Restaurant Business: Knowing Your Target Audience

That's the trick, what triggers people in general, whether its students or whether it's the families, I think another problem that I am faced with is I was used to the people that are at Cornell University and the students that are Cornell and there are students in a whole variety of different income ranges here at Cornell but in general the students that are here are going to spend money, they have disposable income to spend and the students in Kent may or may not. I mean there is much, you know larger portion of the population that doesn't have this money to spend, and they are not spending it at restaurants, they are spending it other things regardless of what that is, alcohol or cigarettes or whatever, and I think that's a big difference, the portion of people that smoke on this campus and spend money out in the bars, they go to bars but they are buying nice things, they are buying like nice drinks, they are not getting dollar pitchers and dollar beers the way they are in Kent and so for me the student population, although they are both college campuses, they are almost similar in size give or take a few thousand, but it is a whole different student population and so that is something that I didn't account for and how do you make the phone ring. I really think for students its all about word of mouth because there are restaurants around here that are very popular but you don't see advertisements for them but they are popular because students talk about it. So our trick is how do we get students to talk about our restaurant and it is a lot more difficult than I would have anticipated. Families on the other hand, a lot of them are looking for coupons which I didn't realize, because in my family we never looked for coupons. Of if there was coupon book we would look through it but there are families out there that literally grab these coupon books, go through them and decide we are going to go to this restaurant on Monday and use this coupon, go to this restaurant on Tuesday and use this coupon, Wednesday we are going to eat at home, Thursday we are going to eat at home, Friday and Saturday we are going to go out and we are going to use these coupons and these coupons and that's how they live their life, and so they come into us, they got little post notes on their menus that they took out of these thing and says Friday night's dinner use this coupon that's how they arrive, and so for us it is like holy cow, this is a whole different arena that I was not anticipating but it is very easy to market to these people, you just have to throw out coupon in a book and they will come, and that's easy. If students were that easy, it would be great and then, my whole philosophy on targeting just the students would have been no problem but we are finding that it is easier to market towards families that are in these coupon clips or magazines and that's how they live their life. Those are the easiest people to target and that's now what we are kind of doing and so we need to figure out the exact same thing in the student market because there has got to be some median that works for students, we just haven't figured out what it is.