The future of restaurant analysis: a customer-driven approachfor an experience economy

Current restaurant profitability models are organisation-centric and focus on product profitability or customer profitability. Because these models overlook the customer perspective in the restaurant evaluation process, they are not sophisticated enough to meet the challenges of today’s experience economy. Customer-defined value attributes can be identified based on customers’ willingness-to-pay and categorised based on restaurant experience values. In this paper a customer driven restaurant analysis (CDRA) model is advanced where the customer experience and the resulting perceived customer value and WTP are the key drivers. The key to allocating the value added costs is alignment with the production of customer valued experiences. This new approach can assist the restaurant industry in increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, while at the same time improving the profitability of the operation. The paper outlines the proposed constructive research approach to develop and test the model.