The Handheld Digital Menu: Building a Relationship with Gen Y Customers3 min read
A handheld digital menu is far more than just a replacement for the printed restaurant menu. Last spring, Graziadio Voice, the biz-school-managed group blog predominantly written by students at the Pepperdine University George L. Graziadio School of Business and Management (the “Graziadio School”), which serves as a forum for students to share their experiences and expertise, called the handheld digital menu “a powerful customer relationship management tool that opens a unique channel of communication between restaurant operators and their customers.”
Why is what these biz-school students have to say about the handheld digital menu important? According to the LocalCollegeExplorer.com – a website of Top Colleges and Universities in the U.S., the average age of students enrolled full time in the Graziadio School is 27 years old. That puts the typical full-time MBA student at the Graziadio School center of the highly sought after 18-34 year old demographic. Today, that demographic is exclusively defined by Generation Y (“Gen Y”) — the 84 million people born between 1976 and 1995 – the generation commonly referred to as the “Millennials.” In other words, the group of typical full-time MBA student bloggers at Graziadio Voice provides valuable insight into the Millennials’ perspective.
From the Millennial point of view, these student bloggers unanimously agree that the “handheld digital menu completely changes the way restaurants and customers communicate.” Notably, Graziadio Voice points out that the handheld digital menu encourages restaurant patrons to provide feedback on the dining experience by enabling comments and posts to be uploaded to social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, as Mark Brandau, a writer for Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN), explains, Millennials’ exuberance for smart phones and social networking sites make them very receptive to new marketing technologies, like the handheld digital menu, that leverage social media.
But Executive Vice-President of WD Partners, Dennis Lombardi, says, Millennials are not just receptive to new technologies like the handheld digital menu, which enable instant feedback through social networks; they “embrace” them. So much so, in fact, that Kat Cole, the newly promoted President of Cinnabon, says social media is the key to reaching the extremely social, but elusive, 18-34 year old demographic, who, as we have noted before, “are always connected and are avid users of social networking and social media…[and] expect to be entertained.” (Be sure to read our previous blog) Cole recommends that restaurant operators leverage social media by developing “contests, activities and events” that appeal to the Millennials’ commonly-held belief that they can achieve almost instantaneous online stardom, by giving them an opportunity for the recognition and attention they crave in mass forums like Facebook and Twitter. Lombardi agrees that restaurants need a “social-media strategy” to reach Millennials, but cautions that they also need to diligently “manage [their] brand’s social image online as a great place to meet.”
The handheld digital menu is central to a restaurant’s social-media strategy and its online social image. It is also key to reaching the 18-to-34 year old demographic. When the group of young Millennials at Graziadio Voice says that the handheld digital menu is “a powerful customer relationship management tool,” they are telling restaurant proprietors how they can build and maintain a relationship with them and other Gen Y consumers. NRN says “Social, tech-savvy Millennials offer big sales opportunities — if you can get, and keep, their attention.” According to the Gen Y group at Graziadio Voice, for a restaurant, the way to get and keep their attention is to unleash the full power of a handheld digital menu.
Disclaimer: This is an independent report sourced from one or more news articles and or press releases; none of the company’s, entities or technologies digressed in this report are affiliated with or a client of Aptito.
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