After more than a million stores collapsed, F&B people began to use customer reviews to break through.
This article was originally published by Red Meal Network (ID: hongcan18), author: Wang Bo.
If you want to sum up the catering industry in 2023 in one word, the word "difficult" may be more appropriate.
Back to last year, with the promulgation of a series of measures, the caterers who have gone through hardships have gradually seen hope. However, at that time, probably no one could have predicted that the catering industry in 2023 would be like this - the streets are full of "prosperous shop transfers".
In such a market environment, catering people are collectively confused, how to "survive"?
The cold market,
Can the "top shop" live better?
Judging from the data, this year's catering people have a harder time than last year. According to data from Jiuqian Zhongtai, from January to November this year, a total of 3.36 million restaurants were closed across the country, compared with 2.73 million in the same period of the year, an increase of 23% year-on-year
The data is reflected offline, and there are more and more "prosperous shops for rent". Red Meal Network recently visited the market and found that popular business districts such as Tianhe South Road and Jiangnan West in Guangzhou have seen varying degrees of store closures.
For example, in a section of the Jiangnanxi business district, more than 10 restaurants have closed their doors in just 2 kilometers long, including single stores and chain brands of different categories. Some catering people complained, "This year's catering focuses on one participation." ”
Several restaurants that have closed down on a street, photo by Red Food.com.
There is a general consensus in the industry that one of the main reasons for the collapse of more than one million restaurants is that the market competition is more fierce than in previous years. According to data from Jiuqian Zhongtai, also from January to November, the cumulative number of new restaurants opened nationwide was 2.64 million, 210,000 more than the same period last year.
In the context of fierce competition in the market, "survival" and "living better" have become the common goals of many catering people.
Shen Chen, a new marketing expert, said at the "3rd China Catering Brand Festival" that four types of restaurants will live well in the future, including dominating the list store, Internet celebrity store, time-honored brand, and cost-effective store.
He took the list store as an example to introduce that many consumers are used to searching for business information on Dianping before consumption, and check information such as star ratings, evaluations, and discounts. When consumers search for restaurants, the top stores will appear first on the search results page, and consumers' choices are often born from them, "Few consumers will turn 5-6 pages on the review and then decide what to eat." ”
This means that the catering market has entered the era of "the aroma of wine is also afraid of deep alleys", and catering businesses must not only have good products, but also have the ability to let consumers see their own good products. Otherwise, no matter how good the product is, it will be useless if it can't be sold.
Becoming a top store can increase the probability of being "seen" to a considerable extent.
Picture worm creativity.
And in order to become the dominant store on major platforms, at least one thing to do well is to maintain good reviews. For example, in addition to influencing the star rating of the store, consumer reviews will also be directly displayed to other consumers. If there are negative reviews, but the merchant fails to verify and respond in the first time, when other consumers see these "no one to handle" negative reviews, they will often turn their heads and choose other stores for consumption.
After all, from a consumer's perspective, it's hard for a store to satisfy everyone's taste preferences at the same time. But ignoring negative reviews means that the service attitude of the merchant is not good.
Therefore, in order to be a good shop, in addition to improving the hard power of quality control and service, merchants also need to have the ability to manage evaluation, including the ability to find and respond to evaluations.
How can catering people make good use of consumer evaluation?
In fact, the ability of merchants to manage reviews is not only limited to the reviews of merchant pages on platforms such as Dianping, but also includes tracking and managing business-related content on major mainstream social ** platforms. More importantly, gain insight into the real needs of consumers behind this content.
In other words, evaluation content is an important channel for F&B operators to do user research. Only by doing a good job in user research can we provide a scientific decision-making basis for catering enterprises to do product research and development, improve services, do a good job in marketing, and expand the scale of enterprises. This is especially true in the current fierce competition, Tong Jiquan, director of digital marketing of Yonghe Dawang, has publicly pointed out that the competition in catering is becoming more and more fierce, and restaurant companies want to accurately capture customer needs more than ever.
At present, many well-known brands are promoting user research as an important part of enterprise development. For example, Hefu Lao Mian recently said in its WeChat tweet that the improvement of the brand's services, product optimization, and every bit of progress are inseparable from consumer feedback.
In addition to well-known chain brands, there are also some small and medium-sized catering businesses that are good at operating various social ** platforms (hereinafter referred to as "social media platforms") and actively receiving consumer feedback. However, small and medium-sized businesses rely more on manually checking consumer messages, and also have to search for store-related content on major social ** platforms, and manually identify whether it is real consumer feedback.
Picture worm creativity.
Compared to using professional digital tools to do user research, this approach is undoubtedly relatively inefficient.
For example, when small and medium-sized businesses are flipping through the content of mainstream social platforms one by one, Jiuqian can collect and analyze information in a matter of minutes. For example, after entering "Haidilao" in the search bar of Jiuqian Middle Platform, it only took about 3 minutes to complete the collection and analysis of recent social media content related to Haidilao.
On the results page, it can be clearly seen that among the nearly 1,000 Haidilao-related content on 5 mainstream social media platforms, 745 valid views are available, and some content that has no reference significance is directly eliminated. At the same time, according to the proportion of the number of positive reviews, neutral reviews and negative reviews, the analysis results are obtained from dozens of keywords such as raw materials, products, meals, experiences, and services, and it can be seen at a glance whether consumers' overall sentiment towards these sections of the store is positive.
Screenshot of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
It can be seen that in the analysis business of social media content, Jiuqian Zhongtai can greatly improve efficiency.
In addition, by clicking on the keyword, you can also go back to the original post and quickly understand the content of the original post to understand why consumers made positive or negative reviews. For negative reviews, you can also contact the poster for after-sales service to increase their favorability towards the brand and promote repeat purchases.
At the same time, Jiuqian Zhongtai can also generate a summary of social media content with one click. Still taking Haidilao as an example, Jiuqian Zhongtai has refined 570+ views with reference value, of which 508 are positive evaluations, most of which praise Haidilao's ingredients, taste, service, etc.
Screenshot of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
Among them, many positive comments also mentioned that the birthday experience in Haidilao is good and the sense of ceremony is strong, which is also the reason why Haidilao's birthday-related ** is frequently popular on social media platforms.
Screenshot of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
The negative rating is 62, and the main dissatisfaction lies in the high **, small meal portions, etc.
There are 1,000 Hamlets for a thousand people, and it is not realistic to expect a restaurant to be 100% free of bad reviews, but excellent restaurant companies will continue to work in this direction. For example, in response to the fact that some consumers do not like warm service, some Haidilao stores have launched "do not disturb service";At the same time, this year, it launched a sub-brand with a relatively low unit price, Hi Lao Hot Pot, to meet different types of consumer needs.
Haidilao's ability to respond to meet the needs of different consumers is also due to its strong user analysis capabilities.
In addition to analyzing the social media content of a single brand, Jiuqian Zhongtai can also analyze multiple brands at the same time to compare the consumer reputation of competing products horizontally.
Taking the rural base and Lao Xiang Chicken as an example, Jiuqian Zhongtai shows that the positive evaluation of the product sector, rural base products, stores, experience and other sectors is slightly more than that of Lao Xiang Chicken, and the positive evaluation of marketing and ** is more Lao Xiang Chicken. In fact, in recent years, the marketing actions of Lao Xiang Chicken have indeed performed well, and it has been on the main list of Weibo hot searches several times.
Screenshot of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
It is worth mentioning that Jiuqian Zhongtai can also analyze categories or products, so that entrepreneurs and operators can quickly understand consumers' reputation for a certain category.
Taking this year's hot roast duck as an example, Jiuqian Zhongtai shows that there are 456 positive views and 51 negative views on the recent roast duck in the product dimension, which can be intuitively judged that the recent consumer evaluation of the roast duck is generally positive. Among them, the positive reviews mainly focus on the characteristics of the product, such as strong fragrance and juicy taste;Negative comments mainly focus on small portions, too high spiciness, poor coagulation experience of red oil after soaking for a long time, and too salty taste.
Screenshot of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
In the first dimension, consumers are generally satisfied with the pricing of roast duck, and positive reviews mainly focus on keywords such as high cost performance and preferential treatment.
Screenshot of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
It can be seen that consumers' evaluations are far more than "expensive" or "not expensive", "delicious" or "not delicious", so compared with manual reading, digital tools are not only faster but also very important for reading comprehension.
In fact, Jiuqian Zhongtai is not just a simple keyword crawling, but with the help of LLM large language model technology, read the full text and comments in full to understand the context, understand user emotions as much as possible, and obtain more scientific analysis results", said the relevant person in charge of Jiuqian Zhongtai.
According to reports, Jiuqian Zhongtai is the industry's first user research and analysis tool, with four characteristics: wide coverage platform, scientific analysis, improving human efficiency, and high cost performance, and there is no limit to categories, brands, and the number of uses. Compared with hiring a full-time social media analyst, it is undoubtedly cost-effective.
Conclusion
In fact, digital capabilities have become the core competency of many restaurant companies. For example, a few years ago, Luckin Coffee was known in the industry as a "technology company in the guise of a coffee company", and its comprehensive digital system runs through various sectors such as consumer insight, store management, and corporate operations. Li Yang, CMO of Chen Xianggui's Lanzhou beef noodle brand, also said at the "3rd China Catering Brand Festival" that catering people should make good use of technology to enhance their competitiveness.
As the Internet penetrates into all aspects of life, it is no longer a clueless job for catering businesses to obtain consumer reviews. Catering businesses that can complete this work efficiently and scientifically are obviously more competitive in the market.
Cover image**: Picture worm creativity.