“Positive Word of Mouth marketing in your restaurant is generated, built, and sustained, NOT on a single gigantic activity, but on a thousand little things that are done well, as planned, into the Guest Dining Cycle EVERY single day of each week and each month.

When you do a great job, people love you. When you exceed their expectations they respect you. When you go the extra mile ... they recognize this and they want to do something for you in return.

This is called, the Law of Reciprocity, which simply means: “You’ve done something nice for me. Now, I feel I should do something nice for you.” As you are providing “WOW, Exceptional Service!” there are many, many times, by design, that you do something special for your guests. These acts have become automatic; they go on all the time; we just do them. We plan, the doing of extra and unexpected things for our guests.

Sometimes we get special requests from our guests; we just do them. We’ve been taught: “The Customers is Always Right!” We bend over backwards to please them. We make the guests “feel good” and they want to reciprocate. So how can you take a pro-active approach to get the guests to actually do what they naturally want to do? We call this the ONE-MINUTE COMMERCIAL.

I want to tell you four ways that you can do this: 1.) The Deal 2.) The Agreement 3.) The Commitment and 4.) The Promise. These are all one-minute commercials. There are many other ways that you can give a one-minute commercial. Get your creative juices flowing and spread the word.

You need to take the opportunity to “make a deal” while your employees are providing “WOW, Exceptional Service!” to your guests so that this can help the guest to reciprocate to the restaurant. It is important to understand that these four challenges are only done infrequently and in a very professional manner with a guest that the employee has developed a one-on-one relationship with. The approach must also be done naturally, according to the personality of the employee and using their own choice of words. Do not overuse the four one-minute commercials and do not get carried away with it. Always respond in a way that makes the guest look good.