After the hall food pressed the pause button, many restaurants offered great moves.

For example, some diners said: the epidemic has made me find many prefabricated dishes in restaurants. In the future, I can buy them online directly to save money.

Others came forward to declare a break: all restaurants selling prefabricated vegetables during the epidemic will lose me after unsealing.

However, KFC and McDonald’s, which are also central kitchens, have not lost their reputation at all. They even became hard currency for group buying during the isolation period. Why? The answer may be marketing.

There is a slogan often said in the catering industry, “I’d rather eat a thousand times for one person than one thousand people”, but this slogan doesn’t seem to work in the era of social media.

The special circumstances in the past three years have made the catering industry seem to be on a roller coaster. One is the imminent retaliatory consumption, and the other is the sudden suspension of hall food. Under such a background, both large-scale chain catering and small catering are difficult. The former strives for survival in the cyclic adjustment of closing stores, while the latter is broken to pieces by a big wave.

According to the data, the catering industry suffered a heavy blow during the epidemic. In the first October of 2021, 784000 catering enterprises in China were cancelled or revoked, a year-on-year increase of 18.1%.

In addition to disappearing, the food enterprises left behind are no better than where to go. According to the data of the National Bureau of statistics, the catering industry is facing increasingly high costs. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the prices of some foods such as vegetables and chicken increased by 16% and 6% on average. In 2022, a quarter has passed, and the motif of the catering industry is still “careful standby”.

As a result of reality, the marketing battle in the catering industry has also become heroic and strange. On the one hand, small restaurants join the express class of talent shop and are crazy to feed traffic opium. On the other hand, chain restaurants hold high and fight, and the central kitchen vows to form an alliance with industrialization.

Finally, after a gust of wind, the former presented a collapse full of details, while the latter ushered in a “systematic” cosmetic surgery in the unified arrangement of food materials.

Catering marketing, concept has changed

In fact, the word marketing was not often mentioned in the catering industry before, especially in the field of Chinese food. Even today, there is no systematic marketing theory in the catering industry.

It can be said that for a long time, Chinese catering has followed a very pragmatic logic, studying food products, services and environment, and paying attention to procurement, management and efficiency. However, few enterprises jump out and say that their success is due to marketing.

However, after China on the tip of the tongue was broadcast in 2012, the local catering industry began to have obvious differentiation. In the view of catering person song Xuan, this year is “the year of the rise of the mass catering market”. Since then, the middle-class market began to rise, and the Internet entered the catering industry and became an important efficiency helper.

Accordingly, there is a more professional division of labor in the catering business system.

In the following years, dazzling online popular catering brands emerged one after another. After the rise of short videos, there was a wave of online popular store recommendation, as well as the spread of diner word-of-mouth promoted by local lifestyle platforms such as public comments.

In the final analysis, behind these phenomena is also the result of multi-dimensional changes in the catering industry. From the enrichment of operation channels to the change of consumer demand and consumption mode, a series of marketing can be involved in the catering industry.

Now, take a tour around Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and you will find that there are too many chain restaurants. Hot pot, Hunan cuisine, Coconut Chicken and every commercial body in the city seem to have similar restaurants.

Like “every consumer product is worth redoing”, the catering industry is beginning to think so. Therefore, we all focus on the subdivided areas. The service of Haidilao is characteristic. We focus on milk tea and duck blood. Even this is not subdivided enough. The catering industry began to focus on a drainage mode of signature dishes.

Chef Fei’s fried meat with chili, chicken soup of rural chicken and yellow beef with spicy cocoa. After several explorations, catering practitioners walked out of the restaurant style thinking and began to locate the category.

The reality has proved that this does have room to play. If you rashly say a brand, you may not be familiar with it, but rice, noodles, chili fried meat and so on are common categories. If the brand is firmly bound to this category, like KFC and fried chicken, Domino and pizza, it is highly likely that each will win.

But after the small win? What is a moat? Marketing has always been a war of consumption of resources.

When the day comes when there are too many choices and too few eyes, it will still be difficult to get customers.

Food can be standardized. What about marketing

There is no doubt that the catering industry has exhausted its brains in this marketing change in which the eight immortals cross the sea to show their magic powers.

For example, chain restaurants have opened the service volume after the point volume. Banu connotes Haidilao, and even wet wipes are printed with “no excessive service”, while small cattle compete for Haidilao in the cooking industry. You have “women’s manicure” and I have “Princess hair”. You can give dishes as gifts, then I will be dissatisfied with the service and free of charge.

Even, catering brands have played a leisurely role in industrial integration. They rinse hot pot in KTV and kill restaurants to eat Sichuan food. As consumers, there is no doubt that one day, restaurants can eat and beautify at the same time. Although this close play method is not particular, it works well for the time being.

There are also fast-food giants who are not idle. From the popularity of “crazy four literature” on social media to KFC’s registration of “crazy Thursday” as a trademark not long ago, to the recent “cluck cluck” social media business of Chinese fast food such as local chicken, in the era of scarce attention, even catering brands are making every effort to build social currency.

In fact, catering marketing has never been so powerful and fragile as today.

The strong side is that the business driven by social media is easy to detonate. In the past, with the blessing of online marketing, the catering industry has produced many stylized catering cultures, and a large number of chain restaurants have poured out. Even combined with the role of the platform, it has proliferated a new industrial chain.

But I’m afraid the bad side can’t be avoided. Under the standardized thinking, excessive emphasis on online popularity traffic will lead catering brands into a new competitive dilemma. For example, when the taste of food is uniformly measured, it seems that only marketing can work hard.

As an immediate example, McDonald’s and KFC, which are regarded as the concentrated embodiment of American industrialized commercial civilization, were once regarded as the light of catering and the other side of the dream model of many Chinese restaurants,