Be All You Can Be with Day-Parts

bee’s Late Night may be coming to your town, but it won’t require any new building. bee’s Late Night is the name Applebee’s is using to designate the karaoke-and-trivia-game-filled club scene into which the family-themed restaurant transmogrifies from 10 PM to 2 AM.
     The concept has worked well for the chain in selected locations. Bloomberg Businessweek reports it’s going nationwide at all 1,870 Applebee’s locations. Family restaurants generally close around 10 PM. Now, with the unveiling of bee’s Late Night, the diner who comes to Applebee’s for a family dinner can say, “Instead of going to a club late tonight with my friends, I’ll come back here.”
     The chief objective of the change is to expand target markets by distinguishing day parts. So let’s use bee’s Late Night as a reminder for you to regularly reanalyze ways in which you can increase sales in your business by catering to different consumer preferences at different points during the day.

• For cost-effective inventory management, build sales around a core set of items. Then think through the likely consumer preferences for each part of the day. Retail consultant Paco Underhill talked about a bookstore he worked with that used rotating shelves to showcase retirement advice for early morning mall walkers, child care books for the young mothers shopping before noon, and business books later in the day. 
• Senior citizens tend to be more profitable customers when shopping early in the day, so feature merchandise then that attracts them to your store. Researchers at University of Michigan, Singapore Management University, and Ben-Gurion University found that the study participants, who were all at least sixty years old, were better able to analyze selling points in the morning than in the afternoon. For stores which let daylight enter, the morning brightness can help seniors tell the blues from the greens and the foregrounds from the backgrounds. But still favor merchandise which uses bold colors, along with large fonts and high contrast in the product packaging. 
• Once you’ve drawn in the customers by meeting their particular day-part needs, expand the length of the day-part. Food retailers have learned that diners who just enjoyed a good breakfast at the restaurant in the early morning often would like to have the breakfast offerings also available at future lunchtimes. Give a good shopping experience in the AM to the senior citizen and they’ll become more interested in PM visits. 

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Reanalyze for Day-Parts with Potential