I’m going to second what @Minion said — we don’t worry too much about competition. In fact, we’ve always held the belief that competition can only make us better. So we don’t focus much on what the other guy is doing. We focus on being the best that we can be, and believe that the rest will take care of itself. Having said that, here are a few things we do to stay relevant and in people’s minds.
1) We keep our social media, especially FB, up to date. This year we hired a media/marketing advisor to help us as we overhauled our business model, post-pandemic. The results were much more than worth the cost.
2) We stay on top of our reviews — Yelp, Google, etc. We reply when needed. We adjust when needed. Sometimes, we even clap back when needed, especially when people are being needlessly abusive. My husband has called more than one “reviewer” a social media troll and a keyboard coward. LOL. That’s probably not a good idea regularly, but it certainly causes people to take notice and usually come here just to meet “that brave man.”
3) We adjust. We watch the market. We track our own internal trends and business analytics. We noticed early on that our strongest pluses had to do with the sheer variety of our product line. On our frozen treat business side we have 72 flavors of soft serve, that can be combined into over 50,000 possible flavor blends. Between those, products that use those and our variety of options, toppings, etc, we have over 1 billion (nope, that’s not a typo!) unique products that we can make.
4) Our tag line, our motto, is “it’s time for something different.” We strive to keep reinventing ourselves based upon that motto. This year, we expanded to a full line of “adult” frozen treats — boozy shakes, slushes, malts, floats, etc, using the same 50,000 plus flavor blends. We also started a coffee operation and can make lattes, cappuccinos in those same flavor blends, including with alcohol.
5) We always try to hire neighborhood high school kids for the frozen treat side of the operation. It results in some amazing good will, and usually results in top notch employees we’ve found. We watched these kids grow up as customers and they work here as if they are invested in their neighborhood ice cream shop.
6) We listen to our customers. And we often add or change products based upon their feedback. Best example of this? We started off with a whole milk soft serve. It didn’t take long to notice that I was turning away a lot (and I mean a lot!) of people who were lactose intolerant. That began a year of testing various alternatives until we found one that even soft serve snobs couldn’t differentiate from the whole milk product. Now it is one of our biggest selling points — all of our ice cream and ice cream products (shakes, malts, etc) are lactose free.
7) We live in a mixed use neighborhood — residential and commercial. While there is always friction between the business interests and the resident interests, those frictions are less so with us. We consult with our neighbors before we make changes that could impact their right to quiet enjoyment of their homes. We go out of our way to ensure that our neighbors know that our relationship with them is as important — and maybe more important — to us as our relationship with our guests. And, most of them are guests anyway, so that helps.
In the end, we’ve learned that our business and its success lies in what we do and how we do it. As long as we have internal integrity and are the are the best at what we do, people notice.
Chip
If my answer resolves your issue, please take a minute to mark it as Best Answer. That helps people who find this thread in the future.Piper’s Ice Cream Bar, Covington KY USA
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User of the following third-party apps (ask for help or a referral link):
FreshKDS — Kitchen Display System
Bookkeep — Automated Revenue Accounting
Restoke — Menu Pricing and real-time inventory
