Using bad reviews to attract customers
Got slammed on TripAdvisor? Has your café had a bad review somewhere? Don’t be disheartened. Use the chalkboard.
Aldo Calderbank, who runs the Nook Neighbourhood Café in Stockport in Greater Manchester, has turned bad reviews into good business. Every time he gets one, he puts it up on a chalkboard outside and attracts more customers
Sure the bad reviews leave him fuming. But he uses them to get the last laugh, writing them down on the chalkboard and turning them into tongue in cheek messages for passersby.
Take for example the case where a customer by the name of dodd18 left a review in February this year.
The complaint was about a breakfast order of two coffees and two bowls of porridge. The customer claimed the porridge was “tepid and undercooked”. Worse still, the customer said it remained so even after a fresh bowl from the kitchen was requested from the kitchen.
“Very disappointing. I cannot understand how the porridge could leave the kitchen a second time undercooked,” they wrote.
So Calderbank took the review and put it up on the blackboard. “Come in & try the worst porridge that one woman on TripAdvisor had in her life.”
Another one: “Come into our cafe that Gary from TripAdvisor said was ‘small and cramped’. We’re called Nook, for a reason Gary. (We don’t really know what you were expecting)”.
Needless to say, the blackboard has gone viral. The tongue in cheek messages have clocked up more than 12,000 likes and 2000 shares.
And English stand-up comedian Justin Moorhouse, said the café had “excellent chalkboard skills”. All free advertising, ensuring lots of people keep popping in for a meal.
The customers have been loving the signs,” Calderbank told the Manchester Evening News. “They’ve been telling us how funny they are.
“The idea was just to try and do something a bit different. But now it’s really taken off.”
And the customers keep coming in. In fact, so many of them been coming in for meals that Calderbank put up a simple message on the most recent blackboard. “Stop ordering porridge.”
by Leon Gettler, September 9th 2016
