Introduction

Though the concept of offering organic food services by restaurants is not new, consumers of
the UK are showing an increasing interest for organic green foods. While many people have a
perception that operating a restaurant business would be relatively easy comparing to other
types of businesses, the reality is completely different. Restaurant business can, in fact, be
considered as one of those types of business that are most difficult to operate. In general, the
success of a restaurant business heavily depends on some key factors such as, where the
restaurant is located, what are the menu or food items it offers, how is the quality of the
offered food items, and how fast and good it is at providing services to its customers. When
formulating a comprehensive marketing plan, one must keep the above stated considerations
in mind.


Market Summary

The group of six organic green restaurants possesses valid information about the market and
knows a lot about the common characteristics of the market. The six specialist restaurants run
by the organic green group are located around a major city in the Midlands. They have already
obtained brand recognition as a top-end dining for evenings. But individual restaurants face
different intensity of competition based on their locations. And, recently, the company is
experiencing less amount of revenue due to some downturn in sales. The organic green
restaurants group will utilize this information to have a better understanding of the current
market situations, and then come up with possible recommendations to generate more
revenue.

The role of marketing for the groups business

Even if a restaurant is performing pretty well in terms of profitability, the need of marketing
cannot be ignored as it will definitely help increase profits. It is often said that restaurant has
only one major goal, which is to make as more profit as possible. The need of marketing for the
groups restaurant business is also crucial because-
It has been experiencing decrease in sales in different restaurants at different times of
day. Marketing techniques can definitely help the group of business to boost up sales.
In two of the suburban sites, they have specialist vegetarian competitor restaurants run
by a notforprofit training trust serving comparable food close by. Further, they
compete with numerous other topend restaurants. Through formulating effective
marketing plans, they can differentiate their services and thus stand out from other
competitor restaurants.
The competitive situation of each business is marginally different because of their
locations. So there is a need for implementing different marketing strategy for
restaurants located in different places.

Market Demographics

The demographical profile of the customer consists of the geographic, demographic, and
behavior characteristics written below:
Geographic
Six key locations in and around the centre of a major city in the Midlands.
Two of the restaurants are sited in suburban areas
Demographics
Gender: Male and female.
Age: People of all ages
Professional people who work close to the location.
Earn a good amount of disposable income
Eat outside of home several times a week.
Tend to drop by and take foods from higher quality restaurants.
Health conscious people.

Behavior Factors
Take pleasure in having quality meal without making any hamper of their health.
Highly health conscious, careful for having healthy diet.
Have a passion for organic green foods

Market Needs

Organic green restaurants provide the customers with a wide range of top-class, health friendly
organic foods that are not only pleasing to eat but also offer a great value for money in return.
The Organic green restaurants intend to fulfill the following needs of the customers.
Food Choice: A wide selection of health friendly, mouthwatering organic food options.
Quick accessibility: The consumers are served within a very short time frame after
making an order. They can opt for both dine in or take out.
Customer service: The customers have to be amazed by the organic food service they
receive.
Aggressive pricing: All food items need to be priced in a way that they charge no more,
and are perhaps cheaper, than the price of other top-end organic dining facilities.

Market Trends

The market trends consist of following characteristics:
Food quality: Demand for high quality processed food has always been a very common
trend for restaurant industry. The customers are very health conscious as they are
opting for organic green dishes instead of regular dishes offered by any other
restaurants. They are showing an increasing amount of interests for top grade organic
ingredients. They are also learning to recognize qualitative differences.
Presentation of foods: People love to eat those foods that are not only delicious but
also look good. Therefore, good presentation or appearance of dishes does really
matter.
Health awareness: Todays consumers are more than ever concerned about health
issues. They tend to attend gyms and go for physical workouts to maintain a healthy
figure alongside healthy lifestyle. They seek for more healthy alternatives when they
plan for their daily diet.
Variety of food items: The clients want to see a lengthy food menu in the dining table
that consists of a large collection of food items and they wish to select their preferable
dishes from a variety of food items.

One of the greatest reasons for these trends is the fact that restaurants are offering a greater
amount of food items from the past few years. With an increase in the items of foods offered
by various restaurants, the customers have become pickier than ever when choosing the food
items for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Another vital reason for such market trends is the growing
number of restaurants that focus on offering organic foods.

SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is a framework that helps companies, in order to fight against their competitors,
map unbeaten strategies based on their needs by focusing on their competitive strengths and
opportunities (Jeannet and Hennesey, 2010). Thompson and martin (2010) defined SWOT
analysis as an analysis of an organizations strengths and weaknesses alongside the
opportunities and threats present in the external environment. SWOT analysis of the organic
green restaurants is discussed below:

Strengths
Highly trained, customer focused, and dedicated restaurant staff
use of only organic, local ingredients
Strong relationships raw materials or ingredients suppliers
Current market position
Restaurants locations are at the major cities around the Midlands
Restaurants are well located for social events and general eating out.
High quality, organic, but at the same time, value for money meals offerings
Topend dining out market in the evenings
Combined approach, both individual and group level, for promotional and advertising
activities;
Greater marketing budget to develop brand awareness.

Weaknesses
Profit margin is low
Competitive vulnerability is high
The struggle to persistently appear to be cutting edge.
Outdated POS (Point of Service System)

Opportunities
Growing market size with increasing number of health-conscious people who are
interested for organic foods
Strategic alliance with a chain of six restaurants
Adequate funding for running advertising campaigns and raising brand awareness and
Increasing sales opportunities with economic growth
The facility to extend overhead over multiple revenue centers.
Competition weaknesses

Threats
Economic downturn is reducing consumer's disposable income
Increased competition from existing restaurants
Declining sales
New government regulations

Competition

Competition in the organic restaurant industry in the UK is severe. Besides considering top-
end restaurants, not-for-profit and Government run restaurants and other franchises as
competitor; organic green restaurants should also consider independent restaurants as
potential competitor.
Independent organic restaurants: There are a good number of independent restaurants
competing with other independent restaurants and chain restaurants and trying to
obtain market position in the organic food service industry. Although the selection of
independent restaurants is limited and a bit pricey, but they can go a step ahead in
getting more intimate to the customers by focusing on food quality.
Big chain restaurants: Top-end and big chain restaurants have the capability of
dominating other restaurants in terms of marketability. This is because of their ability to
spend more on advertising and to afford bigger spaces in the top locations. Moreover,
chain restaurants can offer better price and easily earn brand recognition than
independent restaurants.
Not-for-profit and Government restaurants: In two of the suburban sites, they have specialist
vegetarian competitor restaurants run by a notforprofit training trust serving comparable
food close by. Several of the Organic Green restaurants are in areas dominated by large
Government offices with in-house catering facilities offering lunches.
Marketing Strategy

In order to reach the marketing objectives of the company, it is essential to build up the project
plan, to conduct required marketing research. Organic foods market segment is basically
targeted towards educated and health-conscious customers who consider intake of daily
organic nutrition through organic foods consumption as an asset for their health. This is the
main fact that plays the most important role in determining marketing strategy for the
company.

Marketing Objectives

The market strategy of organic green restaurants must be able to grab the attention of the
target customers. As the group of organic green restaurant businesses has already know what
kinds of customers they expect to have in their restaurants, they should now be able to tailor
their promotional activities to these specific group of customers. Some of the key marketing
objectives are:
To avoid downturns in sales
To ensure a positive, steady growth each quarter
To realize an increase in repeat customers

Marketing Segmentation

Different market segments with similar food habits tend to respond to different marketing
strategies. Therefore, the promotional activities need to be geared to the specific segments in a
specific way. For restaurants, it is very phenomenal to target the market segment based on
their income. This enables restaurants to modify the pricing of the menu items based on their
level of income.
The organic restaurant market can be segmented into three target populations:
Individuals: People who dine in by themselves such as single high-waged workers
Families: A group of people who are associated together; such as young happy couples,
couples with kids, friends, colleagues, or a group of nuclear relatives dining together.
Take out: People who prefer to order a parcel and take out the organic food in their
home or at different places rather than to eat sitting in the restaurant.

After analyzing other demographic factors, I would recommend to the group of organic green
restaurants to build a customer base that possesses following characteristics:
People with higher disposable income who live nearby (i.e. lonely rich professionals)
Single high-waged professionals of different areas who work close to the locations of
the six chain restaurants.
Highly health conscious people who patronize high quality organic foods(i.e. dieting
women, vegetarians, )

Market Positioning

Positioning is an important strategy that an organization might utilize to create, and sustain,
competitive advantage (Anderson and Vincze, 2000). Firstly, the company should figure out the
basis on which it will fight against the competitors, and then it needs to position its services in a
comprehensible and distinctive way (Meek, Meek and Ensor, 2001). Strong positioning is often
considered to be a preventive measure taken by marketing personnel to provide the business
with a protection against competition. A perfect market positioning will leverage the organic
green restaurants competitive edge:

Product: Organic green restaurants must use high-quality, fresh organic food
ingredients to prepare the food menu items. To maintain an aesthetic quality, they
should also take the presentation of food items into consideration.
Service: For restaurants, there is no alternative of providing the customers with superior
service. Organic green restaurants need to develop a customer-concentrated aptitude.
They will provide sufficient training to their current and future employees to make it
sure that their consumers can have a pleasurable dining experience. Further, when
selecting new employees, they should recruit those younger people with dynamic
personalities who are fast as well as smart at what they do.
Home delivery service: Organic green restaurants need to introduce home delivery
service to grab the attention of take-out customer segment. Many people love the
idea of ordering foods through telephone call or internet and then get the delivery at
home.

Marketing Mix
The right choice of the marketing mix helps the organization to communicate the benefits of its
products and services to the consumers (OShaughnessy, 2003).

Product
To become established as one of the best organic food providers in the local market, the
organic green restaurants must create a distinctive image in the consumers mind by providing
them with superior values. They will offer organic foods in three ways- one, table service at the
restaurant; two, take-out from the restaurant; and, three, delivery to home or office. As they
are experiencing decrease in sales during the day times, they should produce less quality of
foods in day times. For night times, as they can sell more, they should add more organic food
items and produce a larger quantity.

Place
The restaurants are located in six major, commercial places around the Midlands where lots of
customer segments can access with convenience. As they make comparatively more sales at
night than day times, they should ensure that they can accommodate their customers. The
restaurants need to be clean and well-decorated where people can easily comfort themselves.
They can also re-think the interior design so that more tables and seats can be set up if there is
a sudden increase of customers. Further, interior decoration and the placement of seats also
matter for the convenient movement both of the customers and waitresses.

Price
All of the organic foods offered by the group of organic green restaurants are not only of great
quality, but also of fair price. As the restaurants offer value for money meals, it should
definitely help them stand one step ahead in the competition. However, more research on the
functional value of pricing should be carried out to have a better understanding of how the
pricing affects customer decision. Moreover, figuring out possible solutions to minimize
operating costs and ingredient purchasing costs can definitely be of help to offer better price.

Promotion
According to Arvidsson (2006), advertising agencies and public relation specialists are
responsible to anticipate the potential of evolving goodness out of the brand image. People
nowadays are more being more internet-oriented; they read newspapers online, love to spend
time in social networking sites and search for anything on the internet that comes into their
mind. Levy (2003) opined that consumers prefer to be personally addressed as it gives them
some extra importance. One of easiest ways to reach to the individual customers is to use the
internet based promotional activities (i.e. email marketing). Therefore, the company must go
for online promotional campaigns rather than spending a large amount of money for traditional
advertising strategies such as ads in newspapers and magazines, blanket mailing, placing ads in
the yellow pages, radio ads, etc. Moreover, besides targeting the local social communities or
groups of people who love and are passionate about organic foods, the restaurants should also
focus on online communities and groups that are formed on different interests related to green
food consumption, vegetarian, etc. The restaurants can also come into agreement with some
local hotels and motels to run promotional activities (i.e. giving away discount coupons) for
them.

Recommendations
Profit maximization has always been the prime goal of all businesses. Keeping this profit
maximization goal in mind, some important marketing recommendations for organic green
restaurants are:
Get more customers: Try to bring as many new customers as possible and at the same
time convince existing customers to come more often.
Sell more items: To Increase the average check amount, try to persuade customers to
buy more items by offering daily attractive deals
Sell the right things: To maximize profit, try to encourage customers to get the more
profitable items, especially those foods whose contribution margin is bigger than other
items.

As the competitive situation of each restaurant is marginally different than others, the group of
business must figure out which restaurant faces more competition and which faces less
competition. After figuring out the intensity of competition for individual business, they need to
consider spending more money and running stronger advertising campaigns for those
restaurants that are facing higher competition. For example, in the city centre, they compete
with numerous other topend restaurants. So they should be extra careful when determining
the pricing and other marketing strategy so that the restaurants in the city centre can have an
added advantage to fight against numerous other topend restaurants. They can also combine
food diversification, for example- adding Italian, Indian and Arabic foods, with setting up low
pricing strategy to grab the attention of new customer segments.

In general, people of suburban are less likely to visit restaurants very often comparing to the
people living in the Midlands cities. Moreover, not-for-profit organizations and organizational
that are run by Government usually offer a better price than other commercial restaurants.
Therefore, the group of organic green restaurants should develop a highly competitive
marketing strategy for the two restaurants located in the suburban areas.

Contingency Planning

The group of organic restaurants also needs to develop a clearly stated contingency planning
for avoiding the consequences of difficulties such as overly aggressive and debilitating actions
by competitors. They should also be aware and prepared to deal with worst case risks such as
having to liquidate equipment or intellectual property to cover liabilities.
The organic restaurants could be more profitable business with the possibility of long-term-
investments. The group of organic green restaurants must consider this fact. They also need to
formulate a long-term financing plan along with marketing plans.

References

Jeannet, J. P. and Hennessey, H. D. (2010) Global Marketing Strategies, 6th ed. USA: Houghton
Mifflin
Thompson, J. and Martin, F. (2010). Strategic Management: Awareness & Change. 6th ed.
Cengage Learning EMEA, p. 140, 817
Anderson, C.H. and Vincze, J.W., 2000. Strategic Marketing Management: Meeting the Global
Challenge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Meek, H., Meek, R. and Ensor, J., 2001. Strategic Marketing Management: Planning and Control.
Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann.
OShaughnessy, J., 2003. The marketing power of emotions, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003
Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: meaning and value in media culture, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Levy, S., 2003. Roots of marketing and consumer research at the University of Chicago,
Consumption, Markets and Culture, 6(2): 99-110.