Son of a Niche! Did I Get Your Attention?

Headlines draw attention.  Get to the point. What’s your message? There are too many websites and blogs bombarding the search engines, overwhelming people with too much information. Does your message draw attention and engage people?  Are they enticed to take a look and they stay for a while.  Most important, will they come back for more? In this article, I’ll share a few tips on how to have fun and make an impression on your customers and prospects. Remember this;  if they don’t notice you, you don’t exist.

Slice that Head Cheese, Real Thin! When I was in college in the 80s, I worked in a delicatessen situated in a large, popular urban grocery store in South Seattle. The rare connoisseur of hog-head cheese always asked us to slice it real thin. It was a difficult, often disgusting task as we envisioned carving into Abi Normal’s, formaldehyde-soaked brains, displayed in a glass jar in Mel Brook’s movie classic, Young Frankenstein.

Head cheese is an inventive mixture of assorted hog parts; feet, tails, ears, snouts, and organs, lovingly combined into a savory jellied loaf. I ate a lot of gourmet cheeses and meats but was never compelled to sample hog-head cheese. The bakery produced its own signature health bars, a conglomeration of leftover bread heals, cookie crumbs, old dry fruit, and assorted staples. One so-called health bar required a thirsty-two ounce’r to wash it down. Needless to say, they were not too popular once people discovered where they came from.  Have you ever seen a slice of holiday fruit cake? It’s essentially the same thing.

Now that I have utterly offended the head cheese and fruit cake enthusiasts, please indulge me for a moment so that I might use colorful stories from my past to illustrate an important point.

Avoid mixing all your key products and marketing ingredients together.  In other words, don’t send mixed messages, keep your message simple, focused, and attractive to your customer. Target a specific niche or group of consumers that are interested in your product or service. Focus on what’s in it for them. Rarely is better, since most people are too busy to care. Be specific, get to the point.

A Hot Case for Attracting Customers: In the Deli, my friend and co-worker, Rick, taught me some valuable marketing techniques. I recall vividly, Rick striding briskly through aisle twelve, a beeline from the meat department to the deli grasping six dead raw poultry in each hand proclaiming like John the Baptist; “Its dinner time, come and get it, we got chickens — fresh, whole roasted chickens, in the deli!”  Rick’s hot case display glistened with heaping piles of savory whole roasted chickens, pork ribs, fried chicken, assorted fried veggies, and chicken organs. The display was fresh, juicy, colorful, and aromatic unlike most hot cases I’ve seen over the years — half-empty, dried-up, burned-out, hideous displays of stinking, dead carcasses and rotting vegetables. We attracted hungry, irritable, post-meridian commuters with an irresistible dinner display and tons of free samples to keep them from smashing the hot case in desperation.

Rick’s hyperbolic trek from the meat department of Tom, Dick, and Harry and an irresistible mountain of food displayed behind the hot case attracted hungry commuters after rush hour and plenty of deli profits. No kidding, the cutters were: Tom, Dick, and Harry — their white, blood-stained aprons hung sordidly under their names, side by side in the slaughter room.

Rick’s Display Case was worth remembering. And maybe for a moment, during the dinner rush, our customers had a chance to release some endorphins after a stressful day at work.

In your own business, keep your display case full. In the grocery business, they call it “facing the shelves.” Look inviting and attractive to your customers and prospects. Empty shelves and empty hot cases are not attractive. They may think you’re out of business or lose their appetite and look elsewhere.

For us, humor proved to be a useful tool and frankly, a means to break up the monotony. Our exaggerated hot and cold case exhibits, food slinging behind the deli cases like high-school dodge ball players, birthed a kind of cult following. Creating a fun atmosphere and memorable experience is what the fish throwers down at the world-famous Pike Place Market do. People come from around the world to see the young fish cutters sling King Salmon, an experience worth remembering and sure to be remarked about.

Humor, Worth Remembering: Most of us welcome a laugh in order to deal with the dire straits promoted by media spin hipsters. Humor creates a welcomed connection and becomes a useful tool in the context of marketing. If you can effectively link humor and honest hyperbole to your product or service, your impact will draw customers and prospects. By the way, what do Lizards and Cavemen have to do with car insurance?