Last week I wrote about how Delta Airlines, like many other companies, will create or continue processes that end up hurting the service quality of their customers, i.e., their lifeblood. Over the weekend I took a road trip to Atlanta with my family and found another good example of a company that is similarly following a flawed approach into failure. Instead of a process, though, this example is a marketing approach that ends up placing annoying advertisements inside its stores to the point of nausea. If you’ve been into an Applebee’s lately, you likely know what I mean.

It’s not my first choice of dining establishments, but my 7-year-old daughter, Ella, loves Applebee’s. We regularly go there for her birthday because it is her favorite. And while on Interstate 75 driving through Knoxville, Tennessee, last Friday I figured we would stop there for a bite to eat. Applebee’s has a good variety of quality food at decent prices, and its servers are usually friendly and energetic. I would say the one big negative of Applebee’s is that it has always felt like you’re being bombarded with stimuli when you really want to sit down and eat. There’s the tchotchkes on the wall and menus with many colorful specials, package deals, and drinks of the month.

But this trip blew me away with the degree of advertising interruption that surrounded us. I took the photo above of the area next to our table (despite my wife’s embarrassment). You can see the table tent to the right of the ketchup advertising cocktails, and another table tent to the right advertising that if your waiter doesn’t offer you a special drink you get an appetizer for free. Then above the table are two additional ads filling the entire wall above our meal. But wait, there’s more! Up on the ceiling to my left was the hanging banner below.

I actually started laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of this in-store marketing strategy. But then it started feeling less amusing and more angering. Here we were spending a decent amount of money at a quality, sit-down restaurant, and we were subjected to a barrage of irrelevant, interruptive ads. It sends the impression that I am considered a low-IQ lab rat who will salivate at any photo of a breading-embedded food item with a $X.99 price tag. My impression is that Applebee’s doesn’t want to maximize the quality of my dining experience; rather, it wants to squeeze every last dollar out of my fajita-holding hands. I doubt we’ll be back more than once per year.

I don’t really believe that the people of Applebee’s are evil marketers; they are just following an old playbook out the window, and have forgotten to take a step back and look at their restaurants through the eyes of their patrons. Many years ago the chain saw strong results by creating inventive special offers, package deals, and creative cocktails. Over time, they have needed better results and found that people are noticing their growing list of specials less and less. So “it’s only natural” to find new places to interrupt people’s fields of vision or new opening pitch lines for their waitstaff. And the challenging economy has put further pressure on the company’s marketing team to do even more (of the same).

Because the people who dream up these marketing ideas don’t actually have to sit with them in restaurants every day, it’s easy to keep piling them on. The restaurant business is notorious for following established “rules” such as this. I remember meeting with an executive at Outback years ago who aired new commercials on Sunday and always saw restaurant traffic rise on Monday. But what happens when the 16th in-store ad fails to be noticed and not enough people saw your commercial on Sunday because they were watching 100 different channels?

The restaurant business might be one of the canaries in the coal mine of the shift in consumer media habits and failure of traditional marketing approaches. Although it’s hard to pin down table-side marketing as a cause, it is clear that same-store sales for Applebee’s are shrinking dramatically. In the first quarter of 2010, Applebee’s same-store sales were down 2.7%, an “improvement” (in other words “less worse”) from more than a 4.5% decrease in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Domino’s Pizza showed the restaurant world how a company can effectively admit its mistakes, significantly improve its core product, and win back customers and revenues, with same-store sales up 14% recently. It is a new model of Marketing with Meaning that brands such as Applebee’s would be wise to move to quickly before it’s too late.