Word of mouth is doing all the work

The advice is that a restaurant should put up its menu, its hours, its location and a phone number and that this covers what anybody needs.

Those are the right facts and they’re not quite what people want because people arrive with questions rather than a desire to read. Is the food good. Are the staff any good. What’s it going to cost me. And where is it which matters more than you’d think if the place isn’t on an obvious route.

You can’t really answer any of those with a website. Not the first three, anyway which are the ones that decide whether somebody comes. A restaurant telling you its food is excellent conveys nothing because every restaurant says that and everybody knows it. Reviews would do it if reviews were trustworthy and they’ve been gamed so thoroughly that most people have quietly stopped believing them.

What people want is a source they trust telling them the answer. That’s the whole mechanism and it’s why the overwhelming majority of a restaurant’s customers arrive through word of mouth, or through reputation built up in curated places like critics and directories, especially at the top end.

A website helps in two specific situations. It helps people visiting an area who have no local network to draw on which is a real and worthwhile group. And it helps a very new restaurant whose owners haven’t built a reputation yet, or who believe a site is the key to getting business which is usually wrong but does at least get the basic facts online.

Outside those cases the only thing that reliably drives trade is building a base of people who tell their friends and their colleagues about you. That’s slow, it can’t be bought and it’s almost entirely a function of whether the experience was good enough to mention.

None of this is an argument for not having one. If a restaurant is going to have a website it should be a good one because bad websites shouldn’t exist and there’s no excuse for putting up something broken when the basic version is a solved problem. It’s an argument about expectations.

A restaurant could run happily for decades on nothing but a social media page and it would make no difference to whether it succeeded. That’s an uncomfortable thing for anyone in this industry to sit with because we’d all prefer that the thing we make is the thing that decides. Mostly it isn’t. It’s a convenience for people who have already decided and the deciding happened somewhere we had nothing to do with.

The same shape applies well beyond restaurants and it’s worth checking against whatever you’re building. Ask what actually causes somebody to choose your thing, then ask honestly whether the piece you’re working on touches that at all. Quite often it doesn’t and the work is still worth doing because being shabby costs you something but it isn’t the lever you thought you were pulling.

Knowing which of the two you’re doing changes how much of your week it should get.

The restaurants that get this right seem to work it out by instinct rather than analysis. They put the menu up, keep the hours accurate, make the phone number easy to find, and then spend every remaining hour of the week on the food and the room, which is where all of the deciding was happening the whole time.

That ordering is available to almost any small business, and almost none of them believe it, because the website is the part somebody can sell you and the room is the part you have to fix yourself.