3 Hawker Center Tactics!

I made a quick trip to clementi hawker center yesterday to buy dinner… While waiting for my food. I made some very interesting observations. How hawkers get sales…

1. Drinks first… anything else later… Notice that for alot of the hawker centers you go to, the drink stall auntie is the one to approach u first. She’s even so kind to find you a seat and clear the table for you. Ever wondered why? Coz buying a drink is usually a spilt second decision. With there being numorous drink stalls, if she doesnt get your business at the start, you’re likely to order a drink from a shop thats near where you ordered your food. Its not like buying food where you walk up and down the rows of hawkers all touting for your business… Once they get you your seat they take your order for drinks… and once that’s done, mission accomplished.. they move on to the next stray wanderer…

2. “Got Queue or not?”… if people are undecided on what to eat, they usually go for one with the longest queue.. Their logic? If there’s a queue it has to be good… and the more ppl queue, the more people queue… Think about it.. how many times have u queued up.. and suddenly once there are like 3 ppl in the queue, the queue just seems to multiply exponentially… Even if you’re not in the mood for queuing.. you’ll take a mental note of that stall and be sure to try it out the next time… Hawkers should just hire people to stand permanently at their stall… make it seem like there’s always a queue… Pay them Macdonalds wages, its even less work that working at Macs…

3. Rewards for frequent customers… nothing will increase business more than word of mouth.. especially for a food stall… frequent customers should be given more “good stuff”. Like extra meat or chilli… befriend them.. and you can be sure that they’ll recommend it to their friend the next time, coz they think they have so called “connections”..

Borat: The best damn buzz marketer there ever was

Hello… My name a Borat. I come from a Kazakstan… I like you. Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a genius… He has effectively used almost nothing to market his movie and yet has almost every single talk show in the country dying to get him on their show… Dave Letterman, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Conan O Brian…. Thats the amount of buzz he’s generated…. Millions around the world are imitating his stupid accent (me included), albeit 90% are probably not very good at it… but that’s not the point.

The fact that this man has been able to generate so much buzz on the Internet and mainstream media, its truly amazing…First, the use of humor and making funny, ridiculous and totally outrageous statements has caused the fire to spread quickly. It goes to show that buzz marketing is a thousand times more effective than traditional marketing…