On a recent Supper Club Tour of Wisconsin, one notices all sorts of interesting things.
Yes, I said "Supper Club Tour". Your state doesn't have Supper Clubs. Wisconsin does. People line up outside of dive restaurants at 3:45pm to make sure they get a seat at McGregor's Blink Bonnie.
When you smell the sizzling steak being served ... when you see the smoke wafting nearby, you understand.
Stuff like garlic toast ... sets one place apart from another.
Bakeries serve peanut squares/cake. Ohhhhh boy!
Ishnala, the top Supper Club in Wisconsin, serves five hundred Old Fashioned drinks ... PER DAY! They expect to sell nearly 100,000 OLD FASHIONED drinks this season, at $9.50 each that's nearly a MILLION dollars a year ... on ONE DRINK! You have stores that don't do a million dollars a year selling six hundred styles.
We were told that Ishnala serves six hundred people per day. Our wait was 2 hours 25 minutes on one visit, 2 hours 49 minutes on the second visit.
There were three common themes across our seven-day Supper Club Tour of Wisconsin.
- Merchandise (i.e. food ... like sizzling steaks with smoke filling the restaurant at McGregor's Blink Bonnie). Good food matters. A lot.
- Scarcity that forces people to line up well before the restaurant opens because seating is limited. Why accommodate everybody then sit empty most of the time when you could have limited seating that forces people to line up at the door before you open?
- A "hook" ... something that sets one apart from everybody else.
I'm sure I sound Old Fashioned (see what I did there), but we've kind of lost the plot in the past fifteen years. You see all the YouTubers doing things differently, you go out in the real world and see all these businesses doing things differently ... then we sit here and think to ourselves about how many tepid channels we can sell tepid products in at 30% off??
P.S.: I frequently think about scarcity these days and how the omnichannel era ruined our businesses by demanding that all products be priced the same in all channels and are constantly available. Wrong! Look at soccer - especially now in the United States. When an MLS team used to share a stadium with an NFL team and put 27,000 people in the stadium it looked like the stadium was 2/3rd empty (it looked that way because it was 2/3rd empty). When an MLS team erected a purpose-built stadium that seated 23,000 fans, you had a sellout and 4,000 people who could not get in. The former situation is an "omnichannel" solution that makes the brand look unloved. The latter situation is a sellout!
P.P.S.: It only makes perfect sense that if you want to make your email marketing program a robust one that "works", you'd use it to advertise the products that you only bought a few hundred units of ... then you create FOMO via email marketing (and social, the concept would work even better there) that the customer must act now or the items will not be available.
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