"He's doing backstroke, I think"
"He's doing backstroke I think"Howdy. What can you do when disaster strikes?
"Waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup?"
"Looks like he's swimming backstroke sir!"
The cafe below our offices has changed hands yet again (I've written about the every-changing-hands cafe previously).
The new owner is someone I know, as do Mel and Jo in the office. The first day of the new ownership and new menu was today.
Mel and Jo trotted down at lunchtime to check it out and say hello. They purchased a bucket of hot chips.
The chips tasted fine..........right up until the moment Jo spotted a dead fly in the middle of them. Then suddenly the chips didn't taste so good!
Mel took down the chips and discreetly mentioned it to the staff. They apologised and that was that.
* No refund.
* No fresh chips.
* No alternative offered.
* Nothing.
What a pain of a thing to happen on the first day
Jo won't ever have chips from there again. Mel says she will. Both say they'll go back and try other food there because they know the owner.
And although the occasional fly will end up in the occasional meal, it's never a good thing.
But if you were that business owner, you need to makes things right for the customer.
And for these very good reasons
We've been in these offices for almost 3 years.
Mel is friendly - she knows everyone around the office.
If Mel started talking about this bad experience to people she knows, that business would be very substantially affected as everyone in the area stays away.
3 things occured to me here:
1. People will trial new businesses. When you get a customer in you need to amaze and delight them. Then they'll come back. If you're the same as every competitor business, they probably won't come back.
2. When things go wrong - as they sometimes will - make it right for your customer. Don't let the customer be the one that lose their lunch and the cost of lunch because you can't keep dead flies out of your food.
3. Word of mouth is a very, very powerful marketing force. It can make or break any business. Make sure the word of mouth about your business is positive.
Me? I'm sticking with the Sushi restaurant.
Cheers
Brendon
[ comments ]
You always seem to talk about these businesses that come and go next to your office, but do you ever try and give them some advice? Or do you feel that if they're in business, they better know business, and if they don't, you just watch them fail?
Thanks for the feedback. It's a good question and one I need to write a full article explaining (I'll do that).
We have 3 main issues here:
1. Businesspeople often don't recognise they need marketing help.
2. They don't always have the resources (i.e $$$) to pay for that advice.
3. They don't understand the value the right advice can provide.
Every pitch we make for new business costs me a decent amount of money - from generating the inquiry/approach, to analysis to hard costs such as phone, paper, printing, etc, etc.
What we have to do is target our efforts to the businesses that:
a) are likely to become clients (they're the people who approach us), and
b) have the money to pay.
If I offer these people marketing advice I'd be fairly certain:
1. They wouldn't see the need for it,
2. They wouldn't value it,
3. They wouldn't want to pay for it, and
There's nothing worse than watching these places come in, spend $50,000 on the refit, then fail after just a few months - it's people's houses, lives and futures that we're talking about here.
As a last aside, one of the more common things I see is a business that spends $x on their business but allocates nothing (either because they've run out of money or because they don't recognise the need) for marketing.
Marketing expenditure is what brings in the customers. And that's what you need to survive.
Thanks again Aaron. I'll get onto that article.
Brendon