Attracting Customers Of Similar Types

You must first assess whether there are sufficient numbers of these customer-types, with sufficient disposable income, within your catchment area to be worthwhile pursuing. Assuming this is the case, and your pub is successfully satisfying the needs of your existing clientele, attracting them is often down to making them aware of your pub and encouraging them to try it. Your marketing efforts should focus on doing this. Once inside your pub, these customers should feel ‘at home’ with similar types of people around them and the service and facilities that they want.

Attracting New Customer-Types

You may decide that to be successful you must attract new types of customers to your pub. This may be because your existing customer-types alone are not sufficient to generate the level of profits you are aiming for, or that new types of customer may provide you with an opportunity of building your business that is too good to miss.

But how do you decide which new types of customer to attract? Here are a few questions to help you decide:

• What other customer-types live and work within the pub’s catchment area?
• What other customer-types have high disposable income?
• Are they in sufficient numbers to be beneficial to your business?

• Can you meet their needs?
• Will you be comfortable dealing with this type of customer?
• What types of customer are not being catered for by any of your competitors?
• What are the implications of attracting these new customers on your existing clientele?
• Are there any other implications?

 

Attracting completely new types of customer is a more difficult way of building your business. Fundamental changes to the way you operate your business may have to be made. (For example, aiming to attract diners to a pub where there are no facilities for serving food at present.) This can be costly and can affect your existing clientele. Communicating with new customer-types is more complicated as you have to find ways of reaching them. There is also no guarantee that you will attract sufficient numbers of new customer-types to make the changes viable. Any plans to make any fundamental changes to your business need to be supported by extensive research, prior to going ahead.

It is possible to make temporary changes to the way your pub operates at different times of the day, or different days of the week, in order to target different types of customer. The aim of these temporary changes is to make your pub more appealing to different types of customers. Different times of the day or week can provide you with an opportunity to attract customers who are not normally around at other times, for example, targeting shoppers with a special lunchtime menu. Traditionally quiet periods can also be filled by making changes that will appeal to new types of customer, such as running Monday quiz nights.

Habit Breaking

People are creatures of habit; they do the same things, go to the same shops and use the same pubs year after year. They will even sometimes do so when the service or facilities are less than good. This can be because ‘dissatisfaction’ in one area may be offset by benefits gained in another. For example, a couple may use a particular pub, despite the fact that the place is not very welcoming, because their friends have always done so.

Sometimes it takes a very bad experience to unsettle customers and make them look elsewhere. However, people’s expectations have risen over the last decade and they are less likely to accept poor service or standards than they once were. People are also generally more experimental and mobile than they once were, and are therefore willing and able to try new places and experiences. People’s personal circumstances can alter too, which changes their habits. The result of all these changes is a constant flow of ‘floating customers’ who are not settled and are looking for new pubs to satisfy their needs.