The guide to unreasonable marketing from the creator of the world’s #1 restaurant - Will Guidara
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
Will Guidara, author of "Unreasonable Hospitality" and co-founder of Eleven Madison Park (the world's #1 restaurant), shares how hospitality principles can transform any business. (00:40) The conversation explores how focusing on customer experience and emotional connection creates competitive advantages that traditional marketing cannot match. Guidara discusses key concepts including the 95/5 rule for strategic spending, reverse benchmarking competitors' weaknesses, and turning service pain points into memorable highlights.
- Core themes: Transforming customer service through unreasonable hospitality, creating emotional connections that drive word-of-mouth marketing, and applying restaurant-smart principles to corporate environments
Speakers
Will Guidara
Will Guidara is the co-founder and former general manager of Eleven Madison Park, which became the world's #1 restaurant under his leadership. He is the author of "Unreasonable Hospitality" and transformed his restaurant from #50 to #1 globally by focusing on exceptional customer experience over traditional fine dining approaches. Guidara is known as "the dining room guy" and hosts the Welcome conference in New York, focusing on hospitality excellence across industries.
John Evans (Host)
John Evans is the host of the Uncensored CMO podcast and has extensive experience in marketing across various organizations, from startups to large corporations including Suntory. He specializes in brand marketing, customer experience, and the intersection of marketing strategy with business growth.
Key Takeaways
Focus on How You Make People Feel Over What You Tell Them
Guidara emphasizes that hospitality is about creating emotional connections rather than just delivering information. (04:04) He references Maya Angelou's famous quote: "People will forget what you say, they will forget what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel." This principle applies directly to marketing - instead of focusing solely on communicating product benefits and features, marketers should prioritize designing experiences that create positive emotional responses. The most memorable advertisements aren't remembered for their information but for the feelings they evoked, such as Microsoft's game controller ad that showed a disabled child being able to participate fully in gaming.
Practice Reverse Benchmarking to Find Competitive Advantages
Rather than trying to match competitors' strengths, Guidara recommends identifying their weaknesses and turning those into your advantages. (18:30) At Eleven Madison Park, instead of competing with Per Se's million-dollar wine cellar, they focused on making their secondary beverage programs (coffee, beer, tea) truly best-in-class. This strategy worked because generational shifts were making people care more about these categories. By collaborating with passionate team members and giving them ownership over these programs, they created competitive differentiation while building internal pride and responsibility. This approach can be applied to any business by examining what competitors consistently do poorly and making those areas your specialty.
Implement the 95/5 Rule for Strategic Investment
Guidara's 95/5 rule involves managing money meticulously 95% of the time to earn the right to spend "foolishly" 5% of the time on gestures that can't be easily measured but create lasting impact. (28:47) This principle addresses the common business challenge of ROI measurement for emotional investments. The 5% spending on unmeasurable experiences often does the heaviest lifting in building customer loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing. Examples include expensive gelato spoons or saving champagne bottles in customers' freezers - small gestures with disproportionate emotional impact that customers remember and share as stories.
Transform Pain Points Into Experience Highlights
Every customer journey has predictable friction points that can be reimagined as opportunities for memorable moments. (46:33) Guidara's team addressed the universal restaurant challenge of presenting the check - traditionally an awkward moment that reminds customers of cost. They transformed this by arriving with a bottle of cognac, pouring a splash for everyone, leaving the bottle, and then placing the check down saying "whenever you're ready." This eliminated waiting, prevented rushing feelings, and balanced the large bill with generous hospitality. The approach requires identifying systematic pain points in your customer experience and creatively solving them in ways that exceed expectations.
Hire for Chemistry Over Capacity
Guidara simplified his hiring approach by treating interviews like first dates rather than interrogations with scripted questions. (65:06) He focuses on three key questions: Do I like and trust this person? Will they work hard? Will my existing team get along with them? This approach prioritizes cultural fit and team harmony over pure technical qualifications, which proved essential for scaling to 1,800 employees with strong retention. The strategy involves minimizing credential requirements to avoid filtering out the right people and focusing on character assessment during interviews by getting to know candidates as people rather than just reviewing their resumes.
Statistics & Facts
- Eleven Madison Park went from being ranked #50 to #1 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list under Guidara's leadership. (11:21) This transformation was achieved by focusing on "unreasonable hospitality" rather than just food excellence, demonstrating the power of customer experience differentiation.
- When Guidara scaled his restaurant operations, the company grew to 1,800 employees while maintaining strong turnover rates. (65:11) This was accomplished through his hiring philosophy of prioritizing chemistry over capacity and cultural fit over pure technical qualifications.
- During the 2008 recession, Guidara's restaurant group survived partly due to Shake Shack's profits, which was born literally from Eleven Madison Park's private dining kitchen. (60:34) The Shack Burger was created by their former chef, showing how innovation during adversity can create unexpected revenue streams.
