The initial challenge of luring patrons into a venue can be easily overcome with attractive and intriguing advertising, but once inside promoting the product is the key to profit.
Once a customer's foot is in the door, portable merchandisers, like logoed merchandise — items used to advertise specialty drinks or products that ease the flow of traffic through the bar — seal the deal on sales for an owner or operator.
Perhaps the easiest and most popular promotion in the entire nightclub and bar industry is a simple happy hour promotion. Slash the prices, throw out some extra drink specials mid-day or after work, and soon enough there will be a steady crowd of devoted Happy Hour patrons. When drinks are a bargain, people tend to flock toward them, especially when those discounted libations will help them to relax and enjoy themselves.
There are literally thousands of Happy Hour promotions all over the country. Most cater to the lowest common denominator, as mentioned above. Less expensive drinks mean lots of sales.
The days when a bar, club or restaurant's entire cocktail lineup could be rattled off from memory by a server — without even making them breathe hard — are history. Today's venues are offering more choices than ever with exotic new cocktails as well as dozens of variations on old standards. And to impart this plethora of choices to customers, bars are developing colorful, informative and creative cocktail menus specifically designed to show their cocktail lineup to best advantage.
Great Flavors and New Recipes Are Creating Cool Rum-Runnings On-Premise
By Mike Hanley
Next to vodka, rum is the happening spirit category in bars, clubs, casino resorts and other on-premise venues today. If vodka and flavored vodka in particular is the great white father of spirits, with sales in the many tens of millions of cases globally, then the rum category now spiking up the charts worldwide with phenomenal success in the flavored category in its own right surely make it the great white and brown mother of spirits from which to profit and prosper.
Because of the availability and universal appeal of rum, many of the newest cocktail recipes are being created with the popular spirit. Recipe flavors are being developed by master mixologists in the finest hotels, by bartenders in every bar, tavern and nightclub and even by weekend party planners for their upcoming family reunion. From these innovative recipes come an equal mixture of tasty flavors and hangover lessons learned.
The Big Chill
Tap New Customers and Higher Sales with Draft Beers
By Andy Ashby
When people think about the ultimate beer, they rarely think about a bottle of beer. More likely, it's a close-up mental image of a frosty beer mug, complete with beads of sweat rolling down the sides.
It's a no-brainer, really. People are simply attracted to a glass of beer, which allows you to see the beer's color and smell the ingredients.
Cleveland's Pickwick & Frolic Is All About Hearty Feasting, Good Humor and Good Company
By Deidra Jackson
The cavernous two-story, 27,000-square-foot entertainment complex situated in downtown Cleveland's historic Gateway neighborhood belies its genuine intimacy. At Pickwick & Frolic Restaurant & Bar — where company policy mandates that employees promote "conviviality"— four different on-site venues promise fun-loving guests a downright delightful time.
In an average week, as many as 4,000 visitors in search of high spirits stream through the comedy club, eatery, cabaret, and Martini bar, all of which are housed under one roof on the former site of the city's Euclid Avenue Opera House. With such a variety of spaces to see and be seen in, guests, remarkably, stay an average of five-and-a-half hours during each visit, club surveys reveal.
L.A.'s The Good Hurt Club Has the Prescription for Revenue
By Taylor Rau
When a patient is in discomfort and needs treatment, he or she typically will go to a doctor and get a prescription. When a patron is restless and needs a cure for what ails them, he or she typically will go to a nightclub to get their fix?
