Why does a brand new restaurant need public relations?
To insure the critical initial success of your business, that's all.

My first restaurant's first day was quite busy (all my friends and family came). The next day (and many more after that) were DEAD. I almost went out of business because I naively assumed that somehow people would just find out about me and beat a path to my door. WRONG. I had to wait until my first review before anyone knew I existed. I thought "word of mouth" would spread like wildfire and so I didn't need advertising or public relations. WRONG. Even years down the road, a PR savvy competitor almost put me out of business without ever cooking a meal (I was a proud chef).

Without a good start-up PR plan (and a good publicist) you may never get past that critical 6 weeks after opening. It is cheap insurance for the early survival of your business. I would never advise anyone to invest in a restaurant venture without this in play.

A good start-up public relations campaign is arguably the most important part of your marketing plan and critical to the long term success of your business.

From the introduction:

Any where from three to six months before your restaurant opens, you need to begin working on this opening PR program, to ensure the success of your restaurant from the very start. This package will help you do the up front networking and media work, put together a winning launch event, and get your first year of PR and marketing under way, without putting you and your investors further into debt like hiring an agency or a publicist might have done.

Never before in the history of the food service industry has PR been so important to an operator’s success. There was a time when a good reputation alone was enough to maintain a successful business, or that opening the doors of a new restaurant would automatically draw people in. Word of mouth was spread from observer, to friend to customer, to customer, and a place succeeded or failed based on that.

In today's sophisticated, technological universe, where mass communication (a.k.a, the media) is the "word of mouth," simply opening your doors just isn't good enough. Your customers have to hear about it, read about it, see it, blog about it. They have to know about it virally, through media and all its channels.

In the last ten years, we have seen an explosion in "food" media. We have The Food Network, a twenty-four hour cable channel devoted to cooking, entertainment, and the subject of food. Every newspaper across the country has food coverage one or more times a week. And the number of food magazines, not to mention food talk in magazines ("celebrity" food preferences, top chefs’ favorite recipes, seasonal, local, green…you name it!), has skyrocketed. Blogs devoted to a single ingredient are commonplace now, and every other food blogger is some kind of critic. People are not only talking about food, they are living it, practically every waking moment of the daily lives.

In this brave new world, the talk about your restaurant, catering company or retail store doesn’t begin with your customers anymore. It begins (and for some, ends) in the media. Today, operators that receive positive exposure in the media when their restaurants open, and operators who cultivate relationships within the media and related industries after opening, are the ones who grow and succeed.

This workbook, by restaurant publicist Stephanie Faison is a no-brainer must-have for your restaurant start-up. Stephanie's philosophy is to empower you as much as possible with simple techniques and easy to obtain resources to launch your own PR campaign (I still strongly recommend hiring a professional PR consultant as well). Take advantage of this unique product to become familiar with a powerful, affordable way to get big publicity and lots of new customers.