Hey, it’s Bob Negen, and in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re gonna talk about the Pina Colada principle. So the pina colada principle simply states that there is always a hook available that you can use to drive traffic. And so what do I mean and how do become the Pina Colada principle.
So my friend Randy Gage has a great saying. He says there’s no shortage of money. There’s just a shortage of ideas.
And it applies to marketing There’s no shortage of people out there who want to come into your store and buy things. There’s just a shortage of good ideas that will actually get them to take action and come into your store. And the reason that it’s named the pina colada principal is our friend, Micha Seto, who owns thirteen stores in the Lewis Delaware area.
Whenever it rains, she makes up Pina Coladas in a punch bowl and serves them to anybody who is shopping in her stores.
And she does it because of the 1970’s song the escape song. And you probably know it as the Pina colada song. Do you love Pina coladas?
Getting caught in the rain.
That song was the number one song of the nineteen seventies in the United States. And when I started sing it, you probably remembered it. You might not like the way I sang it, but you probably remembered it. And so there’s that association.
There’s that hook between pina coladas and rain. And what Micha said was that when it rains on the sure her traffic goes way down. They her customers, the people who are on the Delaware Shore tend to go to the out at malls not shop shop in downtown Lewis. So she came up with the Pina Colada marketing strategy. When it rains, they serve pina coladas and then they start to play the song in the store and do all of those things.
Our friend Kelly Larson, if it snows early in the season, she gives away a free ice cream cone. Why? When it gets cold, people don’t want ice cream. So she’s has an idea, a Pina Colada idea to get people into the store.
There’s always something you can do. It’s just a question of thinking about it being clever and being willing to hustle. I wanna say that also. So many retailers and it’s not this is not a judgment, but there’s the field of dreams mentality happening where If I open my store, they will come and that’s just not a truth.
It’s just not a reality.
And back in the early days of the Mackinaw Kite Company when I started my career, right next to our store was the Dixie Tavern. In the Dixie Tavern, the whole, you know, the the whole wall was window.
And everybody wanted to sit at the window seats because they face the Straits of Mac and all beautiful beautiful view. But if there was nobody in the store, my brother, Steve and I would take a wind up bird, a timber, a French ornithopter. You wind it up, and then it flaps its wings and it flies. And one of us would get on one end.
A window and the other would get on the other end, and we just fly this bird back and forth. And all the customers, they were just sitting there eating their dinners. They’d watch this bird. And we would look at them.
And then if somebody would say we’d go right next door. Right? So the point is is it could be argued that we were being obnoxious us and we were interrupting somebody’s dinner, but I can tell you that we were hustling that we needed the traffic and we did we needed to do to drive the traffic.
Micha needs the truth. She doesn’t need the traffic. She wants the traffic, it rains, the traffic dries up.
The pina colada principle comes into play. So again, Pina Colada principle merely states that there’s always something always. I’m gonna say that. Always something you can do to drive traffic.
So I hope that this episode of Real Retail TV stimulated your brain and got you thinking about things that you can do to drive traffic at times when you might be slow or drive traffic at any time, but this whole idea of there’s always something you can do. So if you do something fun, put it in the comments below. I’m Bob Negen. We’ll see you next week.