Barbell marketing strategy for restaurant growth

Justin Ulrich
Really? 

Rev Ciancio
Yeah. 

Justin Ulrich
How did you do that?

Rev Ciancio
My very first real dream in life, not like when I grew up, I want to be an archaeologist, which I did. But the thing that when I was 16, I was like, man, I really, really, really want to be a radio DJ. Man, that just sounds like the most awesome career ever.

That was the first dream I ever really made happen. A couple years later, I was a radio DJ. It was super fun. I had a great time. I shortly realized after having a professional job in commercial radio, that it was not for me. I hated it.

But I was the program director of my college radio station. My other dream, other than to become a radio show host, was I really wanted to voiceover cartoons. I still want to. I’ve never done it. I would love to do cartoon voiceovers. At the time, Cartoon Network was really kind of exploding.

The big show was Space Ghost Coast to Coast. I reached out to the Cartoon Network. I was like, hey, I’m the program director of this college radio station, Michigan State University. We have 40,000 students. Local population is X. We have 3,000 watts. Our Arbitron rating is ABC. Would Space Ghost do a radio interview? They were like, yeah, absolutely.

I was like, no way. On my morning show one morning on a Thursday morning, 7 a.m., I was in the studio. The phone rang. WDBM was like, hello, it’s Space Ghost. I was like, oh. Whoever voiced the character didn’t break it. It was Space Ghost. I was not talking to the voice actor. He did the entire thing in character.

It’s possible that Space Ghost is real. I cannot unprove it. He was in character the whole time. I am a ridiculous, stupid, intense Space Ghost fan. I wrote zinger questions. I went deep into the wiki, deep into the fandom to pull out references from 1971 episodes of Space Ghost, things that nobody would ever know.

Every one. Every one. He nailed every question. I was so blown away. It was one of the greatest days of my whole life. Fun fact, I get a phone call later from the producer of the show.

It was like, dude, Tad really, Tad, Tad Ghostall, that’s his name. It’s like, Tad really enjoyed speaking with you. We want to send you a thank you package. I was like, oh, cool. They sent me a Space Ghost thank you package or whatever. I asked the producer, I was like, hey, I’m really interested in cartoon voiceovers. How do I get into that? She’s like, oh, we really liked your interview. We would just greenlight you for a job. Can you send your resume? 

I was like, whoa, wait a minute, hold on. They offered me a job. It was starting salary, $18,000 or something like that, I don’t remember. I would have to move to Atlanta. I would have had to give up the rest of my college education.

The one thing that my dad was adamant about was you have to graduate college. My dad told me as a kid, I’ll pay for your college, but you have to complete it. You can’t. It’s the one thing that I’m making mandatory is you have to get a college education. I was like, I can’t give up on this. I never did.

Justin Ulrich
That’s funny. I actually know a guy who is a voiceover. What do you call him? What is the actual official? 

Rev Ciancio
Actor. Voice actor.

Justin Ulrich
Voice actor. He did Papa Bear, Berenstain Bears, a lot of G.I. Joe and Wuzzles and these weird cartoons that we grew up with. Super fun though.

It’s funny talking to the guy because he can’t separate himself from the fact that he’s a voice actor. He will use different voices in responding to you from different characters because it gets a reaction out of people. It’s hilarious.

One of his big things was he sounds just like John Goodman. For all the Toy Story toys, video games, all that stuff, they used him because he was a fraction of the cost of John Goodman.

Rev Ciancio
Of John Goodman? That’s amazing. We don’t have to stay on the subject, but I would love to do a voice acting thing that becomes part of the pop lexicon.

Something like the movie phone guy, hello and welcome to movie phone. I would love to just one shot, one character, one time. The dude that voiced Fred on Scooby-Doo has been the same guy forever. I’d love to have just one voice acting job that becomes iconic. I would love that.

Justin Ulrich
You’re the guy. That’s pretty cool. That would be funny.

Rev Ciancio
Not where we thought this podcast was going to start.

Justin Ulrich
Definitely not. Do you want to give your fidget a spin? I know that you kick off every show with a spin. Boom.

Rev Ciancio
There it is. Now we can be serious.

Justin Ulrich
A lot can happen since the last time we talked. We spoke, you were episode eight and now we’re in the 50s. Six months-ish if we have weekly episodes.

What are things change across social, they change across algorithms, what’s current, what’s trending? I’d like you to jump into maybe if you can give a couple things that you noticed have changed in the last few months and where you’ve been placing focus on your own restaurant as well as with any others that you’re helping to support.

Rev Ciancio
Sure. There’s a really great article. I think you saw it. It came out about three, four weeks ago. We’re recording this in early August. It was July of 2024 about what McDonald’s is doing to fight against market conditions.

Let’s start with something I believe. McDonald’s is the biggest, most successful restaurant business in existence. I believe that they have this room probably not unlike the one I’m sitting in right now where they spend millions of dollars on research and people to go out there and look at things and analyze and come up with really smart plans and blah, blah.

They’re McDonald’s. That’s what they do. Then I sit on the sidelines and wait for them to do it and go, okay, we’re going to do that because I don’t have millions of dollars in a room full of analysts.

This article came out and it basically talked about barbell marketing or barbell pricing. The idea is in the market that we’re in, and I’ll go into this in a second, it’s downturn. It’s downturn. People are spending less. There’s more options. Cost of goods are rising.

The restaurant business as a whole right now, business is down. We had the worst January and February on record in the history of restaurants. Restaurants are still trying to figure out how to recover, blah, blah, blah, blah.

When that happens, the correction is to the value side of the market. Essentially, people are looking for a deal. If I got five bucks to spend, I want as much as I can get or I want the best experience I can have.

McDonald’s is going to dial up their value menu. You’re going to see more $1, $2, $3 happy meal, blah, blah, blah. Wendy’s will probably really push into biggie bags, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the key is that on the other end of it is to have really high priced or premium items. That creates the barbell. On one level, I’m making sure that the value seeker or for my guest that has a tighter budget that they have offerings, and you got to have smart offerings.

Then on the other end is to have a premium offering. Now, I don’t know if most people know this. Our boy, Meti from Crazypedia went super deep on this and shared it all with me.

He walked into 10 different Walmarts. All the Walmarts have Subway’s and McDonald’s and whatever else in them. You walk in and there’s a huge banner like footlong sub sandwich, $4.99, rotisserie chicken, $4, blah, blah, blah. Then when you go into that restaurant in a Walmart and then you add in fries or chips or a soda or a cookie or whatever, you end up still paying like 20, 30 bucks. They get you through the door with the value. The idea of barbell marketing is that you’re feeding both sides of the market.

The trend that I’m seeing and what we’ve done at Handcrafted Burgers and Brews, we’ve really leaned into that. I’ll give you our playbook and then you can do what you want with it. When January and February happened, when the market was down 40- 44%, I called people who have much more experience than I do, like Gregg Majewski, who has an office here at Brandon.

I was like, you’ve seen this. What are you going to do? The story I got from all my friends who are marketers said the same thing, top line revenue.

It is literally just about driving a dollar, right? Not a stupid dollar, a smart dollar that has to be profitable. In our February and January at Handcrafted, we were down 35, 40%. We were a little above market. 

My guys and I were like, we got to do something. We turned it around in March. We turned it around in April. They turned around in May. By July, last month, we had the best July on record. So simple, Justin. We did it with a $5 cheeseburger. That’s it.

Now, in March, we promoted it one way. In April, we promoted it a different way, so on, so on, so on, so forth. We did buy one, get one free burgers. In March, it was a hit. We’re like, we’re going to extend it for April. Then in May, it became $5 cheeseburgers.

It’s the same thing, just promoted a different way. Then the last three days of May, we gave them away for free. Anyway, we did all that. That drove a lot of new customers. That drove a lot of top line. That drove a lot of new guests, a lot of return visits.

We tracked all of it. At the same time, we actually doubled the amount of promotion we put into our Burger of the Month series. Every month at Handcrafted Burgers and Brew, we have a Burger of the Month. It’s a premium item. It’s got premium ingredients. It costs a little bit more.

We donate a dollar to a children’s charity. It changes every month. We, especially without knowing the concept of barbell marketing, we’re doing barbell. We were $5 burger, $18 burger and fry type thing. Honest to God, it turned it around. For all the clients I’m working with and all the restaurants I’m working with, we’re doing the same thing.

We’re finding some sort of item that can be value priced. Not necessarily discounted, but value priced. Then juxtaposing that marketing with also premium items and larger tickets.

You guys know I work with Crazy Pita. What we’ve done with Medi is we’ve done $5 pitas. We launched this Juicy Chicken Pita. It’s essentially a smaller pita with lamb fat fries. By the way, lamb fat fries and pita. Ridiculous.

Justin Ulrich
I’m sure that’s incredible.

Rev Ciancio
It’s amazing. Juxtaposed with family dinners and these premium items and steak shawarma and all this other stuff. It works. It does work. Now, look, you’re going to have to take a couple stabs at the model here before you find the right thing. Essentially, it comes down to this.

This is a lesson I learned from Sarah here at Condado Tacos. I don’t know if you ever talked to Sarah. She’s amazing. Highly tactical marketer. They did this study where they looked at all of their guests. Now, most restaurants would look at their guests with demographic and psychographics in mind.

They would say, our biggest segment is soccer moms or professional workers in an urban environment age 18 to 34 who have expended blah, blah, blah. Everybody does this. It’s totally common practice.

Condado Tacos, for the longest time, did the same thing. They went in. They did a deeper dive. They looked at not demographics and psychographics, but they looked at how do people classify themselves based on their personality and their decision-making. As an example, we all have the friend that always knows where the best restaurants are. It’s probably me.

Or the person that always wants to decide where to go to dinner. They always have the place they want to go. There’s that person. That’s a personality. You could be a man. You could be a woman. You could be African American. You could be white. You could be a boy. You could be a girl. You could be anything. You could be any age. You have any income. None of that matters if you’re the person that’s the foodie in your group. 

Anyway, Condado went and figured out their personalities based on those things. They then looked at their customer database, and they learned that out of the six personalities that they could identify, two of them were driving 80% of their revenue. 80%. They realigned all of their marketing, their content, their voice, their brand, blah, blah, blah, to speak to basically those two.

By doing that, they juiced all their revenue. The other four personalities fell in line behind those. Now, this may or may not work.

I’ve tried with a couple of my clients, but essentially, if you know, getting back to my point on barbell marketing, if you’re going to go value because you have that guest, and you’re going to go premium because you have that guest, make sure that the way that you market those speak to the personalities of the people who spend the most money at your restaurant. 

For McDonald’s, going back to my point, is they know that there’s the value-driven consumer, who’s probably a significant portion of their customer segment. Then me, who can’t wait to get in line when the McRib comes back out. That’s it. You know what I mean?

Justin Ulrich
Yes. What’s the difference then between, because you mentioned not discounted, but value-based. What’s the difference between value-based pricing and discounted pricing on an item?

Rev Ciancio
It’s a great question. Thank you. Discounting is half off, buy one, get one free, five bucks off your first order, $10 here or there. There’s nothing wrong with those. Listen, it’s a cost of acquisition. Everybody does it. I don’t know if you’re subscribed to Chipotle’s emails, but even now, they’re doing deals and BOGOs. Everybody’s doing it. There’s no shame in discounts.

Value-based pricing is different. Value-based pricing is taking an item that you can sell for a lower price, but still has value. For us, our single cheeseburger, if you walk through the door and order one with cheese and lettuce or whatever, is eight bucks. We just changed the price to $5. We still make money on that burger. We still profit.

I think our cost line is $2.44. It’s a 100% margin. You spend five, we get $2.50. Right? On cost, obviously, not labor and all electricity and utilities and all that stuff, but pure cost, we still walk away a winner on that one.

We know that a $5 burger in Times Square or Bryant Park, where we are, is a ridiculously good deal. True story, Justin. If you order from the McDonald’s in Times Square and you get a Big Mac, fries, and a Coke, it’s $24.

Justin Ulrich
That’s wild. That is wild. 

Rev Ciancio
Wild, right? Now, our burger, we’re using premium Angus beef, smash fresh. We’re using a fresh never frozen bun. We’re using high-quality dairy-based cheeses versus a Big Mac. Look, I love a Big Mac, but it’s a way different experience with a higher value. Which one would you rather have?

Would you rather have the $9 Big Mac or the $5 smash cheeseburger? In that case, we took an item that we can still make a profit on, we lowered the price, and we turn it into a value item. You know what I mean?

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah. When they’re coming in, that’s your draw to get people in the door. What is the actual impact that you’ve seen in the data?

Is it driving the average check price higher, or are you driving higher volume of guests to the door who are in turn spending more? What is it that’s causing the increase in total revenue based on lowering the price of that item?

Rev Ciancio
I haven’t looked at the data in probably 30 days, which is a long time for me. I’ve just been busy and I was on the road. But essentially, it’s everything. It’s everything. We’ve increased our AOV. We’ve increased our LTV. We’ve increased our frequency. 

There’s a couple other bits and bobs in there. But listen, the game of marketing is about incremental increase at all times. Increase in transactions, increase in AOV, increase in LTV, increase in frequency, increase in engagement. If you can get everybody or the majority of the players in your CRM to do just a little bit more here and a little bit more there and a little bit more here, great. Awesome.

Once in a while, you’ll find something that spikes it. But if you’re always moving up, that’s the key to success. For us, we’re tracking LTV, we’re tracking frequency.

I think we have a higher LTV than most restaurants, which is crazy considering that we’re in a tourist destination. I think we have a higher AOV than a lot of our competitors because we price it the right way. We’re not geniuses, but I’m looking at what everybody else is doing.

My partners at Chad and Chris are really, really good at operations. They’re really good at team and culture. They’re just really good at it. It allows me the flexibility to go, let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this. Because I know no matter what we try from a marketing perspective, we’re going to deliver a great experience.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. I’ve heard you talk at multiple different events about some of the other tactics that you do that are must-haves in a restaurant. The one that comes to mind is around Wi-Fi.

Would you mind diving in a little bit to talk about the importance of Wi-Fi, how you’re leveraging it, how you’re building your database with that one simple tool? That would be awesome.

Rev Ciancio
Sure. That’s one of my favorite talk tracks because I feel like if you’re not doing it, I have this crazy, secret, easy magic button. 

Justin Ulrich
It is wild.

Rev Ciancio
As a marketer, I get asked all the time, hey, what do you measure? What’s the most important metric? To me, the golden metric from restaurant marketing is CRM growth. It’s not transaction. It’s not AOV. It’s not LTV.

All of those things are important. All of those things should be tracked. All of those things should be worked.

You can’t do anything if you don’t have somebody’s contact info. Since CRM growth, how many emails do I have in my database is the golden metric. Again, if that’s always climbing and that’s always going and you’re keeping your list fresh, it’s easy to affect all the other things.

That means as a marketer, we have to prioritize ways to get people in our CRM. The one that I can’t believe everybody doesn’t do that this is the secret is gated Wi-Fi. Who wants gated Wi-Fi? It doesn’t matter what the answer is because there’s somebody who does. Literally everyone. It’s definitely me.

If I go into the Wi-Fi settings on my phone, I have 75,000 networks I’m connected to and I’ll go back to restaurants. I’m like, oh, I’m already on the Wi-Fi. It’s a thing.

Here’s the thing. Everybody’s like, everybody’s got unlimited Wi-Fi. I don’t know if anybody knows this, but there’s no such thing as unlimited Wi-Fi. You get a whole bunch. If you really abuse your signal on your phone, you will be gated by your provider at the end of the month. 

If you stood in Times Square, just downloaded for 30 days, at some point, T-Mobile is going to be like, okay, buddy. You get a little squish there. Anyway, people want to connect to Wi-Fi, especially us. In a tourist destination, everybody wants Wi-Fi. It’s very simple. You go get a Wi-Fi. I like VivaSpot. I’ll tell everybody why here in a second. 

Basically, you allow people to get access to Wi-Fi by simply putting in their email address. Now, there’s a couple of things here. Number one, everybody wants it, so you might as well give it to them. Number two, it also, I think, helps with your labor. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to stand in line at a coffee shop to ask for the Wi-Fi or to wait for the bartender to come over to ask if they share.

As the guest, I already want the Wi-Fi. The fact that I have to go wait in line or ask somebody is a pain for me, the guest. It’s a bad guest experience.

Then also, how many times have you asked for Wi-Fi in a place? The guy’s like, oh, hold on. Then they go pull out a book behind the register, and they’re like, it’s C underscore, at sign, capital S5. Now, they’re standing there 10 minutes trying to get me to read this thing. What a terrible experience, man. Terrible.

Gated Wi-Fi. I see guest Wi-Fi. I hit a button. I put my email. Done. I’ve relieved some labor. I’ve made it easy, and I’m getting guest Wi-Fi. Here’s why I like VivaSpot. There’s lots of competitors in space. I like VivaSpot two main reasons. Number one, it is $19 a month per location. That’s insane.

Their next competitor is 10 times the cost. The big name that everybody knows costs 10 times more. First of all, 19 bucks. If I capture two emails a month, it’s worth it, number one. Number two, now this may not matter to everybody. It matters to me and my clients.

They’re the only gated Wi-Fi provider that I know of that has an automatic integration into MailChimp. Somebody comes into my restaurant, and they sign for gated Wi-Fi, it automatically pushes them in MailChimp and tags them. If I go into my MailChimp and I pull up my CRM, I can say, show me VivaSpot.

I know every single guest that that’s how I acquired them. That’s how I know that 34% of the people on our list came from Wi-Fi because VivaSpot is cheap, easy to use. It’s such a no brainer to me.

We track it. Justin, our restaurant is in a tourist destination. We’re in Bryant Park, Times Square area. Our average guest is in the store for 18 minutes. They come in, they order a cheeseburger, fries, they’re gone. People are like, well, who wants Wi-Fi? We add somewhere between 75 and 100 emails per week because of gated Wi-Fi. It is actually our biggest single source of Wi-Fi other than online ordering.

Justin Ulrich
Biggest source of email? Sorry, biggest source of…

Rev Ciancio
Data capture. Yeah, yeah.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, yeah. I’m assuming it tracks repeat visitors so then that can help you segment your audiences and serve up offers to them that matter. If you know they’re coming in three times a month, then you’re able to identify more of a loyal segment right there and serve them up something very specific.

Rev Ciancio
For sure. VivaSpot has lots of other features and benefits that are higher packages that do a lot of that stuff. I’m personally not using that because I have other tools in place that do the same thing so I just don’t want the redundancy.

But the base package, the get somebody’s email, put it in the MailChimp, $19 a month. But if you want to do all the other stuff, they do it, they’re great. It’s a fantastic product. I 100% endorse it and I get no money for endorsing them.

Justin Ulrich
I mean, these are great tips. What does your stack look like, the stuff that you’re comfortable talking about? Let folks know other technologies like that.

It could be, because you never know who’s listening. If they have one off location, they could have a thousand locations, whatever. But what are you using?

Rev Ciancio
I appreciate how polite you are, the ones you’re comfortable talking about. Just there are very few subjects in life in general that I’m not, that I’m cool with talking. Very little things make me uncomfortable.

Justin Ulrich
Are you wearing pants?

Rev Ciancio
Today I am actually. It’s the first time I’ve worn jeans since early June.

Justin Ulrich
Wow. Just shorts?

Rev Ciancio
Yeah. Well, it’s like 69 degrees today in the city. So I was like, I’ll go, I’ll wear jeans. I’ve worn shorts every day since QSR Summit.

Justin Ulrich
Same. I have a hoodie on because I’m cold, but I’m still wearing shorts.

Rev Ciancio
Okay. So nothing’s off limits. What was the question? Oh, my tech stack. Okay. I’m going to do this in whatever order they come to my brain. We have a lot. In fact, Amazon Web Services did an article on our restaurant and called us the QSR of the future. I was like, Steve, we got one.

I was like, we have one location. He’s like, yeah, but your tech stack, it’s like McDonald’s should do what you’re doing. And I was like, listen, just tell me what their analyst thinking. I’m happy to share. But anyway, okay. 

So Toast is our POS. That’s the central nervous system for transactions. MailChimp is what we use for email. It’s essentially also our CRM, but we pair that with Bikky. And we pair it with Bikky for, there go the balloons. We pair it with Bikky so they super power each other. Bikky analyzes and harmonizes the data. It creates segments. It pushes them to MailChimp where we do newsletters and automation. 

So Toast, POS, MailChimp, CRM, Bikki, CDP, right? We use Marqii to manage our listings online and our reputation. Super important for local search, especially for where we are. You know, best burger near me.

The reason we come up is because of how we use Marqii. We use Ovation for guest feedback. That’s super important. That’s how we convert from third party. It’s how we do text message marketing. That’s how we get guest feedback. That’s how we do recovery. It’s how we have two-way texting with our guests. Like we do.

So we probably do more of the Ovation than most people do. Yeah. So Ovation also replies to all of our reviews for us. So they’re all signed my name, big secret. All of our reviews are signed by Rev. It’s actually Ovation, but I’ve written them templates. And so they do the templates.

They’re great at that. You can also get that service from Marqii. They’re both very good at it. Okay. So Toast, Bikky, MailChimp, Marqii, Ovation. We use Spendgo for loyalty.

And I do believe that loyalty is a really important segment and a really important tool, but I also believe that your entire CRM should be marketed to. So we market loyalty to our loyalty guests very differently than we market to like sort of our regular guests. We market to them. They want to be marketed to. We’re not trying to drive everybody into loyalty. If you want loyalty, it’s here.

Here’s the benefits. Here’s what you get out of it. But if you don’t want like here, it’s your email. What else do we use? We use Guru Club. Have I ever told you about Guru Club?

Oh, this is amazing. So if somebody comes into the restaurant and they have an experience and they take a picture of their food and they put it on their Instagram stories, Guru Club automatically DMs them an offer. So if they take a picture of their burger or their friends and they’re hanging out in front of the store or whatever, they tag Handcraft Burgers and Brew.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah.

Rev Ciancio
Auto-populates is get five bucks off your next order at Handcraft Burgers and Brew. They click it. They tap it. We collect their email address. They get a code and they have 30 days of which they can use the five bucks. So now we have two…

Justin Ulrich
Sorry, what is that? Is it off the tags in the actual post or is it images or it’s gotta be like they actually tag you?

Rev Ciancio
Yeah, they have to tag you and their account has to be public. So if you have a public Instagram account and you tag in Handcraft Burgers and Brew on Instagram, we automatically DM you an offer for five bucks off your next order. Now, if anybody wants to try this, feel free to tag Handcraft Burgers.

But I don’t want to make it sound like I’m trying to get more… I’m trying to juice you for Instagram algorithm here. If you want to try it, tag me, tag @Rev Ciancio because I liked it so much that I asked the Guru Club guys to turn off my personal account. And so if you tag me on Instagram, you get an offer for a free high five.

Justin Ulrich
That’s awesome. Surprise and delight. How cool is that?

Rev Ciancio
Yeah, Guru Club’s amazing. I love it. And it’s $40 bucks a month per location. It’s a really great way to get engagement, awareness, drive retention, build your CRM. It’s such a great tool. I like that.

We also used… Oh, sorry. You were about to ask a question.

Justin Ulrich
You were going into QR codes and I cut you off.

Rev Ciancio
Oh, we have QR codes all over the restaurant than say tag us on Instagram, get five bucks up your next order. There’s a few other tech pieces that my partners use on the operation side, like Restaurant 365, that my fingers don’t really go into. But I think that’s it. But it’s a lot, man.

I look at it this way, Justin. I don’t care if you’re an independent restaurant, or you’re McDonald’s, okay? The best way to increase revenue at a restaurant is by managing all the parts of the customer journey.

And that’s search, that’s social, that’s transaction, that’s review, it’s email, it’s everything. And so our tech stack was built to capture the most amount of guests, and then hold their hand all the way through the buying journey, and then to bring them back. And so all the decisions that I’ve made around what we do, a, it has to integrate, but it’s doing that.

Oh, sorry. And we use BeBot for online ordering. Oh, wait, I thought of another. We have so much tech. We use BeBot for online ordering. We use Byte for our… We have two different kinds of kiosks. One of them is not great. The other is amazing. It’s Byte.

Justin Ulrich
Very cool. Solid gold nuggets. Man, I could go on forever because I have so many questions about each one.

One thing that is worth mentioning too is we’re talking about acquisition, marketing, nurturing folks, loyalty. A huge component of that is also guest experience, making sure that they’re having the right experience when they’re in store, because you could be doing all of these efforts and throwing a lot of good money after bad, dealing with a leaky bucket. So making sure that guest experience is up to speed is incredibly important.

Rev Ciancio
It’s honestly the most important part. Again, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Handcraft Burgers and Brew because it’s an example I can give you the data on. It’s mine.

All my clients do this. If your experience is not a six out of five stars, go back to the drawing boards. That’s it. It doesn’t matter how much ad dollars you spend. It doesn’t matter how good your creative is. It doesn’t matter which tech you have. None of that matters if the experience is not a six out of five. It just doesn’t. 

I mean, you just sort of referenced this, but I work with this 40 location restaurant once. He called me. He’s like, hey, we’re going to hire you as a consultant. Great. That’s what I do. And I love your brand. He’s like, I want you to save our problem location. I literally was like, oh man. I like those challenges. I’m good with them.

But this is a disaster in the making. And sure enough, we did everything you should do. Google search ads, Meta traffic awareness ads, CRM growth, wifi, sending weekly newsletters, all of the marketing actions I think every restaurant, we should do all of them. And that brand has a great brand. Their photos look good.

The marketing was a six out of five. Operations were three out of five. And people walked in there and they were getting bad reviews and the place was unclean and the food was not presented well.

And I kept telling the CEO founder, I was like, dude, you are getting five star marketing here, six star marketing. It’s not working because there’s a problem with operations. Well, long story short, that business is no longer around. The brand is. That location is gone.

Justin Ulrich
It exacerbates the issue too. If you’re doing all of these efforts, like you said, six out of five on the marketing side, you’re basically amplifying or speeding up the generation of poor reviews, which is going to be an uphill battle that you’re going to continue to fight by throwing more against the marketing side. It seems like it’s just going to perpetuate itself.

Whereas if you fix the issue in store, all those other things kind of go away.

Rev Ciancio
I’ll give you a really simple example. My local pizza shop, Ferazzoli’s Italian Kitchen in Rutherford, New Jersey. I eat there probably once every 10 days, if not more frequently.

Now, let’s be honest. It checks a convenience box. It’s four blocks from my house. I can walk there in seven minutes. It’s priced well. The food’s good, like all of that. Yeah. But on the same block, two doors down is the Domino’s and across the street is another independent pizza shop. I literally have to walk by two other pizza places to go to Ferazzoli’s.

The difference is the guest experience. I walk in the door and it doesn’t matter who’s behind. Somebody behind the counter is like, hey, Rev, how’s it going? Okay. Now, it’s not because I’m a local celebrity or some silly reason like that. It’s because I go there enough that they ask my name and they remembered me.

Same thing. I went to a coffee shop this morning. I go to sometimes I walk in the city. I walk in and I pre-order. I order on the app, but I walk in and the girl goes, oh, you’re the no ice guy. Great. That little crazy move. I keep going back there because a, the coffee’s good. The price is right. It’s green. But also, they see my order come in. They’re like, oh, it’s Rev. Okay, great. Ferazzoli’s, same thing.

I order online and they have the same technology as any other restaurant and automatically says your order will be ready in 60 minutes because it’s just BS or whatever. They call me. Hey, Rev, your order’s ready.

They take the 30 seconds to call me and say, hey, Rev, your order’s ready. That’s just great operations. I joke with Matt Ferazzoli all the time. When I talk about what a genius is and how good he’s like, dude, I don’t know. We just run a pizza shop. He really cares about the guest and he really cares about the customer service. He instills that. Most of his employees are teenagers. They’re high schoolers.

People complain about that as a labor force. It’s culture, man. There’s so many weaves here, but to your point, and I’m going off the rails a little, it’s the experience. If you dial in the experience, all the other stuff works even better.

Justin Ulrich
100%. Now switching gears a little bit. The first time we actually met in person, we talked a little bit about who you’d be as a movie character and why. Do you remember that conversation?

Rev Ciancio
Yes. My answer probably changes on a daily basis.

Justin Ulrich
Totally fine.

Rev Ciancio
If I could be, let’s say, can we include TV today?

Justin Ulrich
Yes, that’s fine.

Rev Ciancio
My favorite cartoon character of all time is not Space Ghost. It’s Wile E. Coyote. I am highly, highly obsessed with Wile E. Coyote. I’ll tell you why. The coyote never, ever gives up. Ever gives up. He knows exactly what he’s trying to do and he’ll try anything to get there.

He is the world’s first growth hacker. He was a growth hacker. Now, somebody said to me the other day, because I mentioned this to them, they go, well, yeah, but he always fails.

I go, that is the director’s perspective. I was like, are you telling me that every single documentary you ever watched on Netflix tells you 100% of the truth? No, it’s entertainment. I was like, the director’s perspective. I would equate Wile E. Coyote back to the most important lesson my mother ever taught me.

Don’t ask, don’t get. Some people say, you miss all the shots you don’t take. My mom taught me if you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. You know what I mean? The most important lesson I ever learned on my own was know when to ask. So, Wile E. Coyote, man, he’s my spirit animal.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, you never know. There could have been there could have been flocks of roadrunners or gaggles or whatever you’d call them, and he was killing a ton of them off screen. 

Rev Ciancio
Director’s perspective.

Justin Ulrich
That’s right. No, when we chatted, it was about, you’d said you’re like Dumbledore. More like one of those, what are they, BuzzFeed quizzes?

Rev Ciancio
No, no, no, no. Myers-Briggs.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, that’s right.

Rev Ciancio
I used to work for Yext, which is a great company, and they’re the backbone of the Marqii software, so I’m a huge fan. But when I started Yext, they made every single person take the Myers-Briggs test, and I was like, why are we doing this? It was actually a great idea.

You took it on day one, and on day two, you were told what your Myers-Briggs score was, and then you got to go to a closet, and on one side of the closet, they had all of the Myers-Briggs scores listed by Harry Potter characters, and on the other side of the closet, they had all the Myers-Briggs scores listed by Star Wars characters, and you could pick either one you want, and then you put the sticker on your back of your laptop. 

So you’d walk into a meeting. Everybody would open up their laptops and take notes or whatever, and you could see who was in the room, and so if you follow Harry Potter or Star Wars, you knew who was on your team and who wasn’t. 

Now, my Star Wars equivalent was Padme, and I got nothing against Padme. She was awesome. She’s just not that iconic. She’s not like a Luke Skywalker, you know what I mean, or Han Solo or Chewbacca. It’s like, yeah, okay, lower level heroism, right?

On the Harry Potter side, which I don’t like Harry Potter as much as Star Wars, my Myers-Briggs score was Dumbledore, and I was like, yes, so for the two years I worked, yes, I’m a huge, Rev is essentially Dumbledore. 

Justin Ulrich
That’s hilarious. Oh, go ahead.

Rev Ciancio
No, go ahead.

Justin Ulrich
I tried leveraging AI to create you as Dumbledore, and it was the worst. It kept, I was like Dumbledore, and I kept trying to get your hat and the Hawaiian shirt, and every time it was cranking out, what is his name? Is it Jack Hammond from Jurassic Park, the old man that was running the park?

I was like, this is not working, so I figured I’d go the Star Wars route, and it was a good choice. I went with Obi-Wan, Rev Kenobi.

Rev Ciancio
That is amazing. That is amazing, and I’m going to do you one. If you give me two seconds to scroll through this, I was showing this to my kid the other day.

My kid always asks questions about what mom and dad were like, or what did mom and dad do with ABC, and so because I grew up in an era where we took pictures of everything, and I have ways of finding it and saving it, blah, blah, blah, I showed this to him the other day because he asked me, and I can’t believe you pulled it up, but there is Rev as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Justin Ulrich
That’s perfect. We’re going to have to do a side-by-side. You’re funny. Awesome, man.

Rev Ciancio
True story, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Myers-Briggs score is one letter of difference from mine, so it’s pretty close. He’s an introvert, and I’m an extrovert.

Justin Ulrich
So he’s INFJ?

Rev Ciancio
Yes, I’m an E.

Justin Ulrich
I’m ENFJ as well.

Rev Ciancio
Amen. You, me, and Oprah Winfrey.

Justin Ulrich
That’s right. Us three. I guess I need another famous friend. That does it for today. If you want, before we fully wrap it up, let us know how we can follow you. If we want to stop by Handcrafted Burgers and Brews, where it’s located.

Rev Ciancio
You can sign into our email when you walk in via the Wi-Fi. Handcrafted Burgers and Brews in Bryant Park, New York City. It’s on 40th Avenue, just west of 6th Ave. Google us, you’ll find us. 

If you want to get in touch with me, I have the same screen name on every single social media platform. I’m Rev Ciancio, and if you can’t figure out how to find that, go to restaurantsgrow.tv. Again, it’s restaurantsgrow.tv. That’s a direct link to my blog on LinkedIn that I share marketing tips, tactics, and tricks almost weekly. I wrote one on the way to the office today.

But if you like these kinds of things, you want to learn more, restaurantsgrow.tv, and then ultimately you’ll get connected to me on LinkedIn.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, I’ll just vouch for your content. It’s some of the most educational, insightful content that I’ve seen on social. Extremely, extremely worth the follow.

I check it out daily whenever I can, and it is very, very, very good content. So, appreciate you cranking it out for all the other marketers out there. Appreciate you joining us today. It was a ton of fun having you in the lab.

Rev Ciancio
Thank you for having me, buddy. And listen, I’m going to pay you a quick compliment. Your social media gain is like an 11 out of 10 on the positivity score, and I always appreciate how much great energy you bring. So, thank you.

Justin Ulrich
I appreciate that. Awesome. Well, with that, we’ll cut out of here. Thanks.

As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.