who runs a graphic design firm brought him in to speak with one of her clients about marketing a new restaurant. She was designing the restaurant's menus and had been asked if she knew anyone who could come up with some unique ways to market the place. He was excited to work with a place that was open to doing things differently. Well, he was wrong about that.13 But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
They sat down together for an awesome lunch,14 and they told Scott about their vision for the restaurant. They were in a downtown location on the western outskirts of Toronto's core, which is an area with many restaurants. They knew it was going to be a battle to build a customer base.
They discussed a few different things and ideas that they had. They all agreed that their biggest challenge was going to be getting people in the door to try out the food for the first time. The owners had a lot of faith in the quality of their food and service and knew that if we could accomplish getting people to try out the restaurant that they would come back for more.
Perfect! Let's get ready to UnMarket!
Here was the proposal:
We need to get a buzz going about the place, but also make people feel exclusive. People love to be made to feel special. Two new condo towers just opened a block away from here, filled with potential customers. I will approach the property management company and let them know that we are going to set aside one night each for the buildings where the residents would have exclusive access to your restaurant.
So far, so good. The owners were smiling.
Here's the kicker. You won't charge them a cent.
Previous smiles were now gone.
You will have two sittings on each night, and people who are interested will have to reserve in advance. When they arrive, they are given your chef's choices of a variety of your best dishes. Not full meals, but enough collectively so they will be full and content. Since you can seat 40 people at a time, with two seatings a night, we will get more than 150 people in here on two weeknights, which wouldn't be busy anyway. These two nights are going to be a great success and get that word of mouth moving.
They just stared at him. Scott assumed it was because of the shock that set in due to the sheer brilliance they just witnessed. Nope. One replied: “No offense,15 but that is going to cost us a lot of money! This is a little far-fetched.” When he asked them how much it would cost in food, they mentioned maybe a few thousand dollars, which resulted in this exchange:
How much did you guys spend on that magazine ad this month?
About $5,000.
How many customers did it bring in?
We don't know.
It was his turn to stare blankly at them. They weren't biting, so he even offered to guarantee it would work and to withhold any consulting fee until they met an agreed-on attendance rate for those nights. The food cost and the fee would have been less than the amount they paid for that ad, plus the guarantee! No dice.
In the end, they decided not to go with the plan and are no longer in business.16 Sometimes you've got to think like a customer. Why would someone go to your place if they have never heard of it? Trying out your food and service is going to cost them money, and they have to take all the risk. This is amplified in a market where there are tons of competitors, and all kinds of choices that I already trust are available. The value of having a packed restaurant would also have affected people walking by, seeing a busy new place filled with people – that is the kind of restaurant they would have come back to try.
Businesses need to stop seeing events as an expense, but rather as an investment. People will pay for ads, but complain about attendees taking advantage of free events. Recently at a conference a woman approached Alison with a story about the cycling store she works at. She was incredibly frustrated because they had been holding free events for the community and not seeing a lot of in-store returns. “People come out to the free event and then go to Walmart to buy their bikes,” she told Alison, with a look of contempt on her face. We totally understand the frustration of “show-rooming” in brick and mortar locations, where customers use the store to learn about products and then go elsewhere for deals. However, in the case of an event, you need to measure your success in awareness – not in direct sales. The same store would have spent just as much on a local newspaper or radio ad, without the opportunity to fill their store with cycling enthusiasts. Events are an investment in the community, and with regard to the potential for future customers, they are not something you can necessarily expect an immediate return on.
If you have confidence in your establishment, your first priority is to get people through that door. They can't come back or tell others about you unless they show up in the first place.
7
COLD-CALLING
It's been seven years since we wrote this story and maybe it's us getting older or softer, but truthfully any marketing can work in a certain context. Fans of the UnPodcast17 might expect knocking on our door with a sales pitch to be a first-class ticket to public shaming, but every once in a while they'd be wrong. If your business is local, like a company paving one driveway on a street, then offering a deal to the neighbors could keep you in business all summer long. Lawn-care, snow-removal, painting, and other home maintenance businesses can successfully rely on this kind of door-to-door cold-calling. As a matter of fact, as we type we're waiting for beef samples from a local farm co-op who we learned about on our doorstep. So cold-calling can work! Just don't tell the investment advisor who rang our doorbell while Scott was in his robe one morning; he won't be coming back any time soon.
Nothing works and everything works. From cold-calls to direct mail and, yes, even spam. It all depends on who your audience is and what you're selling.
So you need to remove the trust gap and get people to try you. Now, how exactly are you going to do that? Good question. Almost 10 years ago, Scott was sitting in a friend's office talking about typical guy stuff,18 when his phone rang. He picked it up, listened for a few seconds, and began to berate the caller on the other end. Scott's favorite line was, “Don't you have anything better to do than to try to sell me your crap?” After he slammed down the phone, they agreed on how big a pain it was when people would cold-call them, interrupting their day. They finished their chat, and then he excused himself with the line, “I gotta go, Scott, I have to make my calls for the day.”
Scott just stared at him with one eyebrow up.
“Chris, you just raked that guy over the coals because he cold-called you, and now you're doing it yourself?”
“No, no, Scott, I'm calling these leads to introduce them to a product they need!”
Scott could already feel the migraine coming on.
And this is where the idea of UnMarketing all began. Scott had the realization that most companies are guilty of hypocritical marketing. Why do we market to people the way we hate to be marketed to? As business owners or employees, we make sure to hire gatekeepers who don't let pesky salespeople get through, and then we make quotas on how many calls our own representatives have to make.
According to the 2009 Economic Report of the President, 72 percent of Americans signed up for the National Do Not Call List. Two hundred twenty million
Most business owners who say things like they want to “think outside the box” actually want to do the same things in their box, with better results. It takes courage to do something outside the norm. Most owners like the idea of courage, but few display it in business.
They gave him the lunch for free. We think we have to say this is now due to the new FTC, FCC, NAFTA, and Geneva Convention laws.
A surefire way to know you're about to be offended is when someone says this. Also true with “Nothing personal” and “Don't take this the wrong way.”
We're not that cocky to think they went out of business because they didn't use the idea. Just sayin'.
Nothing of any importance to the world.
