There is an all purveying  sense of innocent pride in this family business. Self titling themselves ‘The First Family of India Cuisine’ these celebrity quotes adorn the outside menu, the indoor menu and the website. Once an exceptionally good value and popular eat in / take away corner Indian, founded in 1977, it has metamorphosed into a grand eating establishment on the back of such recognition. In fact, it’s so grand it can hardly squeeze itself into it end of terrace abode. If more than four people wait for their many tables, you are left standing.

The backlit stone lions outside the entrance and uniformed doorman ignore its modest two up two down provincial town residential surrounds and glint a flavour of London sophistication. The illuminated gold menu pedestal is quite ridiculous, suggesting a pedestrian flow of bankers, tourists and day trippers when any daytime hour can expect no more than perhaps the mother from 33 off to catch the 44 or a few bored kids ambling to the park for footie. Still, it provides a piss point for the drunken students returning to their digs of an evening.

The locals have lost their prize possession of a fantastic value take-away along with their parking spaces to the 4×4 Cotswold set. The self proclaimed King of Indians is not so much disrespectful of its locality, I think it now pretends it does not exist. The once popular commoner has become self appointed king and mixes in different circles now.

The one time I last visited followed its celebrity exposure and you had to book a table weeks in advance. This was – and I am guessing – several years ago. It was buzzing and you could sense the excitement and energy of the staff. It must have been a sensational and almost bewildering time for them. But this evening, and note it was a Friday, it was half empty.

Passion, fame and excitement create the buzz and endless chatter. Back then it had been enjoying recognition as one of the Top 17 Best Local Restaurants on Ramsay’s F word and of course this led to lots of local word of mouth, newspaper features, radio, texts and mobile calls. Inevitably, what we cannot have – what is so popular it is booked up for weeks – we want even more. Human nature. The irony of its featuring on that programme of course is it ejaculated itself from any sense of being local the moment it found its fame beyond its loyal and loving locals who nominated it!

But sustaining and refreshing the excitement and the buzz is the difficult challenge.  Their prices are as high as they could possibly take them. Most main courses are over £20. Our meal for four – and we only had two starters and one bottle of wine  and a couple of beers – was something over £160.00.

They now risk – or are indeed suffering – the backlash. I took a look at Tripadvisor:

We ordered the chicken curry special & it was nothing more than a gravy and a naan. Honesty, i wouldn’t even pay 7 pounds for it, which they charge 23 pounds. my wife ordered a briyani (again 23 pounds) we had only half as its probably the worst briyani we ever had.

I think they are playing a game with people visiting the area by just advertising heavily on hotel guides. My honest recommendation for anyone interested in going to this place is STAY AWAY.. This place just doesn’t deserve or stand by what it says

I was excited to return and deflated. Perhaps my expectation was too high. But this time the chatter had thinned and I could see the reality: a successful family Indian that had chased its self seeking publicity with ever higher prices and profit and is now in danger of sitting on its own desert island, stranded from its once loving adoring doorstep population as a lonely celebration venue: an expensive cobweb waiting to juice the occasional boated fly.

At the end of the meal, they pass round a guest book. So this is how they attained those quotes from Palin and Branson?! They had fancied a curry during the Cheltenham Literature Festival, enjoyed a drink or two and then been thrust a Guest Book to comment in. Signed and dated, their quote has since emblazoned all. And on looking up the Ramsay quote, well let’s not forget they failed to win the competition on the F word.

You cannot deny the Krori family have passion and create exceptional Indian cuisine, Bangladeshi to be precise. But the storm of chatter their celebrity endorsements unleashed is waning and visitors are reminded of that age old formula: product versus price.  I would have liked the menus explained, some seasonals or specials. Instead of the cheap and meaningless truffles given to sweeten the bill, I would have liked to have left table my taste buds lingering passion and creative flair. I would have enjoyed a surprise or two – events to make the evening memorable and to feel Curry Corner is a creative hothouse and more than the contents of their lidded white porcelain pots they piled our tables with, never to return to enquire over the contents.

This all goes to show the power of celebrity endorsement in creating buzz and chatter. The celebrities have left Curry Corner along with the owner’s once notorious modesty, their loyal locals leaving them to unashamedly proclaim their own virtues to a dwindling audience ever more loudly:

The Curry Corner is the oldest and most highly regarded Bangladeshi restaurant in the country.
Run by the Krori family – the First Family of Indian cuisine.
Deliciously decadent food.
Cooked using only the highest quality local ingredients from the lush countryside.
Freshly ground spices.
In a league of its own.
Seriously stylish interior.
Wildly evocative.
Friendly and personal service.
There are not even enough low grade celebrities to go round  but

The Chatter Challenge
I have created chatter for many brands, products, businesses and personalities.  Celebrity endorsements are a quick route to spark buzz, but there are many means. I will always advise the client that creating the chatter is the easy bit. Sustaining the chatter is more difficult and ultimately returns to the value of the product or person.

When it comes to a restaurant, sooner or later the chatter depends on the diner’s recommendation. Once through the door, they are theirs to make an ally of. Every single diner must be treated to a memorable experience. Once that ethos is established from kitchen to waiting staff, however ordinary the diner, the chatter will look after itself.

I will return to Curry Corner, but I am not excited to and will not be chattering and buzzing about it. And if Jeffrey Archer is quoted singing its praises, I will have a good idea why.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas? Taking an elevator all the way up to the top of the Eiffel Tower offers great views of the Sin city. But it also makes you realise that before Rafael Rivera set his foot in Las Vegas Valley, there was nothing but plain abandoned dessert. Only the discovery of water rich springs started bringing all this traffic to Nevada dessert to become a prime location for a shop facility and town. Now imagine that your website, without much traffic, is just like that dry piece of land 200 years ago.

The days of putting an advert in the Yellow Pages and waiting for the phone call are over. Simply registering your website to various search engines is just the beginning of the long journey. That’s when Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes and the sooner you get started, the faster your business will grow.

Did you know that about 36% of internet users consider a company listed among the top results on search engines to be a top one within its field and about 60% of users click on a website link within the first page of results? Being listed in the Top 10 of natural search results should be a key priority for every online business. About 85% of searchers click on natural results comparing to paid results that appear on the top or side of the search engine results pages and are only half are as visible to searchers and mostly less effective.

There are numerous SEO techniques you can use to improve your natural traffic. The best start is to optimise the website itself. However, the first and most important issue to start with is to know your competition, analyse it and learn from its strengths and weaknesses. Then put yourself in the skin of searcher who is looking for product or services related to your business. What keywords would he put in the search query box? What results would he be interested in seeing? Don’t forget about optimising images on your website to make them visible to search engine spiders who crawl your website to find information related to your search query. Pay attention to writing quality articles and avoid sloppy texts that are hard to read. Focus on link building with subscribing your site to related directories and communities.

And update, update, update…

Understanding how people use search and what they search for is crucial for website publishers and SEO practitioners. Retail is among the first most searched categories followed by entertainment. It is based on one simple assumption – people love shopping, they always have and they always will. The amount of money spent on online shopping has grown despite recession and that’s what your business should benefit from. Placing your advert on relevant websites or exchange links is the best way to do it. Just be careful because unlike Las Vegas you don’t want your website to be related to any gambling or sex links!

Since El Rancho Vegas became the first hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip in 1941, 35 million people visit Vegas year round thanks to its entertaining facilities built in the middle of the dessert.

With sophisticated SEO you can bring as much traffic to your website as you want, so it becomes The Las Vegas of the Web!

Author
Xenia Slosarcikova constructs and implements SEO campaigns for a wide variety of businesses. Please call her on +44(0)1242 222878 or email xenia@themarketingfarm.co.uk.

An infection clamped beneath that molar with nowhere to go shakes the very foundations of your jaw and teeth. That innocent tooth, which has taken years to grow and countless tubes of toothpaste, will probably have to be removed. An infection at the core – at the nerve ending – can destroy all you have grown.

If your marketing strategy is infected with poor information, it will eventually destroy everything you proceed to develop. As any good dentist will say, prevention is better than cure. Although I believe my dentist, Malvern’s Chris Bocking, is the world’s best, I would not hesitate to agree!

Solid information provides sound roots from which a successful marketing campaign can grow. Without this, you risk infection and a costly extraction.

Decisions over potential opportunities, target market selection, market segmentation, planning and implementing marketing programmes, marketing performance, and control should all be underpinned by market research.

These decisions are complicated by interactions between the controllable marketing variables of product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. Further complications are added by uncontrollable environmental factors such as general economic conditions, technology, public policies, competitor activity, and social and cultural changes.

As if this does not provide enough headaches, we need to add to the mix the complexity of consumers. Relevant information can at least help us more reliably predict consumers’ response to marketing initiatives.

I am not arguing that marketing is a complete science. I would not be so passionate about marketing if it was. However, these are essential questions to ask before committing to any marketing campaign:

Your Customers
What are their locations, age, gender, buying behaviours and motivations?

Competitor information
Do you know their identities, marketing strategies and customer relationships?

Product information
How do your customers talk about your brand, products and service and likely impact of technology developments?

Industry information
What is the big picture? What are the future demand and supply trends and patterns?

Competitive opportunities
What are the under-served consumer segments and unmet consumer needs?

Qualitative research using depth interviews, focus groups, surveys, field tests and observations, supported by primary research yielding new, relevant and specific information will answer the above questions.

The Value of The Smile
I write this from a hotel near our Romanian office where the staff appear friendly and smiling. Last week I stayed at London’s Soho Hotel (a converted multi storey carpark!) where the staff were also exceptionally happy. It seems a rarity in hotels these days, but smile and world smiles with you.  It costs nothing and is a great marketing tool! And lest we forget, a good smile requires healthy teeth!

Matthew Rymer, Managing Director, The Marketing Farm Limited

Attraction is in the suggestion, not the obvious. When we flirt with the opposite sex,  we are tantalizing, exciting, challenging and inviting a response. We are certainly not baring all!

Generating successful media interest in a product, service or business reflects the very best of a successful flirt.  The moment a press release joins all the dots and tells the story it is doomed. It will be too long, too opinionated, too obvious and too advertorial. The best press release pinpoints seductive facts and suggests investigation and exploration.

If you had a six pack or a rather ample bosom, you would not bare it and label it (at least, I would rather hope you would not!)?  However, your sense of fashion might suggest it. Ask any copywriter or journalist for a little advice and more often or not, they will advise you to write, then shorten it, then shorten it further and then condense it.

We just staged the initial, and regional launch, for our client The Pembrokeshire Pasty & Pie Co. They are opening a small pasty and pie shop in Tenby on 1st March. Our release was short but signposted the greater story. Within 24 hours, it was headline news across Wales – on radio, TV and in the press. The Pembrokeshire Pasty is to battle The Cornish. Every paper picked up on two lines in our background notes: that the Pembrokeshire Pasty recipe might have been invented to feed the workers building St David’s Cathedral in 1181. Had that been our headline, it would have been questioned. As an understated possibility, it was not. There is certainly circumstantial evidence to suggest this is true, but no hard evidence as yet. That is the successful flirt.

Media relations excites me. The journalists, freelancers, producers, researchers and editors all want a story and I strongly believe there is a story behind every business. Just akin to flirting – everyone can attract someone.

And So To The Marriage!

Now, onto the inevitable consequence of successful flirting… Marriage! I believe too many businesses struggle alone. In these difficult economic times, there is more reason than ever to look for strategic alliances (marriages!) for the greater success. There was recently an article in The Sunday Times exposing a well known author for plugging a rather delightful holiday resort in her latest novel in exchange for a rather expensive holiday.  As the publishing world reduces advances and prepares for the ebook revolution, authors will increasingly look to manage their own affairs more acutely. Her novel will be judged on its merits. Why promote a resort by accident when one can create a viable alliance?

Small town shopkeepers are suffering more than most in this current climate. More than once, I have seen a pair of neighbouring shops – both suffering – and wondered if they knocked out a side door they could reduce and share staff costs. We may regard ourselves as a nation of small shopkeepers, but I do wonder whether our lack of community spirit reflects itself in business too?

I challenge any business to look again and ask themselves: Who can we ally with? To share customer databases, to endorse each other and to generate news stories, profit share and piggy back exposure?

A successful business may flirt with and marry as many as they are able to. So why be celibate?!

Matthew Rymer