Random Musings

Have you ever visited a hawker centre for the first time, and were busy trying to decide what to eat?

And you look around, and you see a stall with a very long queue and you go “Ah, that must be one of the best beef kway teow stalls in S’pore…just look at the queue!” And you see a stall with no queue at all, and you think to yourself “Ah, this can’t be any good…no one’s buying at all.”

See, what you have just done is drawn conclusions on the quality of the stall’s food based simply on the length of the customer queue.

Also, have you ever queued a long time for a particular stall’s food, and when you taste it you go “Hmm, this food isn’t exactly spectacular, but since everyone always queues for it, there must be something good about it which I’m missing.” (Kinda reminds you of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” doesn’t it?)

What you’ve just done is you’ve tried to convince yourself that the stall sells great food simply because it has a long queue.

Now that we’ve established that, let me present to you the greatest food marketing strategy I can think of. It’s called the “Pseudo Queue Strategy”. (Copyright, all rights reserved.)

If you’re starting a new food stall business, be it at a hawker centre or food court or shopping mall, here’s what you do: Forget about spending thousands buying an ad in the papers or magazines or any other form of media.

Forget about printing A5 flyers and giving them out outside MRT stations. (Although if you really insist on printing stuff, I could give you a quote.)

No, word of mouth is always the best.

What you do is you pay a group of people a nominal sum to queue in front of your stall during peak hours to buy your food.

Seriously.

Pay them to queue up to buy your stuff. And people walking past will look at your “pseudo queue” and go “Whoa! What’s all this about?!?” And you know how S’poreans have this intense affinity for queues right?

Soon, due to S’poreans’ innate inability to resist joining a line of people standing in front a stall selling stuff which they may not even know about, you’d start to draw “real” queue-ers, instead of your “pseudo” queue-ers. And then, after awhile, you can stop employing all your pseudo people and there’d be a real queue forming…and the whole thing just feeds on itself. Soon, the whole town would be talking about the amazingly long queue which forms in front of your stall, which in turn draws even more queueing enthusiasts to the line.

And by then you’ve hit the big time, dude.

Seriously, it’s a great strategy don’t you think? I’ve not tried it (cos I don’t own a food stall), but I really don’t see why it wouldn’t work. 

Remember, you heard it here first!

Hmm, maybe I should give this strategy some really cool name like “Purple Cow” or “Blue Ocean”, package it in a really neat way, and write a book on it.

(And I’d pay a bunch of people to queue up to buy my book during its launch.)