Gamification and marketing games for your restaurant

If you own a restaurant or a cafe, you don’t need anyone else to tell you it’s a competitive industry. Approximately 60% of new restaurants fail in their first year, and even for established restaurants, staying in the game is half the battle. If you’re in a smaller town or city, you’re dealing with a smaller market, and fighting for your share of a much smaller pool of diners, and if you’re in a bigger city with far more potential customers, you’re multiplying your competition.

Regardless of how good your food is, whether you’re making the best meatballs in the city, boasting a parmigiana recipe that you can trace the origin of to one of your ancestors in Sicily, or even running an establishment that’s the home of an award winning steak pie, if nobody knows you’re there, or the restaurants across the street are running circles around you with their marketing strategy, you’re already behind the 8-ball. You need to be simultaneously attracting new customers to your business, and making dining with you an experience that both they, and returning patrons, can’t get enough of. You need to be creating loyalty.

So how do you do that? What techniques can you include to help your marketing strategy? How can you attract new customers, engage them in your brand as a restaurant or cafe, and encourage them to keep coming back for more? By using gamification and marketing games to help promote your restaurant, you can create an interactive and fun experience for your customers to help promote your food and your brand, and probably in more ways than you might initially think.

What is gamification and what’s a marketing game?

Gamification is the process of taking less playful tasks and concepts, and making them into a game. By making processes related to your business into a game, and inviting people to play, you can tap into a person’s competitive instinct and their need for a challenge to motivate desired behaviours and encourage desired outcomes. When it comes to marketing games, it could be to promote a new product or service, and could apply whether you’re trading B2C (business-to-customer) or B2B (business-to-business).

When promoting a restaurant or a cafe, it’s really not that different to promoting a bricks-and-mortar retail store. The product is food, and the selling points are the quality of your cooking, the quality of your service, as well as any offers you may be running.

In this article, we’ll run through some of the ways marketing games could be featured in your strategy to help your restaurant attract and retain customers.

Loyalty programmes

Loyalty programmes are one of the oldest, most basic gamification approaches. You’re literally awarding prizes for loyalty, such as getting a free coffee, sandwich, or burrito after purchasing X-number of coffees, sandwiches, or burritos. In the old days before widely available smartphones with reliable internet, people would stamp cards to follow their progress. It was, and remains, a really effective way to keep people coming back for more. If you know dining at restaurant X or cafe Y will eventually give you a free meal or even just a free item for choosing them, providing the food is at least comparable with the competition in terms of quality, they just become a preferred option.

Now of course, modern online marketing games make for a far more sophisticated way of not only rewarding customer loyalty, but in adding excitement to the user-experience of dining at your restaurant, and even collaborating with other businesses.

Create games that draw attention to menu items or initiatives

In the case of a fast food restaurant, gastro-pub, or even just a more casual restaurant, you could consider creating a marketing game to promote specific items. A customised mini game like Pacman or Connect 4 for example, could be created to have your graphics and your branding, with in-game elements made to look like your promoted menu item.

Offer incentives to diners as game prizes

For example, KFC Japan used an advergame called Shrimp Attack to promote the addition of shrimp to its menu. The more shrimp players were able to “slash” the more points they got, and the more discount vouchers they could win. Where appropriate, such as for a fast food restaurant, or when appealing to a younger audience, this is a great way to normalise the addition of a new menu item, get people thinking about it, and encourage them to try it by being able to win discount codes.

There are a number of casual mini games on the Drimify games creation platform that could be customised for just such a promotion. Obviously to get their promo code, or other prize, players would need to submit an email address through your data capture form, which could be put at the start or end of your game, or even in the middle, and through your Drimify dashboard, you can easily analyse the user data in realtime. This means you’re able to promote your new product, drive foot traffic, and collect valuable data.

Educate ethical diners on new menu items

Customising a game engine like the Quiz could be a really innovative option if your restaurant was focused on ethically sourced foods, or even if your ethos was built around certain ethical practices. Whether it’s a restaurant based on seasonal local produce, or a cafe serving a population with specific dietary needs, or vegan or vegetarian food.

With this kind of restaurant, a customised Quiz focused around your niche could test your targeted community’s knowledge, and allow you to educate them around the introduction of certain menu items. This could be a great way to encourage patrons to try new menu items, and also, through seamless sharing on social media, allow you to get your restaurant’s message to the diners who will be most receptive to it.

This slightly more intellectual, educative approach, could also serve as an appropriate gamification approach if you’re more of a fine dining establishment, as a part of the social currency of fine dining lies in knowledge and education. This is a great way to support the more ostentatious, adventurous menu items you might experiment with.

Win a free lunch with an instant win game

There’s nothing quite as satisfying in marketing as being able to turn a common aphorism on its head. For example, offering a free lunch in the face of there being “no such thing as a free lunch.” Indian restaurant Dishoom ran exactly this kind of promotion. They gave out a limited number of “Matka” keyrings which, to this day, when presented to members of staff at the time of paying the bill (at off-peak times), result in being presented with dice. Roll a 6 and one of the table’s meals is free.

Such an approach can be done digitally too. Consider for example, including a QR code on the table or menu, for limited promotions that could lead to a Wheel of Fortune branded like your restaurant. Diners could push a button, and watch the wheel spin, either with the chance of winning a free lunch, or maybe getting a free dessert, or a bottle of wine. Even if they won nothing, they had a chance, and it added an extra experience to their time with you.

Such a promotion run at off-peak times is a great way to draw in extra trade during quieter periods.

Collaborate with your local sports team, or gamify food-based events

Gamification for restaurants also offers opportunities for experiential marketing or cross promotions.

Consider if your restaurant sends a stall or food truck to a food festival, or gets a pitch at some other event. The odds are, while you’ll have access to a busy and hungry pool of customers, you’ll also be up against numerous competitors. You know the drill at these sorts of things, where 1 or 2 establishments have queues for days, while the others get by, and 1 or 2 get very little attention and probably made a loss when they set up. By adding marketing game content to your social media, or even creating a marketing game that utilises the event location (like a digital scavenger hunt), you can create some excitement and hype around your appearance there, and by extension, your cooking and your food.

Another marketing game idea that could drive a lot of traffic is partnering with your local sports team. At a medium to large level, if your restaurant is a sponsor or affiliated with a team, creating a Football game or American football game (or ice hockey, rugby, or even handball), branded with the team’s kit and your restaurant’s graphics, you could foster the connection fans make between the team and your brand. If there are prizes to be won, or offers or promotional codes, then all the better to encourage sports fans to try your food, and become your fans too. Again, if you’re partnered with the team, they could share it in their emails and socials as well, and include the QR codes around their stadium. What’s good for sponsors is good for the team.

Get creative with gamified promotions for your restaurant

From haute cuisine to fast food, and bustling metropolitan cafes to local tearooms, every restaurant, cafe, and dining establishment, be it a chain or independent, has its own character, its own culture, and own brand. The ideas for gamification discussed in this article can be looked at as jumping off points. The only limit on the marketing games you can create is imagination.

Whatever game engine you customise, and whatever direction you take your end product in, you’re getting a powerful engagement tool that can connect audiences to what you’re cooking. Whether you have a Michelin star or you give prizes away with a kid’s portion, the modern marketplace, and audience attitudes, are used to the convenience and pace of fast food. While you’re cooking can’t compromise on tradition, your marketing can greatly benefit from tapping into the faster feedback loops and appetites for instant gratification that have become commonplace. Applying gamification allows you to do just that.

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