If It’s Not Working, Don’t Keep Doing It

June 20, 2008 — Stephen Brooks

Parenthetically to yesterday’s post, there was another, less effective marketing technique used by the Anchor Inn’s bar manager.  He would give “Anchor Bucks” to the top finishers of the NTN trivia games.  Anchor Bucks were coupons that were worth a dollar each and could be spent in the Anchor Inn’s lounge, restaurant and sushi bar.  I think the prizes were 4 bucks for first place and 2 for second.

The trouble was, I am pretty good at trivia, and I was in the bar for its prime hours (8:00 – 10:00) every single weeknight.  The only other person who stood a chance of winning was actually the bartender.  So the only two people who ever won any Anchor Bucks were me and the bartender who couldn’t accept them.

There’s nothing wrong with a loyalty program; as a matter of fact I think it’s a pretty good idea.  Anchor Bucks in particular were not spendable on the date they were issued, so they required the patron to return at another time to redeem them.  That’s clever, because people don’t usually go to bars alone, so even if they have enough Anchor Bucks to buy all their own drinks (highly improbable), they will be bringing their friends’ money in too.  It was also clever to tie the awarding of the bucks to an activity that tends to keep people in the bar (the trivia game).

But the loyalty benefits don’t work if nobody gets to use them.  The promise  of an Anchor Buck if you win the trivia round is nearly worthless – the actual possession  of a Buck by a customer is what gives it value as a loyalty driver.  And to make things worse, I would have been there every night with or without the incentive.  I lived in the hotel.  Once they saw that all Anchor Bucks were going to me, they should have ended or altered the program.

(BTW, I saved my bucks until I had about 500 and treated my boss and myself to a fine meal and night at the bar.  That night, over half of the hotel’s total hospitality take was worthless paper…)

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Bar Trivia

June 19, 2008 — Stephen Brooks

NTN boxI spent the better part of 1991 in Campbell River, BC.  The hotel I was living at, the Anchor Inn, had a wireless trivia system in their lounge that was administered by a company called NTN (now NTN Buzztime Inc.).  There were 20 of the little I/O devices pictured in the photo that people had at their tables, and they read multiple choice trivia questions off TV monitors and entered their answers.  (Sorry for the small photo – it was the only image I could find of the old-style units.  Search Google Images for “buzztime” to see what they look like now.)

It was competitive, of course.  You played against the other people in the room and also against other bars all across North America.  People vied for top individual score, and everyone playing at one location also had their scores averaged to find the smartest room on the continent.  There were sometimes thousands of establishments online at once, and to get our little “ANCHOR INN, CAMPBLL RVR, BC” on the top 20 screen was quite a thrill.

This is exactly the sort of interactivity that engages people and makes them stay longer at a bar, return more frequently, and invite other people along.  I can think of many similar examples, including a pub in Cochrane, Alberta that my sister-in-law used to go to every week for “Name That Tune.”  It was a fiercely competitive event where teams of mostly middle-aged people would try and guess song titles and artists.  She had a riot, and the bar was packed every week on what would otherwise be a quiet evening.

I even invented a similar draw for the fledgling bartender that worked the normally DEAD Saturday/Sunday afternoon shifts at Grumpy’s Bar when I worked there in the 80s.  I suggested that he start some kind of ongoing contest and give free beer to the winners.  We settled on Trivial Pursuit, but not played on the board – he read the 12 questions on 2 randomly chosen cards to everyone in the bar, and the patrons wrote down their answers.  The person with the most correct got the free drink.  It was played every half hour and people who otherwise might have left tended to hang around for “just one more try.”  I won’t pretend that we created a huge sensation, but sales for those two shifts did rise from a couple of hundred to five or six hundred.  And stats on the Buzztime site promise a 47% increase in spending per patron when they’re playing on the system.

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