Delight them. Repeatedly…

I was commiserating with a client shackled by management, prevented from implementing certain marketing initiatives because of an emphasis on direct, measurable ROI. I’m a proponent of indirect marketing (maybe the only proponent) by which I mean marketing efforts that have an impact that can’t be directly measured…which led to a story a client told a story about a great Mexican restaurant by his work.

He had been telling coworkers about the place because it’s clean, the staff is friendly, they remember your favorites, and the food is good. In essence, he is marketing on behalf of the restaurant by telling people about it, what we call word-of-mouth or viral marketing.

But this viral marketing isn’t the result of some concerted effort on the part of a marketing department to incent people to talk about them. It’s incidental.

The restaurant didn’t manipulate my client or entice him in any way to say great things. They simply provided a superior, consistent customer experience and a tasty meal.

No marketing budget has a category for “delight” and I’d probably get nowhere trying to convince a director of marketing that cleanliness, quality and friendliness should be part of her marketing plan, because she wouldn’t be able to track the ROI of a smile.

But would a carefully crafted ad generate the same kind of incidental marketing that the restaurant is now benefitting from?