I have been reading a lot of marketing articles, blogs, white papers, and books lately. All in an effort to become better equiped to bring GuestSpan’s solutions to market and make the customer want to buy. We have conducted market research, spoken to hotel owners and travelers, attended trade shows and conferences, and pretty much talked to everybody we could to promote our concept and gauge market reaction.
It has occurred to me in all of this that all of the time and effort we put into cleaver marketing schemes and research is really an effort to get back to the days of the country general store. We’ve all seen them in movies. And some of us have even lived in small towns that still have something like them. In early America the general store was the hub of economic activity in small towns. Everything happened around the store- mail was delivered there, telegrams were sent and recieved, and every good imaginable from animals to household cleaners were sold there. But the centerpiece of the general store was the shopkeeper.
The shopkeeper knew everyone in town, knew what they bought and sold, knew who the sent mail to and recieved mail from, knew where they lived and what they did for a living-He knew pretty much everything. It wasn’t this knowledge, though, that made the shopkeeper so good at what he did. He really knew his customers. He lived with them. He knew, for instance, that Mrs. Jones hosted a party every Thursday and liked to serve carrot cake. So he made sure that he had it in stock and fresh for her when she came into the store. He also knew that the Smith children didn’t care for licorice, but liked horehound. So when Mr. Smith came in for the groceries there was always a package of horehound sent home with it. It was these little personal touches that made the shopkeeper indispensible.
Modern technology and the supermarket essentially did in the little shopkeeper, and ever since then businesses have been trying to get as close to their customers as he was. Technology has come a long way in helping business accomplish this, but there is still a great deal of distance between the business and it’s customers. I think that when we truly start to understand our customers one an intimate level, for instance, knowing which hotel guests like to order extra pillows, and which restaurants the most frequently visit when they stay at our hotel that we will truly be closer to the kind of relationship the shopkeeper had with his customers.
This is something GuestSpan is striving to deliver to the hospitality industry. I don’t know what the end game looks like at this point. But bringing guests, hotels, and the surrounding community closer together makes things better for everybody.
