Jennifer Bell feels right at home in the restaurant industry.
“When I started working in restaurants, I always say that I found my people,” says Bell, chief marketing officer at Lettuce Entertain You, a family-owned restaurant group, founded in 1971, with more than 120 restaurants and 60 brands across the country.
“It is the kind of person that is willing to be on their feet all day, work really hard, collaborate, work together. Restaurants are like putting on a show every day. There’s the prep, the opening, and the closing, and then you do it all over again the next day. It takes a certain type of enthusiasm, energy, and personality.”
Bell has been with the brand for almost 25 years, and has been chief marketing officer for more than five of those years. The daughter of a salesman, this role allows her to combine her love of restaurants and her knowledge of marketing.
The brand balances legacy with modern marketing. Its cross-restaurant loyalty program has been going strong for almost 50 years, with some of the same members, but it also includes a brand new app that makes it easy for people to make reservations.
“We customized the app to take away any pain points,” says Bell. “Say you want to go out with some friends on a Thursday night and you don’t have a reservation, you can look on the app and see the availability and quickly make a reservation. We’re working on adding payment to the app to make it really seamless.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Bell from her office in Chicago to talk restaurant innovation, loyalty and Gen Z. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How do you navigate all those different brands?
It’s really easy with great people. What Lettuce Entertain You does better than anybody is hire great people to work for the company. I have a team of people here at corporate who manage the Lettuce brand and become experts in social media, PR, in graphic design. We even have an engineering team. They work on really understanding those different areas of marketing. Then we also have divisional marketing teams that operate a collection of different restaurants. They’re watching how customers are interacting with the individual brands and they’re doing the brand-specific marketing. They work together and collaborate with my team on projects. They own a lot of the direct communication to their own customers.
It’s just fun because there are a lot of moving parts. We discovered that even among the same brand of restaurants if we have three different locations, they might have three totally different types of customers. Nothing is the same about these three locations other than the fact that they serve the same menu. The top five items aren’t the same. Everybody and how they interact or behave with the brand is different. And so that’s a challenge.
We get by with great teams of people, experts in different areas, and a lot of processes. I remember when we hit our 99th and 100th locations, everything that worked prior to that stopped working. It was that tipping point where we became larger and needed to update our process. We learn as we go. We pivot. We evaluate. We get groups of people together to work on projects, ask the right questions, and then evolve.
Can you talk about your loyalty programs?
Bob Wattel, founder of our marketing team and founding partner of Lettuce Entertain You, created our loyalty program almost 40 years ago. I now have the pleasure of running it. He had the vision that we have this distinct strength of having a variety of multiple brands. Wouldn’t it be great to give people loyalty points and engagement across all the brands? He got the idea from the frequent flier programs from the airlines. Forty years ago, you did not see loyalty programs for full-service fine dining restaurants anywhere. We were early adopters. We’ve built that over time. We have customers that have been with us since back then that are still with us today.
We recently launched a new app, conducted a customer acquisition campaign, and lowered the average age of our loyalty members by 10 years. We’re seeing segments between 25 and 45 years old. Loyalty, to me, is about innovating. It’s about recognizing and providing better hospitality for our best customers.
What new innovations are you seeing in just restaurant experience?
The restaurant industry is really interesting because there are a lot of things you can do digitally, but you can’t dine digitally. Your innovation needs to really support the things that people spend the most time on by creating efficiencies for employees or taking away pain points for customers. Efficiency for employees is using technology like a better scheduling system to make sure you’re on budget.
The app is an example of customer efficiency. You don’t have to carry a card or know your number; it is in the app. The more efficient we make it for you, the more you’ll use it. You might order carryout and delivery once a week, and we have a simple one-click reorder. Technology should only be implemented if it provides efficiency for employees or better hospitality to guests. Doing it just because it’s cool and new isn’t really my thing.
What is your approach to focusing on the customer in their entire experience with the brands?
We’ve been in business for 53 years. Rich Melman, our founder, founded the company in a new, innovative way. He created restaurants that were different –they played good music had waitresses in jeans and made casual dining a thing. He also really listened to guests. His big thing was talking to customers while they were dining, hearing what they had to say, taking that information, and acting upon it. Feedback wasn’t just when somebody complained that this was cold. He wanted to know why it was cold how it got cold where we could improve and what we could do to prevent that from happening to the next guest.
We want every customer to have a great experience with us. Sometimes the industry is tough. There’s a lot of moving parts. Everybody has to do their position and work together in harmony. Sometimes that doesn’t happen and sometimes the guests can get affected by that. What I think we did better than anyone, is recognize and reassure the guest. It was about apologizing, refunding, whatever we needed to do to own our mistakes and then inviting them back in and showing them what we really could do. Some of our most loyal and our most valuable customers were customers who had painful experiences that gave us a second chance. We were able to win them back. If we make a mistake, if I talk to them if I say, ‘I’m so sorry, we really messed this up, but here’s what we want to do for you.’ They’re great with that. We own it. We want to prevent it. They seem happy at the end of the conversation.
How are you thinking about Gen Z?
We know that Gen Z is going to be a big audience. Within the next five years, Gen Z is predicted to make up 30 percent of the workforce. Ten years ago we were pivoting towards the millennials, which is one of the reasons why we created the app because we knew that millennials wanted to do something digitally. They’re not going to sign up for a pen-and-paper program and they didn’t cook at home.
Now we want to be able to get to know Gen Z, which behaves differently.n. They’re very purpose-driven. As an organization, one of our cultural tenets is the culture of caring. That’s something that I want to make sure that we connect with that audience. We’re in this together. They care about sustainability. We’ve gone to paper gift cards and we’ve gone to paper products, no straws. We’re composting. Connecting with them on those levels is important but we’re only scratching the surface. This is the first generation where they don’t know anything but the digital experience. Just like we did with the millennials, we’re going to have to test and learn and adjust.
What’s next for the organization?
What’s next for me is payment, understanding how to quickly get guests to be able to pay and leave, whether it’s paying at the table or paying on the app. The next thing is really understanding those new customers that come in. There’s a magic number, we call it the magic number three where when we get a guest to visit, we need to get them to visit two more times within the year. And once they hit the third visit, they then become extremely loyal. Three visits turns into six or more visits. We’re really focused on this new audience that we’ve acquired over the first quarter and really getting them through our funnel. Making sure that we’re getting them to be loyal advocates of the brand. then looking at our storytelling and our digital marketing and understanding the growth in that area.
