Guerrilla Marketing
Earlier this evening, I stopped by the library to restock my “TO BE READ” pile of books that I always keep on hand. (BTW, I just finished All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood and give it an enthusiastic two thumbs up…though it isn’t for the faint of heart.) Because I had a bit of time to kill, I decided to meander down the business book row before picking up my pre-selected books on hold. BIG MISTAKE. I just stood there looking at rows and rows of books about every business related topic ever and was reminded in one fell swoop of just how much in this world I DON’T KNOW. I do know quite a few people love all the books about guerrilla marketing and so I picked one up, flipped through, and shoved it back on the shelf. I’ve got enough to stress about and warfare advertising can’t be added to the list.
Here’s a few things I do know:
Ever since we moved our merchandising cooler, the doors have been terribly janky. This forces us to repetitively reassure the customer that they haven’t broken the doors, just that the doors aren’t working properly. We called the company that fixed our oven at Thanksgiving and it took them SEVEN calls to actually find the company that made the cooler and someone who knew the parts it needs. The repair guy was super patient about it all, but he did suggest that we order replacement parts and then also a second set because the first set will undoubtedly break quickly due to low quality. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH.
Apparently, I have a small tear in my rotator cuff and I would guess it is from wrangling janky cooler doors…and that may be the just the lamest way in the world to suffer an injury.
At seven weeks until Thanksgiving, we already have several hundred Thanksgiving pie orders. I sent out an email list link to the order form and received a reply from someone who ordered in our first year of business and told me that we were pretty awful at organizing things and she didn’t want to do business with us. Uh, a) we’ve grown as humans and business owners in the last five years, b) no one was more disappointed in Thanksgiving 2014 than me, and c) 60 months of belonging to an email list when you don’t like us seems excessive.
We are putting some serious consideration into opening on Small Business Saturday this year. Historically we’ve closed the entire weekend of Thanksgiving (we were shell shocked from the first one, email lady) and Small Business Saturday is on that Saturday - just after Black Friday. It seems though that my retail minded friends all extol the virtues of opening on that day because of the strong support in this community for local business. And by “we”, I mean “me, because I haven’t mentioned this to Team PJP just yet….
Over the next few days, we have just over 1,000 tarts on order for all sorts of various events. And it makes me sad that this isn’t Shark Week on television, because we could make so many puns about Tart Week. I bet they don’t discuss that in guerrilla marketing.
