My Friends, one of the best secrets I shared on my 21,000 email list this week was about a ground breaking story from the company Corona Extra which lost more than $150,000,000 when Coronavirus started (and how they bounced back to become a best selling brewery company)
This is for you my friends who are entrepreneurs, business owners and entertainers
Last Sunday while I was travelling, I noticed something as I was scrolling my Facebook timeline
After every regular post, the next post I saw was something talking about Cameroonian dishes & which one of them is the best
Did you notice that too? Or maybe you even posted something about it yourself…
You see mt friend, there’s a certain popular drink called ‘Corona Extra’ which is sold in some African and European countries
When Coronavirus started hitting the streets in March 2020, a lot of people stopped consuming the Corona beer and the company plunged into a deep loss of around $150,000,0000 (one hundred and fifty million dollars)
The owners of Corona beer made several statements stressing there was no link between coronavirus and their brand but it didn’t help
Surveys showed that drinkers were being put off by the association of the names ‘Corona’
One survey revealed that 38% of beer drinkers wouldn’t buy the brand under any circumstances because of the virus outbreak, and another reported that there had been a spike in internet searches for ‘corona beer virus’ as WARC reported
One of those days, the group announced they were halting the production of their beer…. boommmmm!
My friend, imagine you were the brand manager or marketer for Corona beer? How would you play it?
It’s not an easy situation when the brand you manage shares the same name as one of the world’s global pandemic that has the world in grip
But the company did something strange that changed everything
A few months later, they announced they were donating a percentage of all their profits to fight the Coronavirus and around 300,000 antibacterial vels made from brewed alcohol
They started using lines like ‘for every corona beer sold, we’re donating a percentage to the fight against the coronavirus…’ (this is paraphrased)
Do you know how this went ?
A year on, latest data show that sales of Corona beer increased by 40% making it not only one of the fastest-growing alcohol brands but one of the fastest-growing grocery products recently
If you’re still reading this my friend…
One of the biggest skills you’ll need to posses as a hustler and entrepreneur is the ability to watch people
If you want to make money selling anything, WATCH YOUR PEOPLE, watch your audience, see where their attention is focused and go for what’s picking their interest
It’s called “SOCIAL LISTENING“
See, right now when Cameroonian dishes are trending online
Some say its achu
Others like myself think the all time best meal is ERU
As a hustler and one with a business mind, what’s this saying to you and how do you access where the people’s attention is focused?
Or maybe this has nothing direct to do with your industry…
For example, August of every year is the month with the most birthdays
As August approached this year, one cool thing we did was to advise one of our marketing clients to run a birthday campaign for their restaurant business
Here’s what happened…
Facebook has a small trick that will allow you to directly advertise to people who have upcoming birthdays
And that’s exactly what we leveraged
Do you know what crazy thing we said in the ads?
One of the lines said…
“… Because it’s your birth month, restaurant X is offering you a free meal to celebrate your birthday… ”
And that’s how we asked the restaurant to offer a really small but ‘free teaser meal’ for everyone who came and proved August was their birth month
Hypothetically, imagine we got just 30 people to take the free meal
If the staff treats them well and offers a really delicious first meal, our expectation is that 15 of those people should love the food and make restaurant X their favourite place
This means the next time they came in, they probably came with a friend and spent X and X amount (which if you consider, has already covered the cost of their first ‘free meal’)
And that’s assuming they return just one more time, because with businesses like saloons, restaurants, bars etc, there’s a high customer lifetime value(LTV)…
That means an average client will stay with you for around a year except you treated them badly or they were moving to another location
In essence, that means a small free meal which cost the restaurant like $2 maximum(around 1,000frs), could bring them a client who ended up spending not less than $200(around 100,000frs) in a year of returning (talk less if they return with friends and recommend others)
My friend, I’ll leave you to unpack this writing yourself. When I was writing this, I said to myself there will be lots of thoughts running through your brain as you read because we could elaborate on each of these for hours.
Here’s my point to you my friend …
If you’re running a restaurant and a trend like this comes up, what about offering a free meal?(you can still offer a subsidized meal instead)
If you’re a comedian, what about stealing the moment to produce skits that use various dishes to benefit from the trend?
If you’re a content creator, what about creating content around what’s trending?
Did you notice that in Nigeria when Obi Cubana was trending for his mother’s lavish funeral, hundreds of comedians, actors, shows, movies, artists, produced content around it? and some of them featured him in person
Maybe you’re not able to directly make use of the food trend right now…
I hope this gets your brain ticking in the right direction to look for what is trending in your field or when something else starts to trend that will need you to apply this undercover knowledge
My dear friend, where everyone sees the fun, have fun too, but in all the fun, I want you to always think differently…
Always do your SOCIAL LISTENING…
Share this post with someone, forward it to them now if this brought you value, thank you…
Like I always say, cheers to many more years of shamelessly living and crazily excelling in passion and purpose
Talk soon
Arreyb
Internet Entrepreneur | Journalist | Author