I must get ads from every pizza place in town. But although there are a lot of pretty good Chinese restaurants here, very few of them seem to advertise. I can count on one hand the number I’ve seen in my life. Since Chinese are often savvy at business,
Every month or so, I’ll come home to find a Chinese restaurant menu stuck in my door. I never see other restaurants advertising this way.
In my city I see fewer TV ads for Chinese places, but there are some. But there aren’t nearly as many Chinese as there are pizza places or Mexican places, so I’m not surprised.
Yeah, I see the printed out flyers every so often. The pizza places and the occasional Mexican cafe does that around here, too. However, the local businesses that advertise most in this manner are the garage door salesmen. Every week and a half to two weeks I could expect to find a garage door flyer stuck to the side of the garage. (And the door is pretty new, so it’s not a matter of me having a shitty garage door.)
One reason is that Chinese restaurant chains are comparably rare (relative to the total number of Chinese restaurants) compared with other sorts of chains for reasons that are speculated on in the following website:
I also get menus for Chinese restaurants (which are non-chain ones) stuck in my door.
One Chinese place around here advertises on TV frequently. I rarely see the others advertise in any form. Many of the non-chain restaurants around here don’t advertise consistently so they are no different from the Chinese places. There are a few places that advertise in print consistently in the local suburban paper. One place after another picks up a local cable advertising contract and their ads will appear for a while then never be seen again. It does not appear that TV ads have an obvious payoff for the restaurants.
I sometimes see ads with coupons for the local Chinese places in the coupon mailers (ValPak), and ever once in a while, I’ll get a menu stuffed into the front door.
But, by and large, most of them don’t do very much advertising, and, as TriPolar notes, that’s not uncommon for local, family-owned restaurants. They likely draw from a very small geographic area, and TV ads are likely way too expensive for them.
The Chinese restaurants in my area have been in the same location for decades, probably have a fairly reliable clientele and an unchanging menu. If they’re happy with how busy they are, no real need to do much advertising.
I get lots of flyers for Chinese restaurants in my mailbox, probably equal to pizza flyers. I live in a neighbourhood with a large number of Asian (Chinese and Korean) restaurants, though.
The Mandarin Chinese buffet chain does quite a bit of radio and TV advertising in the Toronto area.
I don’t notice a difference between advertising for Chinese restaurants and advertising for any other locally owned, non-national chain/franchise restaurants - which means mostly flyers left on my doorknob. I see more advertising for Dominos/Pizza Hut than I do for Carlo’s Pizza and I see more advertising for McDonalds/Burger King/Wendy’s/Five Guys than I do for the local diner. I suspect that a large part of the reason I don’t see advertising for chain Chinese restaurants here is because there really aren’t any chain Chinese restaurants here outside of mall food courts (and food court locations generally don’t advertise) - I’d probably have to pass 200 Chinese restaurants to get to the nearest PF Changs.
With some places in NYC, once they’re in the building they stick menus in every door. Some just throw them all over the place like confetti.
I suspect this is because the advertising budget for a local ‘mom & pop’ is not the same as a chain resturant, where the main company also chips in.
I get lots of flyers for local Chinese and Indian restaurants in the mail and on my porch.