Marketing Management
Learning Plan 3

Schallie’s
Family
Dining

Schallie’s Family Dining is a three-restaurant chain in the Midwest, offering medium priced family dining. They have kept to a traditional menu since the chain started in 1990. Their strategic planning process indicated that they have not kept pace with changes in the industry, and are in need of research and recommendations on future offerings to their customers.

The world has changed a lot in the last twenty three years. A family restaurant was something frequented any night if the week with your entire family and was affordable as well as convenient and normally everybody knew each other. You could usually feed your family for just a little more than it cost to cook at home. Now, you can walk into a restaurant a block from your home and not know anyone. Going out to dinner is so expensive. Making a meal at home is cheaper than going through a drive through for the entire family. Everything is different. You need to make it worthwhile for a family to come to your restaurant instead of going home or hitting a drive through.

Everyone in the entire restaurant is constantly on their mobile device no matter where you are and social media has taken over. People get deals and updates on their phones which may prompt them to come to your establishment and everything has to be family friendly, clean, and meaningful to want to visit as well as environmentally friendly and having food that is healthy.

A smart company needs to partake in social media, advertise, and make them known in their community to survive. You need to have that special something that brings people back again and again to stay in business. Working with schools and churches is a good way to get involved. Having a monthly day where proceeds go to a local school or church gets families in the door to see what you have to offer. After that you need to advertise deals and do whatever you can to keep people coming back.

Food preferences are acquired as a child. Children learn which foods are edible and decide which foods taste good. All cultures have preferred foods, and food preferences can change through copying, diffusion and migrating of other cultures into American dining. On special occasions, we have feasting foods, such as a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. Many cultures have food restrictions and taboos which need to be known about. Food restrictions and taboos include both plant and animal resources.

Broad based menus are nice because there is a lot to choose from but in a family owned business it is more likely that there are certain specials each day and a basic menu. In Wisconsin, I also take part in the traditional fish on Friday every week. It is a nice time to get together with friends or family outside the house. This is something not served any other day of the week but still brings in good business. A lot of places have tacos on Tuesday and some have chicken dinners on Wednesday or one day over the weekend. Having this instead of a broad menu every day of the week saves on the costs of food and overhead with spoilage if it is not a regularly wanted item.

Current trends in American dining in a traditional restaurant setting begin with how food is ordered and served. Each person is expected to order an entree for their self, along with any appetizer, salad, soup, or desserts they wish to have. Over the course of the meal each dish is served in the appropriate order and everybody concentrates on his own dish with sharing kept to a minimum. This is done on a table where everyone is normally a same distance from each other eating off of matching dinnerware.

Compared to eating at home, dining out is expensive anywhere these days and it is a luxury that most people cannot do very often. Unless nights and weekends are busy with school stuff, karate, bowling or brigade I prefer to cook at home. It is much cheaper and