Marketing From Within
The Decline Of Traditional Advertising Has Lead More Retailers To Turn Inward When Reaching Out To Customers


Denny's Free Grand Slam® Breakfast promotion generated a tremendous buzz in February.

With the number of newspaper readers in the US declining by 4% a year, the broadcast radio industry down by roughly 13% over the past two years, and TV a shadow of its former self, many retailers are finding that it no longer “pays to advertise”, at least not in the traditional way. Small wonder then that advertising spending by businesses experienced its first two-year decline in 2008 and 2009.

Instead of relying on conventional forms of advertising, many savvy retailers are turning inward, adapting an inside-out marketing strategy that uses their stores as advertising platforms for promotions and events that reach out to customers and generate an invaluable viral buzz on and off the Internet.

The most successful of these events aren’t exotic “gimmicks” conjured up to create attention for attention’s sake; instead, they’re promotional ideas that come from within a business, growing directly out of its core identity to build its image with consumers. As marketing expert Marc Gobe wrote in his book Emotional Branding, “Retail environments (are becoming) places to build brand images rather than just sell products.”

The need to build your brand with the customer at the point of service applies to all retail businesses today, including carwashes. There are a variety of ways that you can use SiteWatch® to turn your carwash into a dynamic marketing tool that doesn’t just clean cars, but also polishes your image with customers.

The “Free” Market

For many retailers like Dunkin Donuts, Arby’s, Baskin Robbins and others, this branding has involved running selective “free give-away” offers for limited periods of time. Although it may seem counter intuitive from a pre-Internet perspective, a free offer can be a cost effective way to raise customer awareness for any business, including a carwash.

After all, no word captures the consumer’s attention as effectively as “free”. And few things will spur a viral buzz as quickly as the news that a retailer is offering its product or services at no charge. As far as the cost of giving away the free perk is concerned, the companies that have run these promotions successfully consider their give-aways an advertising expense.

Denny’s Free Grand Slam Breakfast promotion, which generated so much publicity for the company in February, provides a good example of the power of free. Although Denny’s did advertise its free breakfast deal on the Super Bowl, the company relied mostly on social media buzz and extensive traditional media coverage to promote the offer.

In 2009, Denny’s served its free breakfast to two million people, averaging 130 Grand Slams per hour at each of its 1,500 restaurants. During the promotion, the restaurant chain ranked among the Top Ten Trend Twitter Topics. This year, even more breakfasts were served, and Denny’s received 24 million hits on its website in the four days surrounding the offer.

The exposure Denny’s receives from its free offer is well worth the cost of 2 million breakfasts. No wonder the company’s stock rose 22% in the short term after it ran the promotion last year.

Free and Easy

You can run a variety of free promotions at your carwash using the SiteWatch Cash Register System. Here are just a few examples:

Making Your Carwash Fun

People spend more money when and where they feel good, said Walt Disney, who went on to amass a fortune building “the happiest place on earth”. You aren’t going to turn your carwash into Disneyland, but you can create a game-like sense of excitement at your site by randomly giving away free washes at the SiteWatch Xpress Pay Terminal® (XPT).

The XPT makes it easy to assign a free wash based on the number of transactions it processes. For example, you can award a free wash to every 250th customer who uses each XPT. This random award promotion can be highlighted on your XPT, with point of sale material at your wash and with banners on your website. For added fun you can post the number of washes you’ve given away thus far this year on your website and on a sign in front of your carwash. Please consult your legal counsel about state and local laws regulating raffles and games of chance before making this offer.

Your customers aren’t going to expect to win a wash at your site, since the odds are slim, but the fun of having this contest should make a trip to your carwash more exciting and memorable, which will strengthen the bond between your business and its customers. By the same token, most of the people standing in line for hours at Denny’s for a $6 breakfast know that their actions don’t make sense economically. For them, the free Grand Slam isn’t about breakfast; it’s about being a part of something fun!

Consider McDonald’s, which has enjoyed great success with its long-standing October Monopoly Game. The quick serve restaurant chain has reenergized its brand, built customer loyalty and reached out to young consumers by tapping into the iconic name recognition of one of the world’s most famous board games.

Initially, McDonald’s Monopoly began as an in-store promotion, but the quick serve king continually innovated, taking the game online in 2004, bringing on digital partners to increase its prize pool and, in 2008, turning it into the world’s first mobile collect and win game. Some 4 million players entered 70 million mobile codes in McDonald’s Monopoly in 2008 and store sales increased by 5.5% during Monopoly Month. Last year, McDonald’s added a Facebook app for its game, which attracted 500,000 users.

The lesson McDonald’s demonstrates is that customers want fun and color in their daily routines. They aren’t going to get this from your advertising, but you can give it to them by turning your carwash into a marketing platform that delivers an enjoyable experience.

As the McDonald’s Monopoly experience also shows, when you create this enjoyable experience and marry it to social media, the viral buzz you create is going to spread like wildfire. The Internet has turned word of mouth advertising into a more powerful force than could ever have been imagined just a generation ago. If you use your carwash to create events and customer experiences that get people tweeting, blogging and emailing, you’ll create a level of exposure for your business that would be all but impossible to match with traditional advertising.

Making It Meaningful

Making a trip to your carwash fun is one way of generating this kind of exposure. Adding extra meaning to the customer’s experience at your wash is another way. Home Depot offers a good example of this strategy.

Beginning in June of 2009, the home improvement giant did something that would have been unimaginable at the start of the decade: it stopped giving customers plastic bags with their purchases. Ad material published by Home Depot explained the new policy this way:

"To encourage customers to reduce their use of plastic bags and protect the environment we will now charge 5 cents for each plastic bag. Please bring your own bag or purchase one of the Home Depot’s reusable bags available in-store."

Home Depot’s eco-bag policy is just one example of the steps retailers are taking to make trips to their stores more meaningful to customers by connecting it to a larger cause. There’s a good reason why so many merchants from Wal-Mart to Starbucks have followed similar strategies. In one recent survey, 85% of Americans said they have a more positive image of companies that support causes they believe in, and 68% said they would pay more for a product that supported a good cause.

The SiteWatch XPT can help you implement a cause marketing program by giving customers the option of donating to a charity when they complete their transaction, then having it matched by your carwash. For example, you can ask customers if they’d like to donate 25 cents to a designated cause when they purchase a $4.75 wash; then you could match that with a 25 cent donation of your own.

If you consider your 25 cent donation a discount, it seems small – about 5%. In fact, very few of your customers are likely to be motivated by a 25 cent discount on a $4.75 wash. However, when customers see that 25 cents is being donated to a good cause, they are likely to feel a stronger connection to your carwash.

Extend Your Reach With Expanded Hours

In the world of inside-out marketing, operating hours aren’t always just the times when you’re open for business; they can also be a means of attracting attention and drawing new customers.

There’s no better example of this than the “Black Friday” that draws huge crowds to shopping centers across America. Retailers like Target and Wal-Mart don’t open their doors in the wee hours of the morning the day after Thanksgiving simply to sell merchandise. (The customers who line up at those stores at 3am would probably end up shopping there for holiday gifts anyway.) More important to these retailers are the marketing benefits that result from opening early.

Aside from generating reams of publicity and word-of-mouth advertising, the unusual hours also create a sense of excitement among customers and give them good feelings about the store. Movie theatres and electronics retailers are guided by similar marketing instincts when they open at Midnight for the release of a new film, DVD or computer game.

It doesn’t always take a special event or the arrival of a hot new product for a store to expand its hours. Some retailers have distinguished their businesses by opening an hour or two early, or remaining open a little longer in the evening.

Aside from accommodating the busy schedules of time-pressured consumers, the extended hours deliver a positive marketing message. Many customers will attribute the expanded hours to the fact that the business must be doing well. The fact that the hours are different from those of similar businesses also makes a store stand out in the minds of consumers.

The SiteWatch XPT makes it more practical for a carwash to expand its hours, because it saves labor and eliminates cash handling. Click here to read a Great American Success Story on how Busy Bee Car Wash expanded hours and revenues at one of its Miami, FL sites by adding XPTs.

Since the XPT has the ability to implement discounts automatically for specified periods, you can use your self-pay terminal to run specials during your extended hours. For example, you can open an hour earlier and close an hour later on Thursdays and offer customers a dollar-off “early bird” or “night owl special” during those periods.

According to the inside-out marketing theory, this special offer will not only encourage some customers to make a visit to your wash part of their Thursday routine (an important benefit in and of itself); it will also give all customers an added reason to remember your carwash. Even customers who never pull into your lot on a Thursday will identify your carwash with the early bird and night owl offers.

Doing things at your site that creates a positive impression on customers and gives them greater awareness of your business is at the heart of inside-out marketing. Not long ago, a business could create this consumer awareness through advertising, but changes wrought by the Internet and social media have made that far less likely today.

In this era, a carwash operator, or any other retailer, must often take a different route to building customer awareness – and in many cases that route starts inside your own front door.