Injecting your signature drinks with pizzazz
and style
Shaking up the Hits!
- by
Robert Plotkin
What
you really don’t want to have happen is for your guests to order your
signature drinks only to find that there’s nothing special about them. The
natural presumption is that if the specialties in the front of the house are
lacking, so must the specialties coming out of the kitchen.
A
signature drink needs three things to become an enduring classic — great
taste, good production value and perceived value. Successful specialty drinks
invariably have an intriguing captivating flavor, one not easily replicated
without being privy to the recipe. If your guests want to taste it again,
they’ll have to come back.
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3 oz Sutter Home Cabernet Sauvignon
1 oz Shakka Red Apple
1/2 oz Grenadine
1 oz Pineapple Juice
1 oz Cranberry Juice
Splash lemon-lime soda
Garnish with a maraschino cherry, 2 apple balls, lime and orange wedge
squeezed. You can make the apple balls with a melon baller. Pour over ice in a
big glass.
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Applebee's Drink Menu:-
SUMMER SQUEEZE®
Applebee's electrifying lemonade. A sweet classical blend of Bacardi Limón® &
our fresh lemonade mixed over ice.
BAHAMA MAMA
A
frosty Caribbean concoction with Malibu® Coconut-flavored Rum, Crème de
Banana®, pineapple & orange juice served with fresh pineapple & a cherry.
Sky
Blue Martini 1 1/4 once Sky Vodka, 3/4 once Blue Curacao, 1/4 once lime, sever
in chilled cocktail glass with lemon twist.
People buy with their eyes, making production value a critical consideration.
A signature drink must look special, like something one couldn’t easily
concoct at home. Unusually colored drinks attract attention and stir the
imagination. Don’t discount the importance of aroma — the better a drink
smells, the better it sells.
Even
the act of hand shaking a drink enhances its production value. The sights and
sounds of a drink being masterfully prepared certainly improve its
marketability. Perceived value in a specialty drink renders down to good
quality at a fair price. Sticking with high quality brands and products is an
unerring strategy.
Likewise, people know when they’re being gouged on price and rarely will they
allow themselves to be consistently taken.
Pizzazz Injections
Embellishing drinks is a classic way to spark interest. For instance, there’s
a wide array of fresh fruit, vegetables, candies, pretzels, and cookies that
can be used to garnish drinks. And where’s it written that a Bloody Mary can
only be garnished with stalk of celery?
Among the other more creative options are a scallion, boiled shrimp, a crab
claw, a Slim Jim or beef jerky, asparagus, cucumber spears, or a pepperoncini,
to name but a few. Garnishing is an art, not a burden.
Glassware is another vehicle for enhancing a cocktail’s presentation.
Companies such as Libbey and Anchor-Hocking have catalogs filled with
interesting, cost-effective specialty glassware. In a world where first
impressions are often the most significant, ensuring that drinks look their
best is a marketing imperative.
Adding pizzazz to a drink may involve changing its presentation. For example,
create a Meltdown Raspberry Margarita by serving the Chambord on the side, and
letting your customers pour the liqueur themselves. The liqueur will slowly
wind its way down through the drink adding the marvelous flavor of raspberries
and creating a striking presentation.
Swirls are also a style of presentation loaded with pizzazz. Swirls involve
blending two different drinks— a piña colada and strawberry daiquiri for
instance— and combining them in the same glass. The resulting drink is both
delicious and visually intriguing.
The
question may occur to some, why do I have to build better specialty drinks?
What’s wrong with the drinks I’m marketing now? Perhaps nothing. However, your
clientele has to pass many other restaurants to get to your front door. Are
you sure that serving them tired, uninspired specialties is in your best long-
term interests?
Selling the Sizzle, Not the Steak
You’re not shy about letting your clientele know what food specials you’re
offering. You take great pains to develop a food menu that will portray your
bill of fare in the best possible light. Then you instruct your servers to be
assertive and suggest appetizers and desserts to your clientele.
Each is an advisable marketing technique. But what marketing plan have you
set in motion for your bar? Before you answer, remember that the profit
margins behind the bar exceed those in the kitchen. All things considered,
internally marketing your beverage program makes good financial sense. To that
end, you have several tools that you can use to your best advantage.
Without question, your service staff provides the most effective internal
marketing, and that sales effort starts with training. Your staff needs to
become familiar with suggestive sales techniques for beverages, which in
essence are the same as those used to promote the sales of appetizers, wine,
and desserts.
The
point to stress to your staff, however, is that like food they have to become
adept at spotting natural opportunities to use suggestive selling, such as
when a guest is unsure as to what to order, or a couple is celebrating a
special occasion.
You
also need to impress upon your staff that their efforts will greatly
contribute to the guests’ overall experience in your establishment, as well as
positively impacting the business’s bottom line.
Another invaluable tool at your disposal is the bar menu. In it you can
promote your house signature drinks, draft and bottled beers, appetizers and
bar food items. Bar menus should be dynamic, exciting and full of color. It
should also be easy to read in low lighting.
Bar
menus afford guests the opportunity to casually peruse the entire scope of
your beverage marketing. The staff can then follow-up and close the sale.
Table tents also support your operation’s marketing efforts. The combinations
of marketing devices are highly effective, not too mention profitable.
The
strategy for increasing beverage profits is straightforward. Create a line of
delicious, one-of-a- kind cocktails, drinks that are of such exceptional
quality and taste that they serve as your trademark. Then, in every
conceivable way, let the world know about them. Like the creator of a better
mousetrap, people will beat a path to your door.
Marketing Alcohol-Free
What
if you found out that there was a large and growing segment of the population
that you weren’t catering to? These are people who want to enjoy the vitality
and ambiance of your establishment, and are primed and ready to spend some of
their hard earned discretionary income.
However, since you haven’t identified their particular wants and needs, they
go and spend their discretionary income at someone else’s business. Well,
that’s essentially what’s happening if you don’t actively market alcohol-free
beverages. More than a passing fad, they are now part of the dynamics of our
industry.
Today, people are more predisposed to socializing without alcohol. There are
numerous reasons why, including stricter DWI laws, health concerns, caloric
content, and, of course, personal preference. This trend has propelled
alcohol-free products into a multi-billion dollar industry, and the fastest
growing category of beverages in the country.
In
addition to increased consumer demand, another reason to market alcohol-free
products is that they typically command the same profit margins as their more
potent counterparts. Also, marketing alcohol- free beverages incurs no
third-party liability and precipitates no service-related problems
From a management standpoint, incentives for selling
alcohol-free beverages
are rife. An important aspect to marketing alcohol-free specialty drinks is to
do it in the same manner, and with the same production value, as you do other
alcoholic products, such as a specialty drink menu.
You
should present in your menu a balanced, broad selection of alcohol-free
products, so that there are products to appeal to the largest segment of the
market. Also price them in-line with your bar’s other products. If priced too
low, service personnel will be hesitant to market them; if priced too high,
your clientele will react negatively as if they are being gouged.
Table tents are also particularly effective in marketing alcohol-free
beverages. A well designed, graphically appealing table tent has an immediate
affect on customers as it’s often the first marketing piece they see. In
addition, table tents promoting alcohol-free drinks and beverages reemphasize
your marketing commitment to your service staff.
Getting your employees to fully support any beverage program is essential to
its success. As the people who will be marketing the alcohol-free beverages,
they need to rid themselves of any lingering negative attitudes they may have
towards them.
Furthermore, they need to look for opportunities to market alcohol- free
beverages. For example, upselling a bottled water to someone who orders a club
soda, or an alcohol-free cocktail to a person who is reluctant to order
another alcoholic drink. Servers need to believe in the quality and basic
appeal of alcohol-free beverages to be successful selling them.
So
go ahead and serve your guests a thick, rich milkshake, a tall glass of bubble
tea, or perhaps a raspberry-flavored lemonade. Maybe they’d rather sip on a
caffé latte or mug of hot cocoa with a scoop of French vanilla ice cream.
Whatever their personal preferences may be, the creative ideas captured in
this book will keep your guests enthralled for years to come.
