By John I. Todor, Ph.D., author of Addicted Customers (www.AddictedCustomers.com)
How
can a business make the customer experience they offer more compelling?
One
way is to stop thinking about the product being sold so literally and think
about how it fits in the broader context of the customer.
Most
grocery stores sell food products
and they do so at very low margins in a highly competitive environment. The
following excerpt from Karola Saeket’s article San Francisco Chronicle
illustrated how a growing number of “growing” companies have put food products
“in-context.”
“It’s 4:30 in the afternoon. do you know where your
dinner is coming from?
Surveys claim that nearly half of working Americans
don’t know and rely on last-minute stopgap solutions. That frequently means
fast food or other high-fat takeout. All too often, members of a household end
up “dining” in a solitary garb-and-run pattern.
A wide range of commercial products and services
aim to keep the hallowed tradition of the family dinner from going the way of
the butter churn and the wood-burning stove. The latest wrinkle: the meal
assembly kitchen.
In a nutshell, it’s a place where customers can put
together as many as a dozen family-size main courses—chicken crepes with cheese
and bacon, maple-soy glazed salmon, vegetarian chili, summer ribs with chipotle
barbecue sauce—and a few deserts, such as cinnamon peach crisp, strawberry
cheesecake or bread pudding. Yet, it is not a cooking class.
When registering for a session, customers pick from
a monthly changing menu, generally featuring 14 dishes. All ingredients are
pre-prepared and lined up at individual workstations, along with the few needed
utensils. Assembly instructions are clearly posted, step by step, so no cooking
skills are required.
The staff takes care of all cleanup …the whole
process takes about two hours.
…after each meal is assembled, it is packaged for
the home freezer and labeled with instructions no more complicated than those
on mass-produced frozen entries …a home-cooked family dinner for four to six
people appears on the table.
The cost is usually between $2.75 and $4 per
person.
Why
are the numbers of these types of businesses growing and even being franchised?
People want the experience they deliver. It is more than the prepared food and
it is more than the price. People want to be engaged in producing “family
meals”, meals that are nutrition and fit their busy lifestyle.
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