The restaurant industry is expanding at a strong pace again, but there's a difference to the growth and the strategies driving it. Chains are creating opportunities by peering further into the future and anticipating the trends in consumer preferences, restaurant recruitment, financing, politics and restaurant operations. They're hungering for ideas, innovation and insight.
Forecasters have divined a larger sales role for social media in 2012 and beyond, but that’s where the crystal ball goes wonky. Fortunately for restaurateurs, Facebook has agreed to foretell some of the why’s and how’s for their channel.
In the mind of marketing consultant Tom Feltenstein, branding is how your brand makes people feel about themselves.
Struggling to reach staffers who seem lost in their own world? Well, have you thought about pottery? That’s the improbable route Bill Strickland took when he set out to turn the disadvantaged of his native Pittsburgh into choice job candidates all but vibrating with enthusiasm. Now a world-renowned motivational authority, Strickland has agreed to recount how he molds workforce stars from prospects that don’t appear to fit the system. His delivery at the Restaurant Leadership Conference promises to be as unusual as the training approach he’s taken.
At age 84, Bernie Marcus wonders if restaurateurs and other small-business operators will be denied the sort of Cinderella life he earned through sweat and smarts. That’s why the co-founder of The Home Depot plans to make an impassioned case during the Restaurant Leadership Conference for standing up to anti-business forces.