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July 11, 2008
Are you a barker or an attractor?
Along the streets of downtown Playa del Carmen, Mexico, "barkers" for restaurants beg passersby "try our steak!" "Drink specials!" "Happy hour!"
Person after person ignores the barkers; their in-your-face advertising oozes desperation.
In this Mexican city, it's the low-key restaurants that generate the stronger attraction. These restaurants understand that a sleek decor, candle-lit atmosphere, and sumptuous menu are what is needed to attract customers. Instead of barkers, pleasant hosts standing near menus, answering questions were far more efficient. A packed house of diners was the final evidence prospective customers needed to determine which restaurant to patronize.
Barking as a customer acquisition strategy is a relative affair, whether spamming bloggers with press releases, peppering a neighborhood with door hangers , dressing up a mascot to stand on a street corner, or pimping a new website on Twitter. Real marketing is designing elements into a business that will get the attention of customers so you don't have to yell.
Bonus link: My favorite restaurant in Playa.
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That´s right Jackie,
That is an annoying tradition of the small food businesses in Mexico, what we call “changarros”, that does not happen in well stablished restaurants, and its also a tradition from the popular markets where the owners yelled a lot of funny creative arguments of why buying there and not in the business infront of them. There are very few restaurants that take that old tradition and adapt it through new marketing strategies and techniques.
Glad you visited Mexico
I totally agree that the attractor approach works better for restaurants, however I'm not exactly sure how this translates for websites.
Websites need to get incoming links and, while a popular website will eventually do well from natural, externall created links, they do still have to start somewhere and do some form of promotion.
What sorts of methods do you think are best for websites who would not like to resemble the Barkers in Playa?
Thanks
Joe
Joe,
I think for websites (as well as most other businesses), word of mouth matters. The website should be compelling enough that people would recommend it to others.
To be a barker takes promotional marketing such as advertising. To be an attractor, it takes better product. That's where product management comes in and is so important yet overlooked. On the other hand, awareness has to be created somehow and that often takes advertising. Then eventually, word-of-mouth can take up slack for growing sales.
Playa Del Carmen might have been nice 25 years ago but now it's such a phoney place. It's like it's been sterilised and turned into a US theme park or something.
