What can Romano’s Macaroni Grill’s re-engineering of its tomato bruschetta dish teach us about innovation in a recession?
Most marketers are relying on price and promotional shifts to re-position their brands for value. By contrast, savvy marketers are re-assessing their products more holistically, taking into account how raw materials and production costs interact with traditional marketing disciplines like consumer understanding and pricing.
Enter Macaroni Grill, which reported in The Wall Street Journal | Sep 16 is reworking its menu to get away from 1,000 + calorie items—its consumers want to eat more healthily. The restaurant’s tomato bruschetta appetizer makeover illustrates recession-minded innovation at its best:
- Reduce olive oil dressing—drive down a costly input
- Put in better tasting cherry tomatoes + small leaf basil— recover the flavor loss from reduced olive oil with these stronger tasting (but cheaper) substitute ingredients
- Serve tomatoes in a bowl on the side—reduce labor that goes into getting those pesky little tomatoes to balance on the bread. Leave that challenge to the consumer, many of whom actually prefer having extra control.
- Drop price by about 6%–fantastic! Just what our wallet-riven consumers need in this recession. Maybe that’ll help you pull off a Panera Bread, and catch consumers drifting out of more expensive alternatives.
All of this, and calories cut by 36%, in keeping with consumer preferences for healthy (okay, healthier) eating.
Some marketers do this sort of multi-variable swapping by zen (less charitably, you might say its by gut). But we’re seeing marketers bring real science to making these swaps. They’re building “consumer value equations” by using conjoint analysis and vector analysis. Conjoint in marketing isn’t new, per se. But it’s typically applied only to functional attributes and price. We see marketers applying it to emotional attributes, as well.
With this approach, you can with confidence reduce that olive oil and replace it with small leaf basil, because you know consumers won’t mind that. You can serve the tomatoes in a bowl on the side, but you can’t CUT the quality of the tomatoes. In fact, all the better if you can increase quality of a critical ingredient.
This kind of recession-minded innovation is replicable by most companies. Think through the interdisciplinary dimensions of your own products— are there any tomato-bruschetta opportunities in your portfolio?
MLC members, take a look at this short case study on consumer value equations to learn how to how to re-engineer your product offering. Or Access our best tools and insights on NPD and Innovation.
