About a year ago (Lightbulb #16, to be exact), I wrote about ‘the Cheesecake Factory approach’.

As you may know, The Cheesecake Factory is a moderately upscale restaurant chain in the US known for its thick, cross-cuisine menu so extensive, it emits a light thud when dropped on your table.

Everyone in your party can easily find something they like, and is generally satisfied with the food…

…but you never seek out Cheesecake Factory for a particular cuisine.

It’s more like, ‘let’s just go to CF - they’ll have something for everyone.’

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It’s an example I come back to often to describe the drawbacks of a generalist consulting strategy.

If you do everything, you’ll have a hard time attracting people for one specific thing.

Plus, you lose the ability to achieve scale, build authority, elevate your rates, and all the other benefits of specialization.

But, truth be told, when I use the Cheesecake Factory example, there’s always something that doesn’t quite reconcile…

…that is, that they’re actually a wildly successful chain. 🤔

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So, last month I saw this headline:

“The Cheesecake Factory is eliminating 13 menu items in major makeover”

Could it be?

Could they be finally slimming down their offering to reap some benefit?

Well, not so fast.

Turns out they were replacing those 13 menu items, with 20 more.

Even doubling down, saying, “We’ve changed the menu twice a year, every year, for 40 years. There’s nothing that America wants to eat that can’t go on the Cheesecake Factory menu.”

Bold.

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So what gives? How is this broad-as-can-be strategy working for them, against the common advice to go narrow.

And then there it was…

The article goes on to cite an analysis concluding that the reason CF is able to outperform other full-service chains is:

“…its ability to harness the power of annual dining milestones,” adding that these days “can be powerful drivers of foot traffic at restaurants, offering chains a prime opportunity to grow visits – and sales.”

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Now, I’d imagine any restaurant would see a lift around major holidays, but apparently CF overindexes vs. their competitors on major dining out days such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.

So now this makes more sense — perhaps their differentiation strategy is to be top of mind for, I’ll call it “groups & occasions”…

And if you’re going to nail that niche as a 200-location chain, what do you have to have?

A broad, menu capable of satisfying a range of disparate tastes.

So broad, in fact, it needs a spiral binding.

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All this to say, cuisine seemed to be the obvious lever for me to tell Cheesecake Factory to wake up and choose a lane.

Perhaps it’s less about which niching lever to pull, but rather just ensuring that you’re actively doing something to differentiate yourself, ideally into a category of one.

And under that lens, I’d say Cheesecake Factory has niched quite well.

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💡

-Wes