Business

Incremental Marketing, Pizzaville Style

Pizzaville. My wife and I ordered pizza delivery at the weekend from Pizzaville, one of the leading pizza fast-food franchises across Ontario, Canada.

When our order arrived, we noticed we got a free pack of playing cards. While at first this seemed an odd choice, thinking about it sees it make more sense.

Consider some of the most popular connections to pizza delivery – watching DVD’s, playing videogames and playing cards with your buddies. Now think about that tie-in again – “thanks for ordering your pizza from us, have a free deck of cards (on orders over $15)”.

It offers relevance and value – two key factors in customer loyalty.

Thinking about it, there are a ton of incremental marketing techniques that can be used elsewhere. For example, we have the Beer Store in Ontario. What goes perfect with beer? Pizza. So how about tying up a coupon deal with someone like Pizzaville?

Or have a joint promotion with the local grocery store. Buy a 24-pack and get free chips when you buy dip (or vice versa) via a redeemable voucher. The grocery store gets more customers; the Beer Store gets more customers; Pizzaville gets more customers. Pretty much everybody wins (including us, the customer).

These are just examples of how three interlinked businesses could grow their sales.

What companies and businesses are you interlinked with? Could you work together to grow each other’s customer base?

photo credit: hfabulous

Food (And Drink) For Thought

I read a recent blog post about a coffee shop increasing its clientele thanks to Twitter (and my own thanks to Rachel Reuben for pointing me in the right direction). It’s a great example of businesses engaging their local community through social media, and a great poster child for ROI in social media.

Yet as encouraging as this example is, there’s another way this business and others like it could increase its customer base and profits while reaching out to local social media users – teenagers.

While on Twitter this morning, I noticed a comment by Chris Clayton. He made a valid point that most Tweetups (public get-togethers of Twitter users) are in bars. Since Chris is only 17, he has to wait another year to take part – and there are many other countries where the legal drinking age is more than 18.

This is a huge audience that’s being missed, both by social media and business alike.

While there’s certainly no age barrier to social media, the majority of users are still within the 18-45 age group. A lot of businesses currently using Twitter effectively cater to this audience – technology and new media, for example, are hugely popular in this age group. But what about everyone else?

We talk about opening social media up to a wider audience, to make its tools and applications more approachable. One way of doing this to make it appealing to the non-core audience. This is where local businesses can really come in and claim a huge slice of the pie.

Take Chris’s example. He’s not old enough to drink at bars but he wants to get together with other local Twitter users of his age. I asked the Twitter community earlier about solutions, and the majority that came back were coffee shops, bagel shops and similar. And as the example of CoffeeGroundz shows at the start of this post, it works.

So here’s the pitch, local cafe and coffee/bagel shop owners.

Get yourself on Twitter.
Use the community to find out who the younger users neighbourhood are.
Offer your place of business for the occasional Tweetup. If it’s a really good number, how about making it a private couple of hours?
Start a Twitter group for your business and get the local teenagers to join it so you can post details of the latest Tweetup for everyone to see.

With one simple action, you’ve not only established a presence with your online and offline community, but you’ve also reached an audience that’s sorely underused. And you don’t even have to stop there – for adults that don’t particularly like bars, reach out to them too.

For the teenagers looking to find a place to meet other Twitter users in your city? Get some numbers together and take it to your local coffee shop. Show why it’d be worth it for them to let you arrange a Tweetup. Make sure you all buy at least a coffee or one item from the menu – after all, the business is helping you. Return the favour.

There’s a big chunk of business out there just waiting for someone. Ready to grab it?

Acorns And Oak Trees

: Image by Chris Campbell via Flickr

I had the good (?) fortune to sit down with the CEO of a PR agency in Toronto recently. He had been at a seminar I attended regarding converging technologies and mediums and how they fit into the role of the PR professional. We got chatting and decided to have lunch together.

Now, I’m a pretty open guy to how businesses run themselves, but this lunch was an eye-opener.

The conversation turned naturally to the economy and the effect it’s having on agencies and clients alike. My lunch partner said he was finding it tough as his clients just weren’t spending, yet he was sure both would start needing his agency’s services again soon. I asked if he’d lost a lot of clients to the credit crunch – after all, being reduced to two clients must be extra tough.

His response floored me.

“Oh, no, we never have more than two clients at any time – we just concentrate on finding the biggest and most profitable ones and stick with them.” So, no small businesses or entrepreneurs, I asked. The answer: “Why would I want to deal with the little guy? How would that enhance my reputation?”

The lunch ended, we exchanged business cards and went our separate ways. I wondered if I should have probed him more on his views about clients, but the way he emphasized the “my reputation” part made me think he was only in business for one reason – his glory. Which normally means any arguments falling on deaf ears.

Yet perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised. Too many businesses in too many industries have forgotten about the little guy. Too many businesses think dollars over development. Too many businesses think pre-built over building.

Just when this mindset happened escapes me – what doesn’t escape me is the narrow-minded tunnel vision behind it.

Did the CEO of the Toronto PR agency start off as a ready-made success story? Did Richard Branson jump into the business world with Virgin already a huge success? Does being a large corporation guarantee success levels?

Of course not. Yet still the belief remains in many businesses that small is a necessary evil, to tolerate while the big boys gather to put small in its place.

These are dangerous thoughts.

True success comes from the building of relationships. Of loyalties being forged. Of give and take and the combining of good ideas and openness to encourage greatness.

Aim high – there’s nothing wrong with that. But just take a minute to think what’s going to get you higher – two giants 100 feet tall who control you, or hundreds of normal sized people who respect you.

The choice is yours – I know whose company I’d prefer to keep. How about you?