Making Things Harder

I’ve been on record several times in this space saying that I believe that food service is the hardest industry there is, and nothing I’ve seen recently has changed my mind about that. Between issues that are completely out of your control (cost of ingredients, local ordinances, traffic conditions on nearby roads), unreasonable demands and entitlement from customers, outright fraud and the fact that people who have no knowledge of the industry will assume that what you must be easy, food service is almost a perfect storm of all of the things that are problematic in the retail, grocery, entertainment, health, child care, nutrition and personal service sectors. Trying to cut through the noise in this industry and actually get your advertising noticed by potential customers is even worse, frankly, and leads to lapses of taste and judgment like the “Freaky King” and food-as-sex fiascos I’ve already referenced. And all of that is assuming that you don’t specifically make things harder on yourself…

Consider for example the recent advertising series from the Red Robin hamburger chain, as referenced on the Yahoo News site this week. For those unfamiliar with the company, Red Robin’s menu is built around hamburgers, and specifically around 24 specialty types that include teriyaki sauce and pineapple, or bleu cheese dressing, or what have you. Some of these are kid-friendly, but the majority are targeted at young adults who have moved beyond fast food offerings but not past enjoying hamburgers – e.g. the coveted 18-35 demographic. Since any restaurant that is perceived (correctly or not) as a hamburger joint will have trouble drawing customers who don’t eat meat – or even getting parties that include a vegetarian member – the company has offered vegetarian and vegan versions of all of the burgers for years. What is baffling is why they should have chosen to make fun of those options…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that vegetarians are not part of the key demographic for a company that has positioned itself as a hamburger restaurant. I don’t know how much sales volume the company has in vegetarian dishes, but it clearly is not the focus of their operations. We should also note that the use of snarky, “edgy,” and somewhat mocking styles of advertisement have become popular across a wide range of companies and industries in recent years. But by the same token it does not require any great, in-depth knowledge of the issue to realize that many people in that community take the vegetarian lifestyle very seriously, and do not react well to anything they consider mocking or disparaging of their choices – anymore than any other distinct group likes being made fun of by an organization that is allegedly soliciting their business…

In its efforts to appeal to both young adults and families, the company has long cultivated a humorous and somewhat irreverent image; in theory this serves to help differentiate them from rival chains that make use of more conventional branding (and advertising) strategies. And they can with some justice claim not to have been mocking vegetarians in general in this ad, but rather gently poking fun at the sort of teenage drama that results in a single member of a family suddenly going vegetarian and then insisting on everyone else in the household conforming to his (or in this case, her) decisions. But given how common militant vegetarians are in our culture – and how vocal they are known to be about anything that appears to disparage them – it’s hard to imagine how any marketing advantage could be gained through these ads that would offset the resulting difficult they would create…