2008 - 3 years after my biggest disappointment. I knew I wanted to go into psychology 5 years before college. I read Charaktery magazine, books by Tomasz Witkowski, Cialdini and everything related to human interaction. I did some research in Warsaw, Szczecin, Wroclaw and even London. SWPS seemed to be the best university in terms of psychology. Unfortunately, I soon realised that I didn't find myself at the university. The lecturers taught about the human absorption of knowledge, most effectively with the 5 senses from the black and white slides they read. The 'business psychology' lecturers were professors who had little to do with real entrepreneurship. I was totally disappointed. This was reflected in my grades, as I was barely passing year after year. At the same time, I was working as a financial advisor, and I was much more focused on that than my studies, which bored me. I really wanted to be very good at something - the best - and I already knew that psychology was
not going to be it.
Once upon a time, in my third year at university, I found myself in an optional course taught by Maciej Misztak, head of marketing for a pharmaceutical company. I particularly remember the class to which he invited Tom Bartnik, then managing director of a large international advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi. They introduced a lot of concepts that I did not understand at all at the time: "strategy", "creation", "account department", but I still remember the story of the launch of the Heyah brand (a once famous mobile virtual network). I listened with rapt attention, the subject was so different from all the theoretical ones I had been taught before. What I was learning was tangible and something I could see every day on the street. It was then that I decided to focus on advertising and marketing - at that time I did not know the difference between the two.
Similar to what I did with psychology 8 years ago, I bought all the books on advertising and marketing: Kotler's Marketing, Juicy Brand, Like an Orange, Whisper Marketing, Brief magazine. I even read about marketing for the public sector. I started a blog to share my knowledge and to test what I was learning - in practice. A small breakthrough for me was when I placed an ad in Google Ads on the names of famous bloggers directing to my blog. These were provided by Maciej Budzich and Natalia Hatalska from Mediafun. Eventually, my efforts began to bear fruit - I was offered a job as an intern at Ogilvy, an international agency.
Raptly, I was fired after two months for posting the job as "Junior Account Manager" instead of "Intern" on Facebook.
It wasn't long before I was working in property marketing. I wanted to be the best, so I would do anything to learn from the best. In 2011, I spent PLN 8,000, all my savings plus a grant from my mother, to go to the advertising industry's Oscars - Cannes Lions - for a week. Living for a week on a protein diet, McDonald's cheeseburgers for €5 each and pure excitement, I recorded interviews with ad creatives, ad campaigns and tried my hand at being a video blogger (now we would say YouTuber). The Tesco campaign was groundbreaking at the time.
When my contract with P&G was not renewed after my internship, I decided it was time to try something on my own. I toyed with the idea for a long time, calculating the costs and possible income on a piece of paper. On Valentine's Day 2012, I opened my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu club. Then there was a sportswear brand based on characters from the Dragon Ball Z anime, a marketplace for extreme sports equipment and, finally, diet catering. I had theoretical knowledge from books and conferences, from working full-time and from my own experience of running businesses. I also had a bankruptcy and debts of PLN 100,000 behind me, which I managed to pay off in full after several years of stress. At that time I said to myself: "Never again". I worked a lot, but it brought no tangible benefits. I knew there must be a pattern, a correlation, as to why some companies make money and others lose money. What you will learn in the following article is just a collection of these correlations that I have developed by testing them on myself.
Schemes are necessary because they allow us to organise our thinking and our work. We cannot do everything at once. Just as when you build a house you start with an architect, when you organise a business you need to start with a structure. Marketing is nothing more than the organisation of a business. It literally means "to reach the market". Since the purpose of a company's existence is to meet a market need, it includes all the activities that describe how a company should operate. A simple scheme that suits me and allows me to better organise my thinking is the 4Ps:
1. Product
Menu: An assortment of food and beverages offered in a catering establishment. May include different cuisines, special dishes, desserts, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
Appearance and presentation: how the food is presented to the customer, the aesthetics of the plates, the way it is served.
Variety: the range and variety of options available, such as meat dishes, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free.
Additional services: additional options such as catering, delivery, online reservations, special culinary events.
2. Price
Pricing strategy: The way products and services are priced, e.g. premium, mid-range, low-end pricing strategy.
Price promotions: Temporary price reductions, special offers, happy hours, promotional sets.
Discount coupons and rebates: Coupons, loyalty cards, seasonal or occasional discounts.
Price elasticity: How prices can change depending on the time of day, day of the week, season or demand.
3. Place
Location: The location of the restaurant, its accessibility and attractiveness to customers.
Channels of distribution: The different ways in which products are delivered to customers, such as eat-in, take-out, home delivery.
Logistics: The process of managing deliveries, storage of ingredients, delivery time to the customer.
Availability: Opening hours, number of seats available, ability to book tables.
4. Promotion
Advertising: Advertising campaigns in traditional media (TV, radio, press) and digital media (social media, Google Ads).
Public Relations: Building a positive image through media relations, participation in local events, sponsorship.
Direct marketing: Direct communication with customers, e.g. newsletters, SMS, emails.
Sales promotions: Hold special events, competitions, tastings, give away samples.
Feedback and reviews: Managing and utilising customer reviews on review platforms, social media.
On the internet, in books or in conversations with friends, you've probably come across various truths that have some truth to them, but don't quite reflect reality:
Product - cooking is an art, it is the chef's touch that counts.
Price - if you want to increase sales, you have to reduce prices.
Place - location is everything.
Promotion - a good product will defend itself.
And here is how I see each of these elements and why I disagree with these myths:
The product is an answer to a need. The need is not: "to eat something". A need can be:
Try new flavours - casual dining,
Impress your partner on a date - fine dining,
Spend time in a pleasant atmosphere - cafés,
Satisfy hunger quickly - kebabs, fast food, staff canteen,
Nourish the body - healthy food.
Therefore, the product must be repeatable. When I think of McDonalds, I know I will get the same burger, coke and fries every time. When I think of fast food, I know exactly what kind of experience I will get. Humans hate unpredictability. Does that mean the menu should not change? Not at all, McDonald's also has fixed and seasonal offers. The Lumberjack sandwich, which is only available for a limited time, is so popular that it has entered the language as a synonym for something iconic, unusual and expected. My advice: don't overestimate the quality of the food. I have learnt in diet catering that what seems absolutely phenomenal to me is not so to customers. What's more, there are plenty of companies whose food seems average or even inedible, and their sales are growing.
Price - "expensive" means giving little value for the price we have to pay. This is important - the value we, the consumer, perceive, not the seller. I may not want to pay for organic vegetables if they taste exactly the same. On the other hand, people who don't want to consume zoonotic products pay extra for plant-based coffee drinks or meat alternatives, and no one seems to make a problem of it. Is PLN 10,000 a lot or not? It depends what it's for. For shoes? A lot. For a square metre of flat in Warsaw? Not a lot. For a square metre of flat in Gorzow Wielkopolski? A lot.
Stanley thermos flasks cost 50-100% more than regular ones and are a hit on social media. Why is that? Their perceived usefulness is much higher than that of competing products.
iPhones are the most expensive in the world and also the best-selling in the world.
For this reason, customers will be more willing to pay more for "an evening of authentic Uruguayan sushi by Master Keryoshi accompanied by Bengali rumba dancers and a tasting of Honduran shaman's brew" - a unique product - than for "just sushi" - an easily comparable product of which there are dozens, if not hundreds.
Places. It's probably not the best idea to open a fine dining restaurant in a tunnel under a railway station, but location is not counterintuitive. Matching distribution to location is. We have 4 basic distribution models:
Dine-in restaurant
Food to go
Instant Delivery - delivery via marketplace
Planned Delivery - event or diet catering
The distribution method forces the scalability of the restaurant concept. By scalability, I mean the number of customers that can be served in relation to fixed costs, including the size of the premises.
The least scalable is a non takeaway and delivery type restaurant (such as fine dining), where we are directly limited by the amount of space in the premises.
In second place is instant delivery. The limitation is the capacity of the courier and how many customers they can handle in an hour.
Thirdly, we have take-away, such as a bakery or patisserie, where customers come to buy baked goods. They can serve dozens of customers per hour in a relatively small space.
The most scalable will be event and diet caterers. The former are able to cater events for thousands of people, while the latter cook thousands, tens of thousands and the largest even hundreds of thousands of meals a day and distribute them across the country every day.
Promotion. It won't do anything by itself, and it certainly won't promote the product. The winner will always be the company that is able to pay more to acquire a customer, that is, the one that most likely has a higher margin. You can read about margin in foodservice here. The customer should hear about your brand often and a lot. There are infinitely more people who will never know about your brand, despite your sincerest efforts, than those who will be offended by the amount of content you produce. Don't worry about the offended, they're not your customers anyway. Take this drink as an example. Brown sugar water with cocaine in the name - does that sound like a recipe for a brilliant product? How much can you say about such a product? Coca-Cola is doing quite well, and has been talking about the product for more than 100 years. The key is that it advertises constantly at an intensity greater than anyone else and longer than any of us reading this article.
Needs are created. None of us needs sweetened brown water (or the light version with aspartame), coffee for the price of lunch, or pale rolls with something like meat inside. Pepsi Cola, Starbucks and McDonalds are global brands worth billions of dollars. The key is intensity and repetition.
Another myth is that you have to "be everywhere." As long as you don't have very large budgets, you simply can't afford it. Any form of promotion will initially be ineffective until you learn how to use it properly. Learning TikTok, Instagram, print advertising, influencer partnerships and Google Ads at the same time is a recipe for disaster. You don't need multiple channels. My team and I promoted Cebulka Catering to 1 million in revenue per month in 4 months from launch using only ads on TikTok, then adding Facebook. We didn't have influencers, we didn't throw in organic posts, we didn't do ads on Google - exclusively one communication channel at first, where we tested all the time what we could do better.
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