World’s 50 Best Restaurants

Glamourous and profitable #1 ranking in an impossible category

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In 1987, Hatton Gardens Hotel in Upton Saint Leonards won the inaugural Loo Of The Year award.

The Loo Of The Year is awarded each year to the best public toilet in the UK, based on criteria such as adequate flushing frequency, urinal privacy, overall cleanliness, lighting, lack of vandalism, and, best of all, a “wow factor.”

The Loo Of The Year awards were set up in 1987 by the communications director of a washroom service company.

That first year, only 50 guests attended, and awards were given in only two categories, hotels and restaurants.

There are now 63 categories, and over 300 guests attended the prestigious event and dinner last year.

Yesterday, I talked about the transformative effect that winning the race at Le Mans had on Jaguar, the car brand. To my mind, there are three key elements in something like winning a top-tier car race:

1. A ranking with a clear number 1

2. An incontestable result, a matter of performance, not popularity or opinion

3. An element of glamour

But even if you cannot get all three, two out of three can still be great for business.

Awards and arbitrary “Top 100” listings only offer #1 and #3, ranking + glamour. The results are definitely a matter of popularity or opinion, but so what?

I wrote an email back in 2019 about the impact that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants listing had on the restaurant and tourism industry.

As one extreme example, a Copenhagen restaurant named Noma already had 2 Michelin stars. Even so, they were struggling to fill tables.

After Noma randomly and unexpectedly came in at the top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, 100,000 people tried to book a table there in one day. Suddenly, generating business was no longer an issue.

As for Hatton Gardens Hotel:

At the next year’s event ceremony, in 1988, the manager of the Hatton Gardens said visits to his hotel had doubled since winning Loo Of The Year.

Such is the power of a #1 ranking + glamour, above and beyond a certification… or a gold star… or a label. (And yes, even toilets can apparently have glamour — at least glamour enough to double business.)

So create an award for your industry, or create rankings.

Or better yet, pay somebody else to create them, and to announce you the winner.

Put on a tuxedo or an evening gown, get your photo taken in front of one of those step-and-repeat banners, and watch what happens to your business.

And if you detest awards show, and if paying some rando to create a Top 50 ranking and put you at #1 turns you off, don’t worry.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you how to have success with only elements 2+3 off the list above.

Can you guess what example I’ll use?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s a man who built a massive, enduring career, out of nothing, to become the most famous entertainer of his age. And he did it with a series of incontestable challenges, dares, and contests, all of which featured an element of glamour.

While you ponder that, let me remind you that my Daily Email Habit has been voted #1 among the World’s Best 100 Email Prompt Services by a distinguished panel of email marketers, all of whom happen to subscribe to Daily Email Habit.

Here’s what one of the distinguished panelists, Australian copywriter Allan Johnson, had to say in casting his vote:

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Nobel scientists stunned to produce must-read news

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“It will change everything,” said Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

“Stunning,” said Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Laureate and President of the Royal Society. “It has occurred decades before many people in the field would have predicted.”

You may have heard the news published yesterday. DeepMind, an AI project within Google, “solved” the 50-year-old problem of protein folding. (I say “solved” because DeepMind does a good job, much better than anybody else. But it’s not perfect.)

This is a big deal. It will help scientists unravel the many mysteries still hidden in the human genome. It also means that the singularity is near. If you haven’t yet started building your anti-Skynet bunker, the time is nigh.

But let’s talk persuasion.

My point today is that the human brain looooves shortcuts.

We are giant shortcut-seeking machines.

For example, we rarely try to figure out things ourselves. Instead we look around. “What’s that guy doing? Eh, I bet that’s good enough. I’ll do the same.”

Another shortcut we take is to only look at extremes. So The World’s 50 Best Restaurants wields more clout than the Michelin guide. Why? Because it’s easier. There’s only one no. 1 restaurant among the 50 Best. But there are 135 restaurants with the highest 3-star Michelin rating.

You see my point. As Gene Schwartz said, “there is nothing so astounding as the astonishment of experts.” Particularly if those experts are the very top experts, the ones who got a Nobel Prize.

Because when you 1) take experts and 2) make them amazed, you create must-read news. And news is another shortcut that the brain loves to take, right on down to the order page. But that’s another story, for another time.

If you’d like to read that story when it comes out, you can subscribe to my daily email newsletter. It will appear there first.

Even better than two Michelin stars

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There’s a restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma.

The name is short for “nordisk mad” — Danish for “Nordic food.”

And while that might not sound too appetizing, Noma is quite a destination for gourmands.

In fact, it’s got two Michelin stars — a pretty rare honor that only a small number of restaurants around the world share.

And yet, in spite of all the Michelin stars, there was a time when Noma wasn’t flush with business.

And then, in 2010, out of the blue, Noma came in at the top of the World’s Best 50 Restaurants.

This is a new restaurant list (unlike the Michelin Guides, which have been around for a century).

It kicked off in 2002 as a lark, but it’s since become more successful than anticipated. In fact, it’s become so powerful that it impacts the tourist industries of entire continents.

And it does wonders for individual restaurants:

The day after Noma got the top spot in the World’s 50 Best, a hundred thousand people tried to book a table. Suddenly, finances weren’t an issue any more.

So what’s going on?

How could the upstart World’s 50 Best do so much more for Noma than 2 prestigious but stupid Michelin stars?

For that, let me quote an interview that I just listened to. It’s with Michael Fishman, one of the world’s most successful list brokers, and a guy who has bushels of experience in direct marketing. Says Michael:

“When you give prospects a choice in direct mail, the danger is that they don’t make a choice and that you lose the order. […] The more choices you give and the more effort you embed in the process, the more likely you are to lose an order.”

I think the same reasoning applies to restaurant guides.

The Michelin system might be prestigious, but it requires effort.

After all, there are multiple restaurants all around the world with two or more Michelin stars.

On the other hand, there’s only one restaurant at the top of the World’s Top 50.

Which means no choice.

No effort required.

No chance to give up and say, “Ah to hell with it.”

Maybe you think I’m stretching this too far. But as Michael Fishman puts it, this idea of effort is “excruciatingly sensitive.” Michael illustrated this with the example of a direct mail reply card that required two perforations instead of one. Even such a tiny bit of extra effort reliably lowered response, compared to the simpler option.

Just something to keep in mind when you are designing your offers.

Or setting up your marketing campaigns.

Or writing to your clients.

Speaking of which, I’ve got a no-choice, no-effort offer for you. If you want a free copy of my upcoming book on email marketing, head on over to the following page, and sign up with your email:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/