National Clothesline

A cleaner who is looking for the one special marketing thing that will make business skyrocket is looking for the wrong thing.

“There is no magic bullet,” said Howard Kaschyk, owner of The Marketing Shop. “Marketing is not a one-time event. Marketing is not couponing.”

Kaschyk was speaking at one of the two seminars on marketing sponsored by the Interntional Fabricare Institute at Clean ’05. His topic, “Marketing for the Smaller Plant,” could apply as well to larger cleaners, just as the advice dispensed in the concurrent seminar,

“Marketing for the Larger Cleaner,” (see below) could apply to smaller cleaners.

Marketing, Kaschyk said, is ongoing. It takes place at every moment during the life of your business and goes on whether or not your are tending to it. It’s your signs, your store, your counter, your people, your product, your packaging, your convenience and your attitude.

“Attitude is the most important,’ he said. “The owner’s attitude will come through to the customer.”

Since all the elements of marketing are always in operation, the cleaners might as well take control of them. To take control, understand the five basic concepts of marketing: image, consistency of effort, consistency of product, value and building customer loyalty.

Image, Kaschyk said, “is the greatest single differentiating factor between cleaners.” To find out what you look like to customers, take the customer’s approach to your business. Drive up to the front and enter through the customers’ entrance. What you see communicates to the customer what you are about. It tells the customer about your quality, trustworthiness and service. It sets the customer’s expectations and determines whether he wants to do business with you.

Once you have established your image you need to maintain it through consistency of effort and consistency of product. Consistency of effort means being open when you say you are, providing the same level of service at all times, making prices the same every time. Consistency of product means the quality of cleaning, pressing and packaging must be the same ever time.

Consistency establishes a level of comfort between the customer and you. Then you can work on the value of your service, which Kraschyk said is what will make or beak your business.

Value is more than just price. It is that plus a combination of convenience, quality, service and image. Customers who think another cleaner provides more value for the same price will leave. They are always looking for higher value. A cleaner’s perceived value is always changing — changes in the business, other changes in the market, and changes in individual customers affect the value quotient.

A cleaner must stay ahead of the value game to achieve the fifth element of marketing success: customer loyalty.

“Repeat customers are the bread and butter of your business,” he said. You can’t build loyalty without consistency and value. To turn new customers into loyal customers, explain why you are different and better than other cleaners and give them incentives to return.

“That customer is not your customer until five visits,” Kaschyk asserted. “If they don’t come back, follow up and find out why.”

Some attendees at Darcy Moen’s “Marketing for the Larger Plant” seminar at Clean ’05 were confused about whether they should even be considered a “larger plant.”

Moen, a consultant from the Customer Loyalty Network, offered a quick response: “I don’t care what size you are, whether it’s $30 million a week or $300 a day, the measurement tool I want you to use is right in your head. It’s what you think you are and where you want to be tomorrow.”

Important factors such as marketing, quality, pricing and loyalty can be abstract notions,

based in perception as much as reality.

“There’s something about this industry… pricing is so screwed up,” he said. “We’re consistently racing for the bottom. I can do it faster, cheaper, better — for less — until eventually we get down to nothing.”

Meanwhile, he noted, customers are basing their buying decisions on how they were treated in the past.

“We really hope that what we’ve done for our customers will bring them back,” he said. “That’s all we got is hope. I don’t think hope is enough.”

Instead of hope, Moen showed how to measure a handful of variables that he believes control a drycleaning plant’s business.

Those variables include: presence (where you are in your marketplace); pervasiveness (your reputation and track record with your customers); positivity (how positively consumers are receiving your advertising and marketing); pertinence (how relevant you are to your marketplace); and preferences (customers always choose a cleaner based on their personal inclinations).

Showing a graph that charted all of those factors, Moen asked, “What if I could figure out what my presence is in a marketplace and score it? How can you increase that presence in your customers’ minds? What if I could move up the pervasiveness of my advertising? How positive is my reputation? Each of these factors can be measured and quantified. And the really fun part is, you can do the same thing with your competitors.”

Moen has worked on ways to map marketing strategies and believes one of the keys to making such a system work is knowing what’s going on in the minds of customers.

“I can go through your customers’ files and pull up whatever market you want from your existing customer base, take the phone number and have my people call and ask how we are doing,” he said. “We’ll score everybody in our base with a rapid scoring system. Then, we’ll use this simple little chart to tell you what is going on with your business and where you need to work and what changes are going on.”

Recently he employed that technique with his company’s call center to poll both cleaners and customers on the same questions. He discovered some interesting discrepancies.

“We’re exceeding our customers’ quality expectations,” he said. “That’s fantastic, but how about convenience? We think we’re pretty convenient. We’ve set up all of the locations near and dear to them. The customer is saying, ‘No, you’re not convenient enough’.”

Moen also noted that customers don’t consider packaging and pricing nearly as important as cleaners believe they do.

“There’s a big disconnect there,” he said. “Cleaners are way out of whack with what’s going on. You think you know what what’s going on, yet in fact, it’s completely different than what is occurring in your plant.”

Todd Feigenbaum of Feigenbaum Cleaners, who joined Moen as a seminar presenter, agreed. He told how Moen’s marketing analysis has helped his plant.

“We focussed our marketing to a very narrow set of niches, getting away from the broadcast marketing — newspaper, radio and TV — because we found it didn’t work,” Feigenbaum noted. “There are so few people in our communities who have a really significant need for drycleaning on a regular basis. So, in the broad media, you’ve got an awful lot of overshot.”

Devising a marketing plan that narrowed its scope to direct mail and a specific population of potential customers was the first step. Then, Feigenbaum varied offers by customer segments and season, reduced the discounts overall and added a household offer to every coupon. The idea was to appeal to the 20 percent of their clientele who comprised over 70 percent of their business since the old marketing strategies just weren’t working so well.

“We used to use 50 percent discount coupons trying to really say, ‘We’re going to convince you at all cost to switch from a competitor and come to us’,” Feigenbaum added. “It just didn’t work. It’s very hard to get people to change.”

“Now we try to find the most affluent, small blocks of neighborhoods using postal carrier routes, which are typically 300 to 500 households,” he continued. “We try to focus our prospect marketing on those households — we’re not trying to get a high percentage return. We’re trying to find the right customer — the ones who will come in and spend $200, $300, $500 or a thousand dollars a year with us.”

The new approach has produced some very positive results. Feigenbaum Cleaners has managed 7 percent growth in a declining market and a 9.6 percent increase in annual expenditures per customer across the board.

“Just to stay even in a market like mine is an accomplishment,” he stated. “So, we’re happy with these results. I think without this approach, we would have seen sales down 5 percent instead of up 5 percent — a 10 percent sway.”

To accomplish that, Feigenbaum admitted he had to be willing to change his marketing approach, which is not easy for a plant owner to do. However, by knowing his competitive environment and customer demographics very well, he was able to increase his annual revenues in a tough economy.

Moen echoed the same sentiment, adding that such a change in attitude is much more difficult than the changes cleaners usually make: price drops.

“It’s insanely easy to take a ‘3’ and turn it into a ‘2’,” he said. “It doesn’t take a lot of creative power, but it does take a lot of work to move up, to build your business, to reposition, to re-market. Nobody really wants to change. We’re resistant to change. You have to know who you have as a customer today, whether they are going to go with you, whether they are going to leave you and go somewhere else. You also have to know where you’re going. You need a great willingness to change.”