper Bar, itself a deliberate encroachment on casual dining's turf.

I don't have the prices of the new burgers, but presumably they're a significant step down from the charge on casual dining menus. It's Carl's Six Dollar Burger mentality, carried to the next logical product.

Then again, turnaround is fair play. One of casual dining's big successes in recent years has been the introduction of sliders, the little burgers that were once a mainstay of the quick-service sector. Now the big fast-food chains like Burger King, Jack in the Box and McDonald's are copying the casual dining specialists who copycatted fast-food brethren like White Castle and Krystal, the originators of sliders.

Similarly, casual dining made a grab for traditional quick-service turf when it moved chain by chain into the take-out market, cleverly differentiated from the fast-food variety by the name "curbside takeaway."

Ironically, if the industry was smart, it'd stop stealing ideas in-house and try to, um, catch some inspiration from today's true foodservice successes, the supermarket/takeout shop hybrids like Tesco's Fresh & Easy and Walmart's Marketside. They've hit on some Harry Potter formulas that could make life extremely difficult for restaurants, regardless of whether they're competing on price, convenience or even quality. They're the innovators whose ideas should be plundered--er, complimented, I meant to say, as in imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.