Consumers were just about coming to terms with, rather than making sense of, 11 years (!) of financial, economic and political turmoil, when 12 months ago, the government imposed Lockdown. The resulting unprecedented damage to the economy has affected hospitality more than most.
From a former-diner point of view, eleven months of Lockdown, working from home and cooking for themselves from base ingredients, has provided them with unprecedented insights into meal preparation in terms of cost and quality. It would be unusual for consumer-diners not to apply this experience in assessing the overall value of their post-Lockdown out-of-home meals…
Also, given the job uncertainty arising from the transition from furlough to redundancy, they are increasingly relating every £1 of ‘discretionary’ expenditure to their current and future earnings, assessing the opportunity-cost in terms of alternative uses of the money, like never before. For many, this will cause them to see out-of-home eating as something for special occasions instead of simply a convenient break from home cooking. They will have to be won over on both counts…
Despite being shell-shocked by a year of incarceration, consumer-diners with time to think, have been developing increasing confidence in their common sense when making purchasing decisions. This is in turn driving business and personal expenditure like never before. The same goes for their ‘appetite’ for out-of-home dining…
They are also becoming more savvy. This emerging savvy consumer-diner has evolved from the combination of the mobile, social, cloud and big data developments in most markets. In other words, they will emerge equipped with tools that help them make more informed purchases of hospitality services, like never before.
As the newly-emerging primary driver of demand in hospitality, these savvy consumer-diners must be persuaded that their real needs are being met, for a fair price, and that their purchases of out-of-home meals will deliver more than expected in practice. In other words, this new savvy consumer-diner, if willing and able to spend, will be determined not to accept anything short of good value for money.
Welcome to the new savvy consumers-diners, the professional, discerning buyers who are simply seeking to obtain satisfaction of their out-of-home eating needs in an open market, at a price that compares well with alternatives available, based upon simple but tech-assisted common sense. Therein lies a real opportunity for the good guys in hospitality.
Incidentally, if this seems like more doom and gloom, then we are simply not expressing it properly. In fact, we believe that the emergence of the savvy consumer-diner is the most positive and exciting social development of the continuing cash crisis.
We are now living through the evolution of a tech-assisted common-sense approach to out-of-home eating by increasingly informed consumers, who are prepared to vote with their feet. This is a development that will obviously challenge traditional marketing and selling practices in hospitality, but will provide significant opportunities for those providers that are prepared go back to basics, factor this new reality into their hospitality offerings, and always strive to exceed consumer-diner expectations.
In practice, this means that the savvy consumer-diner is providing an entirely new, more informed basis for suppliers to re-evaluate every aspect of their offering against available alternatives, and ruthlessly eliminate anything that does not clearly demonstrate a total match with latest consumer-diner need, made available in a way that diners want to buy, and is demonstrably better than the competition…
The consumer-diner will return post-Lockdown, but in smaller numbers, more experienced in terms of evaluating the quality and service of out-of-home eating, into a market that will be populated by hospitality-providers that managed to survive the past 12 months, and can only grow at the expense of their competition. It follows that foodservice NAMs now have to decide which of their surviving customers are capable of meeting the above needs of the new savvy consumer-diner. This will then become the basis of determining which of those hospitality providers are designated Invest, Maintain or Divest customers.
Post-Lockdown, we shall enter uncharted waters that will be populated by no more than 50-70% survivors of pre-Lockdown customer portfolio, in fierce competition for a viable share of a diminished pool of what will be savvy consumer-diners.
Your help for the right customers can help some of those survivors to thrive….
