MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

This cus­tomer delight for­mula is based on inspi­ra­tion I got on my trip to Sin­ga­pore; namely from my trip to Aston’s Grill, which is a bud­get west­ern food place.

It also hap­pens to be the only bud­get food place I know with a queue that goes down the length of the entire street – peo­ple queue up from end to end to eat steak – and it took us about an hour to get in!

Here’s the ques­tion: why do they have such a long queue for a bud­get food place? The obvi­ous answer is, “yes, the food is great”, but beyond the gen­er­ous por­tions and pleas­ant atmos­phere, the first thing peo­ple talk about isn’t the steak, nor is it the service.

It’s the SIDE DISHES. The potato chips. The French fries. The baked pota­toes. My friends have sto­ries of peo­ple order­ing 15 side dishes to go with a chicken chop, because the side dishes are just that great.

Peo­ple are rav­ing about the side dishes! Why? Because the French fries had paprika salt sprin­kled on top of them, and peo­ple queue up for an hour down the length of the street to enter Aston’s grill. No doubt the por­tions are good, and so is the food, but when peo­ple think ‘Aston’s Grill’, they think paprika fries. Why?

I think this is the answer. First, take your entire cus­tomer ser­vice process –no mat­ter the field or genre you’re in– and break it down into its com­po­nents. So, for exam­ple, in a steak house, you have the wait­ers, the menu with French fries and other side dishes.

Next, take the seem­ingly most insignif­i­cant thing, and add a dash of effort to it. When you add a dash of paprika to your fries, it cre­ates a pleas­ant dis­rup­tion to your customer’s expec­ta­tions because they haven’t seen any­thing like it before. When peo­ple eat the paprika fries, the place is ele­vated in their minds because of the tiny, extra touch. I call this the Paprika Effect.

The main prob­lem is that it takes a bit of effort and a con­sid­er­able amount of time to add cus­tomer delight to your main prod­uct items– your big offer­ings, which are your main course. But, when it come to the small things, the smaller bat­tles, the ‘low-hanging fruit’ as it were, if you tweak the lit­tle things first, you will cre­ate a domino effect so that by the time you reach the ‘main course’, you already have a line of fanat­i­cal customers.

In the same man­ner, in the US, every­one goes to Gor­don Bier­sch because of the ‘Gor­don Bier­sch Gar­lic Fries’. It’s a very sim­i­lar con­cept, but it’s fun­nier because Gor­don Bier­sch is a micro brew­ery and peo­ple go there because of what they’ve done with their fries!

Let’s put it this way. When peo­ple go to a grill house, they expect good steak and decent side dishes, sim­ply because they’re mostly pay­ing for good steak. They get sat­is­fied, but they don’t get delighted. Just adding paprika to the chips turns cus­tomers into fanat­ics who want to come back, and knock at your door again.

Joe Girard, the world’s #1 retail per­son, said some­thing very sim­ple: his strat­egy was to send out post­cards that said, “I like you.” For exam­ple, every now and again you could send your cus­tomers a post­card that says ‘I like you’, and with it comes with a small extra bonus. It can some­thing as sim­ple as an audio, but is has to be totally unex­pected. I empha­size on ‘cus­tomers’ because we know that if you start by giv­ing things free, peo­ple don’t nor­mally value it at all.

You can start imme­di­ately after they buy — you can turn peo­ple into fans right from the begin­ning and get rid of all the doubts they may have had. It also gets them to con­sume more of your prod­ucts, and that in turn makes it more likely that they’ll come back to buy more. When you add that ele­ment of cus­tomer delight, your busi­ness even has the poten­tial to go viral, a for­mula that Cen­ter­pointe has used quite suc­cess­fully.

You can do it, too. First, you need to cre­ate and put in place a proper cus­tomer rela­tions sys­tem. For exam­ple, make sure you have a sep­a­rate buy­ers list. Once you have the basics in place, you can start fig­ur­ing out how to add paprika because if you don’t have proper cus­tomer rela­tion­ships or a proper back end, doing this might not be as effective.

Then, you can think about the var­i­ous com­po­nents of your cus­tomer rela­tion­ship. Where can you add paprika? Think about a small thing that other peo­ple ignore that you can make great. What tweaks can you make? Instead of a .pdf file, can you send a video file instead? When you do those lit­tle things, you cre­ate some­thing for your cus­tomers to form a long queue about.

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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

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