Injury-free marketing
By Mike Mitchelson

Sometimes a little bad press can be the perfect advertisement. For Marina and Naum Liberman, owners of Moscow on the Hill restaurant in St. Paul, when the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported a few years ago that a large metal Russian teapot, called a samovar, became airborne and landed on a customer’s head, it turned into added business.

“It caused a minor injury,” Marina said, laughing as she recalled the episode. The Pioneer Press reported the incident in a small story with a headline that included “flying samovar.” “We had a lot of people coming in to see what the flying samovar was about,” she said.

That unusual circumstance drew the media to them, but there was a time, shortly after they purchased the restaurant—formerly Quail on the Hill—in 1994, when they sought out the media, and not for an ad. When they converted the French cuisine Quail to Moscow in 1996 (“We’re Russian,” she said. “Why don’t we serve Russian food?”), they called the Pioneer Press to announce a contest to name the restaurant. The paper printed a short story, and Liberman soon was flooded with names, including Moscow on the Mississippi, Dr. Zhivago and From Russia With Love. And business, she said, picked up immediately with the conversion.

For businesses not lucky enough to earn media coverage with an injury or concept renovation, they must utilize more conventional means of advertising. Liberman has extensive experience with that, too. “When the business was smaller, we tried to advertise a lot,” she said, estimating that about 70 percent of the efforts weren’t worth it.

It wasn’t too long ago when advertising options were fairly limited—an ad in a newspaper or a magazine (or on late night television) coupled with good ol’ fashioned schmoozing and people would show up at your door.

Now advertising options are almost overwhelming with so many available media, and it is difficult to find the best value for the dollar. The independent restaurant or catering company which operates without a massive budget, must think harder about how to get people in the door.

Liberman places print ads in Minnesota Monthly, City Pages and other newspapers and magazines. Determining the effectiveness of those ads is difficult; the only way to find out is to ask a new face how they heard about the restaurant, she said. She also began to include a coupon for a free shot of the restaurant’s house vodka with the purchase of an entrée within the ad.

There are also the yellow pages phone directories to consider, but now, with many to choose from—the Moscow is listed in both U.S. West and Verizon books, but Liberman is also presented with offers from countless community directories—it is again difficult to determine the best bang for the buck. Liberman said they also teamed with other businesses to purchase billboard space on Snelling Avenue, which was effective, and there are networking opportunities with neighborhood business organizations and the chamber of commerce.


Foot traffic

Nicollet Island Inn owner Larry Abdo combines old-school advertising with high-tech. Since he purchased the Inn about a year ago, Abdo has cultivated a grass-roots advertising campaign, which includes hitting the pavement with pamphlets and distributing them at residences in the area. He keeps an eye on the new developments springing up, too.

“The reason the Inn is going to be more successful as an everyday place is because of the condos (being developed in the St. Anthony Main/Nicollet Island area),” he said, namely the Phoenix and Flour Sack Flats being constructed nearby. “That’s 2,000 people coming in.”

Abdo’s advertising efforts are more a “re-education” effort, he said. “People think of (the Inn) as a dinner place, a special event place, and it is. But that’s also an attitude from an era when dining out was special. Now, dining out is not so special.”

As he emphasizes the Inn as a dining destination, Abdo said the “hotel” aspect will continue to play an important role. “You look at the suburbs like Eden Prairie and Eagan, developing Fairfields, Courtyards and Marriotts. Mostly, out-of-town guests don’t stay at the home of the person they’re visiting anymore.” This is true especially for the guests of condominium owners with just one bedroom—another reason to target the new developments directly.


Cyberspace

An integral part of advertising today is having an Internet presence. Moscow on the Hill has a Web site that generates a lot of traffic, Liberman said, and people can leave a note on their experience in the electronic “guestbook.”

Abdo said inquiries via the Nicollet Island Inn’s Web site have also been “substantial.” His company, Anxon, employs two people to “protect our turf on the Internet,” he said. Through Internet polling mechanisms, the Inn has rated “best of” in the Twin Cities for hotel dining, romantic setting, and other categories, Abdo said. His Internet staff spends their time working on the Web site and checking search engines, including the obvious ones such as Google and MSN, to follow their positioning. “We want to make sure we’re clear and easily seen (on those sites). But we pay attention to where our business is coming from. We’re one of 20 downtown restaurants on OpenTable.com (the Internet reservation service), and 50 percent or better of our reservations come from that, so we know people are looking through their computer.”

John Schiltz, owner of the Lake Elmo Inn and president of the Twin Cities Originals independent restaurant group, also joined OpenTable.com about a year ago. About 20 of the TCO’s 32-member restaurants also have signed on, he said. “It just made so much sense to join,” he said.

OpenTable features independent restaurants with various promotions throughout the year, and the Twin Cities OpenTable page features a link to TCO restaurants.

OpenTable has a close relationship with TCO and the national organization of independent restaurants, Dine Originals, said Liz Johannesen, manager of restaurant marketing for OpenTable, and helps those restaurants harness the Internet by developing presence and marketing campaigns to “compete with the big guys.” OpenTable drives traffic to restaurants through affiliate partners, including AOL CityGuide, the Chicago Tribune’s metromix.com, Citysearch.com, DiRoNA (Distinguished Restaurants of North America) and Yahoo! Inc. The company also e-mail blasts its users to notify them when a new restaurant has joined the site.

The service allows restaurateurs who don’t have the time or staff to capture reservations from their Web sites. “We’re turning the Internet browsers into buyers.”


Spreading the word, old style

Abdo also owns a fast-food restaurant concept, My Burger, located in the downtown Minneapolis skyway. “Every day we’re marketing that aggressively,” he said. But they’re doing it in a throw-back way, taking advantage of the proximity of downtown businesses via the skyway.

“In spite of this electronic age, people still like to have a voice (to hear),” he said. Anxon has an employee who calls downtown businesses to ask whether they’ve heard of My Burger, to encourage them to try it, and even take an order for them. “We have an extremely friendly person who knows three languages, and it’s about making friends with the businesses downtown, finding out whether they want to fax something, get their e-mail address…and then the conversation starts.”

That personal style of marketing has paid dividends in another area—franchising. Abdo doesn’t hide the fact he wants to franchise the concept, but “hasn’t done a thing” to market to prospective franchisees. Yet he has a list of 14 who are interested. “They’ve contacted me,” he said.

With all the efforts to advertise, in the end, the best advertising is the oldest in the book: word-of-mouth, Liberman said. The word about Moscow on the Hill has spread not just from the neighborhood, either. For instance, guests have said they heard of the Moscow from other American travelers while they were on vacation in Switzerland and Germany, so they made a point to check it out.

Another referral came from someone who recently visited the Minnesota Zoo with a friend, Liberman said. “They were standing in front of the Siberian tiger, and that’s how their conversation got started. So, we got some guests from the zoo.”

There’s considerable word-of-mouth when it comes to Moscow on the Hill. Well known for its martinis and extensive vodka selection, the restaurant also gained a reputation as a unique culinary destination; a place where a meal can easily turn into an all-evening, multi-course affair of tempered revelry. This has earned the restaurant a fair amount of press coverage and favorable reviews from food critics.

“It’s like the health department,” she joked. “You never know when food critics are going to show up, so you have to be ready all the time.”


The Flying Samovar

It was a night like any other at the Moscow on the Hill restaurant a few years ago, before their latest renovation. In the old floor plan, there was a small waiting area with a waist-high wall. A Russian samovar was placed on the wall, along with other decorations. A samovar isn’t just a teapot, it’s a large metal container with a faucet for dispensing tea. On the other side of the wall was a booth and a table. Somehow, in the course of the evening, a customer accidentally hit the samovar, and knocked it from its perch and onto the head of a diner in the booth.

The samovar, while not a tiny piece of equipment, also isn’t large enough to cause a major injury. “She got some stitches in her head,” Liberman said. Nonetheless, the injured party attempted to file a claim of $1 million. Liberman’s insurance adjuster came out to the restaurant to investigate. “She wanted to see what caused the injury, probably expecting to see a 70 pound pot to cook potatoes. She was surprised.” The injured party settled for $500.


OpenTable: How it works

Charges for the service are scaled on a per-cover basis through the service. Restaurants are listed both on the OpenTable web site, and are linked to the service through their own Web site. OpenTable discounts those reservations made through the restaurant’s web site. “We see those people as the restaurant’s customers, who would have made a reservation anyway,” said Liz Johannesen, manager of restaurant marketing for OpenTable. Restaurants that do have links track more than twice the covers as when they did not have the service, she added.

OpenTable is also a hardware and software system. “That flat screen you see at the host’s stand—that’s the OpenTable system,” she said. “It’s not just a reservation system, it’s a guest and table management system. You can use the system to record and manipulate every aspect. You can also make customer notes: who’s a VIP, who likes what or if it’s a friend of the chef. It replaces the box of index cards the GM used to keep.”