This is something that I am learning the soft way. Hold on, I know that turned you on, right away. 10 million Likes ??? hmmm
Well, the new learning is: Captive customers may not be real consumers at all even if they are highlighted in pink on your quarterly sales projection presentation.
To get to the meat of the matter, go for a medium or vehicle where the customer or the potential customer can talk back and yell back at your channel/system.
Interactive mediums throw up numbers. These numbers are more reliable than the ones representing retired government clerks or promoted clerks pondering over broadsheets, which they regularly use to hide behind when confronted by wives or worthies.
Also read: Food and Cooking techniques
Qualitative judgments on consumption numbers for any medium/channel throw up opinions. Twenty or even ten years ago, these opinions used to translate into business in a world where the Internet was not omni-present.
Now, things are different.
Compare a regularly active news website versus an opinion poll using a sample audience. You get the idea. The former is real-time data involving knowledge of even the browser used by the reader and the latter is an opinion by experts who have been there before.
It does not quite match.
Except that we cannot get 30 million users to forcibly use a poll online and give us data on something we want to hear about. It could be the name of the political party they will vote for or the brand of the cake of soap they will buy.
Or can we?
Yes, we can if we disguise the question by breaking it up into hundreds of questions and scattering it all over the place as articles, slideshows, opinion pieces and pictures on which the reader can comment displaying his or her inclination. This valuable indication can be captured through big data/analytics tools and used by marketing or business heads.
Now, the Internet is in every hand held device and through push feeds, products are either being customized or changed for mass production through continuous user feedback, which is manual or dynamic.
Today, it is possible for restaurateur couple such as Sumit Goyal and Shruti Sharma Goyal of Gastronomica and Dude Food in New Delhi, India or George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan of the Press Club in Central Business District, Melbourne, Australia, to unearth potential customers out of the combined pool of restaurant goers in the National Capital Region or CBD. They just have to convert them by offering them the proverbial lollypop.
Hold on. There is something really different here.
The Goyals and the Masterchef duo can engage in lollypops, which can be customized for every customer if they choose to buy that data.
The executive chef of the Le Meridien Gurgaon (formerly the Pullman, Gurgaon) can now find out if the amount of cherry in his cheesecakes was too much for the family who walked in on Sunday for a good time.
Abhijit Mukherji, formerly of the Taj group of hotels had locked on to this bee of collecting data on guests. He had once gone on record saying a hotel should offer a guest only Coke and Rose apples if that guests prefers just that.
The example that he had mentioned to me personally when he was the general manager of the Ambassador – a hotel he turned around completely – was that the guest may not expressedly state his preference but may leave something untouched and consume something else wholly to indicate his preference within the room.
This was data collection in the non-tech manner. It can be digitized and automated today.
However, just being able to do it is not reason enough for our hospitality industry to embrace this concept. We still want to live in our own creative world where the customer is expected willy nilly to like the chef’s creations.
DISCLAIMER: Views expressed above are the author’s own.