TARGETING YOUR CUSTOMERS

Target customers

Different types of customer use different types of pubs. It is very difficult to present your pub as the solution for every type of customer’s needs. What attracts one type of customer will discourage another. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, you should concentrate on attracting and retaining a few key customer-types by shaping your business to meet their needs. Focusing on a few key customer-types and doing it well is preferable to trying a ‘catch all’ approach and doing it badly. The customers you want to retain and attract are your ‘target customers’ and your marketing efforts should be aimed at them.

Existing customers

There are many sorts of customers living and working within a pub’s catchment area, each with different needs. Fortunately, you are not starting a business from scratch. Your pub has the benefit of existing customers who feel that your pub satisfies some of their needs.

As a new licensee, your aim is to find ways of building your business by attracting new customers and encouraging your existing customers to spend more.

Getting your existing customers to spend more is the easier of the two ways of building your business. They already use your pub, you know who they are, and something about them. It is relatively easy to find out their preferences and communicate with them. Sales turnover from your existing customers can be increased by encouraging them to visit your pub more regularly and/or spending more on each visit. Your marketing activity for existing customers should concentrate on ways to achieve this.

New customers

New customers can be broadly divided into two kinds:

• customers of the same ‘types’ as your existing clientele;
• new ‘customer-types’.

Customers who behave in a similar way and have similar needs can be banded together as ‘customer-types’. Examples of these are OAPs (Old Age Pensioners), students, executives and married couples etc. Splitting customers down into categories is known as ‘market segmentation’ and there are some extremely sophisticated ways of doing this. Customers can be segmented by age, occupation, social class, marital status and lifestyle. For our purposes, a simple means of categorising our customers is all that is needed.

Attracting similar customer-types to your existing clientele is less difficult than attracting completely new customer-types. The argument here is that customers of the same type as your existing clientele will find your pub meets their needs in the same way it does for your existing clientele. New customer-types are more difficult to attract because you have to speculate more about their needs and find ways of making them aware and interested in your pub. There may also be fundamental reasons why they are not using your pub at present and changes may have to be made in order to accommodate them.

Attracting customers of similar types

You must first assess whether there are sufficient numbers of these customer-types, with sufficient disposable income, within your catchment area to be worthwhile pursuing. Assuming this is the case, and your pub is successfully satisfying the needs of your existing clientele, attracting them is often down to making them aware of your pub and encouraging them to try it. Your marketing efforts should focus on doing this. Once inside your pub, these customers should feel ‘at home’ with similar types of people around them and the service and facilities that they want.

Attracting new customer-types

You may decide that to be successful you must attract new types of customers to your pub. This may be because your existing customer-types alone are not sufficient to generate the level of profits you are aiming for, or that new types of customer may provide you with an opportunity of building your business that is too good to miss.

But how do you decide which new types of customer to attract? Here are a few questions to help you decide:

• What other customer-types live and work within the pub’s catchment area?
• What other customer-types have high disposable income?
• Are they in sufficient numbers to be beneficial to your business?

• Can you meet their needs?
• Will you be comfortable dealing with this type of customer?
• What types of customer are not being catered for by any of your competitors?
• What are the implications of attracting these new customers on your existing clientele?
• Are there any other implications?

Attracting completely new types of customer is a more difficult way of building your business. Fundamental changes to the way you operate your business may have to be made. (For example, aiming to attract diners to a pub where there are no facilities for serving food at present.) This can be costly and can affect your existing clientele. Communicating with new customer-types is more complicated as you have to find ways of reaching them. There is also no guarantee that you will attract sufficient numbers of new customer-types to make the changes viable. Any plans to make any fundamental changes to your business need to be supported by extensive research, prior to going ahead.

It is possible to make temporary changes to the way your pub operates at different times of the day, or different days of the week, in order to target different types of customer. The aim of these temporary changes is to make your pub more appealing to different types of customers. Different times of the day or week can provide you with an opportunity to attract customers who are not normally around at other times, for example, targeting shoppers with a special lunchtime menu. Traditionally quiet periods can also be filled by making changes that will appeal to new types of customer, such as running Monday quiz nights.

Habit breaking

People are creatures of habit; they do the same things, go to the same shops and use the same pubs year after year. They will even sometimes do so when the service or facilities are less than good. This can be because ‘dissatisfaction’ in one area may be offset by benefits gained in another. For example, a couple may use a particular pub, despite the fact that the place is not very welcoming, because their friends have always done so.

Sometimes it takes a very bad experience to unsettle customers and make them look elsewhere. However, people’s expectations have risen over the last decade and they are less likely to accept poor service or standards than they once were. People are also generally more experimental and mobile than they once were, and are therefore willing and able to try new places and experiences. People’s personal circumstances can alter too, which changes their habits. The result of all these changes is a constant flow of ‘floating customers’ who are not settled and are looking for new pubs to satisfy their needs.