Introduction

Though the concept of offering organic food services by restaurants is not new, consumers of

the UK are showing an increasing interest for organic green foods. While many people have a

perception that operating a restaurant business would be relatively easy comparing to other

types of businesses, the reality is completely different. Restaurant business can, in fact, be

considered as one of those types of business that are most difficult to operate. In general, the

success of a restaurant business heavily depends on some key factors such as, where the

restaurant is located, what are the menu or food items it offers, how is the quality of the

offered food items, and how fast and good it is at providing services to its customers. When

formulating a comprehensive marketing plan, one must keep the above stated considerations

in mind.

Market Summary

The group of six organic green restaurants possesses valid information about the market and

knows a lot about the common characteristics of the market. The six specialist restaurants run

by the organic green group are located around a major city in the Midlands. They have already

obtained brand recognition as a “top-end” dining for evenings. But individual restaurants face

different intensity of competition based on their locations. And, recently, the company is

experiencing less amount of revenue due to some downturn in sales. The organic green

restaurants group will utilize this information to have a better understanding of the current

market situations, and then come up with possible recommendations to generate more

revenue.

The role of marketing for the group’s business

Even if a restaurant is performing pretty well in terms of profitability, the need of marketing

cannot be ignored as it will definitely help increase profits. It is often said that restaurant has

only one major goal, which is to make as more profit as possible. The need of marketing for the

group’s restaurant business is also crucial because-

It has been experiencing decrease in sales in different restaurants at different times of

day. Marketing techniques can definitely help the group of business to boost up sales.

In two of the suburban sites, they have specialist vegetarian competitor restaurants run

by a not for profit training trust serving comparable food close by. Further, they ‐ ‐

compete with numerous other ‘top end’ restaurants. Through formulating effective ‐

marketing plans, they can differentiate their services and thus stand out from other

competitor restaurants.

The competitive situation of each business is marginally different because of their

locations. So there is a need for implementing different marketing strategy for

restaurants located in different places.

Market Demographics

The demographical profile of the customer consists of the geographic, demographic, and

behavior characteristics written below:

Geographic

Six key locations in and around the centre of a major city in the Midlands.

Two of the restaurants are sited in suburban areas

Demographics

Gender: Male and female.

Age: People of all ages

Professional people who work close to the location.

Earn a good amount of disposable income

Eat outside of home several times a week.

Tend to drop by and take foods from higher quality restaurants.

Health conscious people.

Behavior Factors

Take pleasure in having quality meal without making any hamper of their health.

Highly health conscious, careful for having healthy diet.

Have a passion for organic green foods

Market Needs

Organic green restaurants provide the customers with a wide range of top-class, health friendly

organic foods that are not only pleasing to eat but also offer a great value for money in return.

The Organic green restaurants intend to fulfill the following needs of the customers.

Food Choice: A wide selection of health friendly, mouthwatering organic food options.

Quick accessibility: The consumers are served within a very short time frame after

making an order. They can opt for both dine in or take out.

Customer service: The customers have to be amazed by the organic food service they

receive.

Aggressive pricing: All food items need to be priced in a way that they charge no more,

and are perhaps cheaper, than the price of other top-end organic dining facilities.

Market Trends

The market trends consist of following characteristics:

Food quality: Demand for high quality processed food has always been a very common

trend for restaurant industry. The customers are very health conscious as they are

opting for organic green dishes instead of regular dishes offered by any other

restaurants. They are showing an increasing amount of interests for top grade organic

ingredients. They are also learning to recognize qualitative differences.

Presentation of foods: People love to eat those foods that are not only delicious but

also look good. Therefore, good presentation or appearance of dishes does really

matter.

Health awareness: Today’s consumers are more than ever concerned about health

issues. They tend to attend gyms and go for physical workouts to maintain a healthy

figure alongside healthy lifestyle. They seek for more healthy alternatives when they

plan for their daily diet.

Variety of food items: The clients want to see a lengthy food menu in the dining table

that consists of a large collection of food items and they wish to select their preferable

dishes from a variety of food items.

One of the greatest reasons for these trends is the fact that restaurants are offering a greater

amount of food items from the past few years. With an increase in the items of foods offered

by various restaurants, the customers have become pickier than ever when choosing the food

items for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Another vital reason for such market trends is the growing

number of restaurants that focus on offering organic foods.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT analysis is a framework that helps companies, in order to fight against their competitors,

map unbeaten strategies based on their needs by focusing on their competitive strengths and

opportunities (Jeannet and Hennesey, 2010). Thompson and martin (2010) defined SWOT

analysis as – “an analysis of an organization’s strengths and weaknesses alongside the

opportunities and threats present in the external environment.” SWOT analysis of the organic

green restaurants is discussed below:

Strengths

Highly trained, customer focused, and dedicated restaurant staff

use of only organic, local ingredients

Strong relationships raw materials or ingredients suppliers

Current market position

Restaurants’ locations are at the major cities around the Midlands

Restaurants are well located for social events and general eating out.

High quality, organic, but at the same time, value for money meals offerings

‘Top end’ dining out market in the evenings‐

Combined approach, both individual and group level, for promotional and advertising

activities;

Greater marketing budget to develop brand awareness.

Weaknesses

Profit margin is low

Competitive vulnerability is high

The struggle to persistently appear to be cutting edge.

Outdated POS (Point of Service System)

Opportunities

Growing market size with increasing number of health-conscious people who are

interested for organic foods

Strategic alliance with a chain of six restaurants

Adequate funding for running advertising campaigns and raising brand awareness and

Increasing sales opportunities with economic growth

The facility to extend overhead over multiple revenue centers.

Competition weaknesses

Threats

Economic downturn is reducing consumer's disposable income

Increased competition from existing restaurants

Declining sales

New government regulations

Competition

Competition in the organic restaurant industry in the UK is severe. Besides considering “top-

end” restaurants, not-for-profit and Government run restaurants and other franchises as

competitor; organic green restaurants should also consider independent restaurants as

potential competitor.

Independent organic restaurants: There are a good number of independent restaurants

competing with other independent restaurants and chain restaurants and trying to

obtain market position in the organic food service industry. Although the selection of

independent restaurants is limited and a bit pricey, but they can go a step ahead in

getting more intimate to the customers by focusing on food quality.

Big chain restaurants: “Top-end” and big chain restaurants have the capability of

dominating other restaurants in terms of marketability. This is because of their ability to

spend more on advertising and to afford bigger spaces in the top locations. Moreover,

chain restaurants can offer better price and easily earn brand recognition than

independent restaurants.

Not-for-profit and Government restaurants: In two of the suburban sites, they have specialist

vegetarian competitor restaurants run by a not for profit training trust serving comparable ‐ ‐

food close by. Several of the Organic Green restaurants are in areas dominated by large

Government offices with in-house catering facilities offering lunches.

Marketing Strategy

In order to reach the marketing objectives of the company, it is essential to build up the project

plan, to conduct required marketing research. Organic foods market segment is basically

targeted towards educated and health-conscious customers who consider intake of daily

organic nutrition through organic foods consumption as an asset for their health. This is the

main fact that plays the most important role in determining marketing strategy for the

company.

Marketing Objectives

The market strategy of organic green restaurants must be able to grab the attention of the

target customers. As the group of organic green restaurant businesses has already know what

kinds of customers they expect to have in their restaurants, they should now be able to tailor

their promotional activities to these specific group of customers. Some of the key marketing

objectives are:

To avoid downturns in sales

To ensure a positive, steady growth each quarter

To realize an increase in repeat customers

Marketing Segmentation

Different market segments with similar food habits tend to respond to different marketing

strategies. Therefore, the promotional activities need to be geared to the specific segments in a

specific way. For restaurants, it is very phenomenal to target the market segment based on

their income. This enables restaurants to modify the pricing of the menu items based on their

level of income.

The organic restaurant market can be segmented into three target populations:

Individuals: People who dine in by themselves such as single high-waged workers

Families: A group of people who are associated together; such as young happy couples,

couples with kids, friends, colleagues, or a group of nuclear relatives dining together.

Take out: People who prefer to order a parcel and take out the organic food in their

home or at different places rather than to eat sitting in the restaurant.

After analyzing other demographic factors, I would recommend to the group of organic green

restaurants to build a customer base that possesses following characteristics:

People with higher disposable income who live nearby (i.e. lonely rich professionals)

Single high-waged professionals of different areas who work close to the locations of the

six chain restaurants.

Highly health conscious people who patronize high quality organic foods(i.e. dieting

women, vegetarians, )

Market Positioning

Positioning is an important strategy that an organization might utilize to create, and sustain,

competitive advantage (Anderson and Vincze, 2000). Firstly, the company should figure out the

basis on which it will fight against the competitors, and then it needs to position its services in a

comprehensible and distinctive way (Meek, Meek and Ensor, 2001). Strong positioning is often

considered to be a preventive measure taken by marketing personnel to provide the business

with a protection against competition. A perfect market positioning will leverage the organic

green restaurants’ competitive edge:

Product: Organic green restaurants must use high-quality, fresh organic food

ingredients to prepare the food menu items. To maintain an aesthetic quality, they

should also take the presentation of food items into consideration.

Service: For restaurants, there is no alternative of providing the customers with superior

service. Organic green restaurants need to develop a customer-concentrated aptitude.

They will provide sufficient training to their current and future employees to make it

sure that their consumers can have a pleasurable dining experience. Further, when

selecting new employees, they should recruit those younger people with dynamic

personalities who are fast as well as smart at what they do.

Home delivery service: Organic green restaurants need to introduce home delivery

service to grab the attention of “take-out” customer segment. Many people love the

idea of ordering foods through telephone call or internet and then get the delivery at

home.

Marketing Mix

The right choice of the marketing mix helps the organization to communicate the benefits of its

products and services to the consumers (O’Shaughnessy, 2003).

Product

To become established as one of the best organic food providers in the local market, the

organic green restaurants must create a distinctive image in the consumers’ mind by providing

them with superior values. They will offer organic foods in three ways- one, table service at the

restaurant; two, take-out from the restaurant; and, three, delivery to home or office. As they

are experiencing decrease in sales during the day times, they should produce less quality of

foods in day times. For night times, as they can sell more, they should add more organic food

items and produce a larger quantity.

Place

The restaurants are located in six major, commercial places around the Midlands where lots of

customer segments can access with convenience. As they make comparatively more sales at

night than day times, they should ensure that they can accommodate their customers. The

restaurants need to be clean and well-decorated where people can easily comfort themselves.

They can also re-think the interior design so that more tables and seats can be set up if there is

a sudden increase of customers. Further, interior decoration and the placement of seats also

matter for the convenient movement both of the customers and waitresses.

Price

All of the organic foods offered by the group of organic green restaurants are not only of great

quality, but also of fair price. As the restaurants offer value for money meals, it should definitely

help them stand one step ahead in the competition. However, more research on the functional

value of pricing should be carried out to have a better understanding of how the pricing affects

customer decision. Moreover, figuring out possible solutions to minimize operating costs and

ingredient purchasing costs can definitely be of help to offer better price.

Promotion

According to Arvidsson (2006), advertising agencies and public relation specialists are

responsible to anticipate the potential of evolving goodness out of the brand image. People

nowadays are more being more internet-oriented; they read newspapers online, love to spend

time in social networking sites and search for anything on the internet that comes into their

mind. Levy (2003) opined that consumers prefer to be personally addressed as it gives them

some extra importance. One of easiest ways to reach to the individual customers is to use the

internet based promotional activities (i.e. email marketing). Therefore, the company must go

for online promotional campaigns rather than spending a large amount of money for traditional

advertising strategies such as ads in newspapers and magazines, blanket mailing, placing ads in

the yellow pages, radio ads, etc. Moreover, besides targeting the local social communities or

groups of people who love and are passionate about organic foods, the restaurants should also

focus on online communities and groups that are formed on different interests related to green

food consumption, vegetarian, etc. The restaurants can also come into agreement with some

local hotels and motels to run promotional activities (i.e. giving away discount coupons) for

them.

Recommendations

Profit maximization has always been the prime goal of all businesses. Keeping this profit

maximization goal in mind, some important marketing recommendations for organic green

restaurants are:

Get more customers: Try to bring as many new customers as possible and at the same

time convince existing customers to come more often.

Sell more items: To Increase the average check amount, try to persuade customers to

buy more items by offering daily attractive deals

Sell the right things: To maximize profit, try to encourage customers to get the more

profitable items, especially those foods whose contribution margin is bigger than other

items.

As the competitive situation of each restaurant is marginally different than others, the group of

business must figure out which restaurant faces more competition and which faces less

competition. After figuring out the intensity of competition for individual business, they need to

consider spending more money and running stronger advertising campaigns for those

restaurants that are facing higher competition. For example, in the city centre, they compete

with numerous other ‘top end’ restaurants. So they should be extra careful when determining ‐

the pricing and other marketing strategy so that the restaurants in the city centre can have an

added advantage to fight against numerous other ‘top end’ restaurants. They can also combine ‐

food diversification, for example- adding Italian, Indian and Arabic foods, with setting up low

pricing strategy to grab the attention of new customer segments.

In general, people of suburban are less likely to visit restaurants very often comparing to the

people living in the Midlands cities. Moreover, not-for-profit organizations and organizational

that are run by Government usually offer a better price than other commercial restaurants.

Therefore, the group of organic green restaurants should develop a highly competitive

marketing strategy for the two restaurants located in the suburban areas.

Contingency Planning

The group of organic restaurants also needs to develop a clearly stated contingency planning

for avoiding the consequences of difficulties such as overly aggressive and debilitating actions

by competitors. They should also be aware and prepared to deal with worst case risks such as

having to liquidate equipment or intellectual property to cover liabilities.

The organic restaurants could be more profitable business with the possibility of long-term-

investments. The group of organic green restaurants must consider this fact. They also need to

formulate a long-term financing plan along with marketing plans.

References

Jeannet, J. P. and Hennessey, H. D. (2010) Global Marketing Strategies, 6th ed. USA: Houghton

Mifflin

Thompson, J. and Martin, F. (2010). Strategic Management: Awareness & Change. 6th ed.

Cengage Learning EMEA, p. 140, 817

Anderson, C.H. and Vincze, J.W., 2000. Strategic Marketing Management: Meeting the Global

Challenge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Meek, H., Meek, R. and Ensor, J., 2001. Strategic Marketing Management: Planning and Control.

Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.

O’Shaughnessy, J., 2003. The marketing power of emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2003

Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: meaning and value in media culture, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Levy, S., 2003. Roots of marketing and consumer research at the University of Chicago,

Consumption, Markets and Culture, 6(2): 99-110.