BRAND LOYALTY
“Brand loyalty is dead. When times were good, you could go to a restaurant maybe four or five times, and if it screwed up, then you gave up. Now it screws up once and you give up, you go somewhere else. You want a guaranteed experience. That doesn’t mean that brands aren’t important – they are crucial, but you have to absolutely deliver on your brand promise, so there’s a much greater premium on excellence, value, new product news, and execution.”
– Malcolm Knapp (president, Malcolm M. Knapp, Inc.)

BRAND MANAGEMENT
“Brand loyalty is not dead, it’s just a lot harder to earn it because guests expect more. We’re fortunate in that our brands have built loyal followings. As a company, we focus on operations excellence and brand management excellence. No matter how great your marketing programs – whether you are a company with 1,800 locations or a smaller company – at the end of the day, the ability to deliver on your brand’s promise comes down to the level of execution by the employees in the restaurant. We’re a very values-based company committed to hiring the right people and to training and development. Our employees are our lifeblood. It’s our employees who determine whether we meet guest expectations, and who over the long term build loyalty to our brands.”
– JJ Buettgen (senior vp new business development, Darden Restaurants)

COMPETITION FOR THE DINING DOLLAR
”I think a real challenge to our industry is this steady drumbeat that started with Walmart and then Stouffers. You see these ads now about eating at home – instead of going out for breakfast, buy these five products, and you can have a breakfast for 87 cents a day instead of $5 a day. If people who have been going out to eat four times a week start going out three times a week, or people who have been going out once a week go out only once every other week, it could over time impact the industry. There’s nothing that takes the place of going out to eat, there just isn’t, no matter how terrific they try to make putting a pizza in the microwave sound. The experience is not the same, and this feels like a threat to our industry.”
– Dawn Sweeney (president/ceo, National Restaurant Association and NRA Educational Foundation)

MAINTAINING INTEGRITY
“Our restaurants have always operated at a very high level – a level we achieve through the discipline of what we do each day in all of our restaurants – and for this reason, the experience we offer has always been in high demand. Integrity has to do not only with the quality of the experience we give our guests, but also the quality of experience we provide to our team. That has always been very important to me – not only to have a great dining room, but to have a great kitchen and a great office, where people are truly happy to come to work; they’re comfortable in that work environment and they’re going to perform their jobs at the highest levels. We give everyone in all our restaurants the tools they need to execute according to the expectations of myself and our guests. It’s about spending money; it’s about making that dollar commitment to your restaurants. The experience of your team is as important as the experience of your guests.”
–Thomas Keller (chef, Thomas Keller Restaurant Group)