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Extra service may make the difference

All businesses must consider how much value to give their customers and when it ceases to become profitable. Measuring this is difficult and today's idea may make it harder or easier for you. Let me know?

In business schools they teach you to do the least that you possibly can so that your profits will be as large as they possibly can. This strategy does not seem to be widely promoted for corner shops. Instead, shopkeepers find themselves being urged by suppliers to do the most that they possibly can to delight their shoppers and win extra custom.

Seth Godin says in a recent blog that that the latter strategy is a "crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least. Radically overdeliver."

"Turns out," he says, "That this is a cheap and effective marketing technique."

Which is an interesting idea for independent retailers to consider. While big companies may exploit your willingness to overdeliver to shoppers to sell their product or service, taking value away from you, at the same time your act of overdelivering creates extra value for the shopper that makes a visit to your shop more attractive than to a competing multiple...and creates more value for you as a result of winning their loyalty.

Perhaps what you lose in cash margin, you make up in cheap marketing? You will have to work it out for yourself.
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