There was a person ranting to me today about a restaurant that she went to. Apparently it had the worst food and service she has ever had. She made her complaints to the chef as well and evidently they didn’t do much initially. What she did discover is that they mailed her a gift certificate to go to the restaurant again.

This was interesting as she was ranting on how silly this was where if she was that dissatisfied about the service why would she ever want to return to even use it? That just resulted in her ranting bad things about the restaurant even more. She was expressing how she couldn’t believe that they just didn’t charge her at all for the initial bill.

When you think about it, value wise it works out to be the same thing as the card essentially gave her another free meal. In that case I would be inclined to say that it would make more business sense to just deduct the appropriate amount on the present bill. It shows the person that you are doing something immediately to try and rectify the problem where there are better odds that they will give you a second chance.

Nobody likes the thought of paying for something they disliked a lot. Giving the person a voucher in that type of instance just turns it into a “you bought two bad meals for the price of one” I’d say. I think vouchers or gift cards as a form of financial compensation only works best in a scenario where the person purchased something wrong either through their own fault or the business’s.

Today I read an e-mail that had a note about how a person’s business grew entirely though word of mouth and that the operation started in a simple home. It continues to grow today and so he wanted to try and get more word of mouth advertising.

This is definitely one of the more effective methods that can be very cost effective too. Not only that, you are heavily rely on the quality of your offering to convince people to essentially advertise it for you. It’s one of those things too where just focusing on offering something great can translate into a lot of additional advertising.

Of course, some people may argue that they know a ton of people that offer something great yet they still fall short and say go out of business. I think the important thing is that if you are relying on advertising through word of mouth, don’t be afraid to ask for it. Don’t just assume the buzz will naturally spread. Tell people that you want to attract say more business and so that way you are actually taking an active role in getting the word out.

Really, it’s not uncommon for people to simply assume that you are doing great and so they won’t actively feel the need to tell people about it unless the other party asks first. Just ask for it.

There was this fitness business I was looking at that dealt with teaching people a specific sport and like most places they offered a pricing package. Interesting thing I noticed though that throughout its site they were actually pushing some kind of diet product as part of their curriculum fee. I recognized this product from all those Internet advertisements too.

These types of things usually leave a bad taste in my mouth. It’s almost like a school where they force/pressure you to buy some kind of health product which people can do without. Not only that, some of them say you have to buy it as part of the curriculum which is border line unethical I’d say.

In my opinion, the only true way to introduce supplement products of this fashion for a business that is trying to sell a product to its client base is to simply present it while demonstrating how it has helped them. Attaching it to your service in a forced way though just screams money grubber for the most part I’d say.

Example, imagine a gym where for a membership they charge you for the facilities as well they put in the price of these multi vitamins on top of it as part of the “package”. I would think the better thing to do would be to keep the membership separate and simply just demonstrate/showcase how someone in that gym has benefited from it. Usually a better buzz and credibility can be created that way too in terms of getting demand to actually buy the product.

While I’m sure any business would want to make an extra dollar anyway they can, reputation is one of those things that can’t really be bought back afterwards and so techniques like these should be avoided I’d say.