As new restaurants open shop around Boston University’s campus, experts and veteran business owners say the BU area, with its narrow demographic and established university dining venues, offers a unique challenge to entrepreneurial restaurateurs.
“In this particular instance, their trade area is already fairly defined,” School of Management marketing department chairman Patrick Kaufmann said. “These businesses don’t get many people walking in who aren’t from BU.”
All businesses, including restaurants, have their own methods of attracting customers, including providing wireless Internet to customers, offering free delivery and advertising college-student discounts. These marketing techniques play a part in determining whether a restaurant becomes a practically permanent fixture on campus or whether it only lasts for a year.
“Most restaurants or any kind of retailer will identify any kind of buying characteristics and try to correlate those types of things with a particular demographic,” Kaufmann said. “If they can do that, they can associate those kinds of buying characteristics with the BU student.”
Commonwealth Avenue restaurants also have to compete with university dining venues, which have the advantage of BU’s point system. T.Anthony’s, a fixture on campus since 1976, was around before Late Nite or BU convenience points existed.
“Things change over the years,” T.Anthony’s owner Joe Rastellini said. “When we first opened, there was no points system.”
After BU’s West Campus dormitories opened in 1961, there was a 15-year period when there were no late night dining options in that area until T.Anthony’s opened, according to Rastellini.
T. Anthony’s is open until 3 a.m. on Fridays and 1:30 a.m. every other weekday. Although the shop does not offer wireless Internet or student discounts, its success on campus may be due to its loyal customer base. Kaufmann said businesses have different marketing methods depending on whether the business has a problem recruiting customers or retaining customers.
“When we opened up, we were an immediate success with the students,” he said. “We got to know people and teams. People who played on teams knew they could get something delivered. It evolves on itself.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
