🍽️ Why go experiential?
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. ‘The Podcast Guy’ saving you 10 hours a week.
Ready for the 64th edition of Podup? Enjoy the best bits from Business Breakdowns.
Restoration Hardware (RH) is a luxury furniture brand. So why did they open a restaurant in 2016? As peculiar as that sounds, this move resulted in a powerful synergy and a beautiful business.
Dining amidst luxury
RH had the problem of high margin, low frequency goods. They coupled this with something high frequency to drive foot traffic and stay top of mind.
You go to a restaurant much more often than you buy furniture.
When you walk into their restaurant, you see all of their furniture. People not only like the food but it’s such a cool space to be in.
And it turns out the restaurant itself is a profit centre. The RH restaurant in New York does $10 million a year, making it one of the highest grossing restaurants in the country.
Drew Cohen
Experiences > ads
BMW blanket the consumer with a lot of ads so that in the short window when you’re considering buying a car, they’re top of mind. This is obviously very expensive to do.
RH solves this problem by launching another service to drive awareness.
They prefer to do more untraditional things and see if they work. They’ve tried an RH concert and an art gallery.
The restaurants are the most successful. They drive 4 to 5 times the foot traffic that they’d typically see.
Drew Cohen
Why it matters
The more Google embeds Bard into search, the more challenging it will be to track ROI on organic search and paid ads. You need to start exploring more innovative, albeit harder to track, channels to diversify away from SEO and SEM.
Experiential marketing isn’t suitable for everyone, but it provokes creative thinking. RH's restaurants serve as a lead gen tool for their luxury furniture. They’ve proven it’s possible to build a unique customer experience and be profitable at the same time.
Next steps
Experiential marketing forces you to think outside the box. Here are some high-risk, high-reward ideas to get your gears turning:
Create immersive experiences. Like RH, you can create a physical experience for your customers that complements your product. If you sell cooking supplies, run a pop-up cooking class or host a tasting event featuring dishes made using your products.
Partner with unlikely brands. Collaborating with a brand outside of your industry can seem risky, but it can also tap into a whole new audience. If you run a health food brand, partner with a fitness app to create a holistic wellness program.
Go big with guerrilla marketing. Organize a surprise public event or stunt that promotes your product in an unforgettable way. This is difficult to pull off, but a successful event can earn media coverage and social virality.
Use this as inspiration. Take a long walk and think of creative ways you can engage with your customers.
Your thoughts?
Thanks Nudge Podcast for making this post possible…
Behavioral science is only for marketers, right?
WRONG. Human psychology impacts everyone in the workplace.
From staying motivated to improving your memory, Nudge has it all.
No wonder Nudge is the 3rd most popular business podcast among Podup readers.
So why not subscribe and get an MBA’s worth of insight every week?
P.S. Phill is one of the nicest guys in podcasting. If you don’t want to subscribe, you’d make his day if you left a quick review.
Quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Sentences were left out to make the narrative more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast.