Know-How Exchange : Branding

Your question begs some more background information.
Did you first start dine-ins and then home deliveries or at the same time?
What is the rate of takaways now?
Do the people who dine in also take away food or not?
Do you deliver all your dishes or some selection of them?
What is the average time it takes your people to deliver to customers' home and would you find that acceptable as a client?
Is it a natural and generally accepted customers' need in places where you operate to have the food delivered home?
How much do you charge for home deliveries on top of food price?
What is the rate of dine-in/home deliveries for your competitors?
Do you focus on individual consumers or companies in your home deliveries?

Adam

I am in the process of developing an entire program for an Italian place in New Jersey. The questions posed are things you absolutely must look into to get a really good understanding of your customer.

Handing out the same menus with the same products is throwing good money after bad. You will need to take a really proactive approach to reaching new customers and more importantly turning them into repeat customers and have them refer you to new customers.

First things first, if you don't have a website--GET ONE BUILT TODAY!!!!!! Customers are finding what they want via the net and the want the immediacy and speed the internet offers.

To give you some insight to what we're doing for our client: their biggest challenge was bad, and I mean BAD location. Next there has been an onslaught of the big players in quick serve: McD's, Wendy's, etc. Now even the Dunkin' Donuts that obscures customers' view of their location, serves lunch-type meals.

What we're doing for my client, whose focus is on developing his lunch-at-the-office clientele, is to work with the internet. We are developing a daily email program, featuring specials of the day, coupons and most importantly the ability for a customer to place an order right through the email. We've also proposed some customer participation activities that will give customers a sense of ownership in what's being served.

We've also recommended some tweaking of the core product: namely putting some thought into the menu as opposed to selling the same thing all the time. Long story short, coming up with new recipes to build excitement.

Another challenge was timing of deliveries. In a work environment, timing is everything. We've proposed hiring more part-time drivers, giving each of them a specific "route" so they'll know the customer and where they're located. This is a challenge in the food industry since the turnover is great, so the "jury" is still out on this suggestion.

You might consider branching out into the catering sector, a good way to reach a large number of people (potential customers) at one time.

Definitely take the advice of the previous posters and gather as much info about your customers and their buying habits and needs as possible and work with a marketing firm to help you implement these changes.

If you know of a website dedicated to local eateries, definitely get yourself listed in some way. Place advertising in local blogs.