Tom Feltenstein

Of all the weapons in your marketing arsenal none can be more powerful than the four walls of your store.    Thus, every strategic neighborhood marketing offensive should begin with Four Walls Marketing.  After all, where else do you have a captive audience of your most sought-after prospects?  While it’s important to attract new customers, the least expensive and most effective strategy you can employ is to convince people who visit your store to return again and again.  There’s no better way to do so than to turn your business into a powerful advertising medium.

Let’s say you own a restaurant.  Think of your restaurant as a physical space consisting of merchandising zones that influence customer perceptions and buying decisions.  Promotional messages and visual displays within these zones can be a potent vehicle to increase revenues.  In addition to merchandising zones, every restaurant has an equally important zone of persuasion — the internal customer zone.  Your internal customers are your employees.  I call them internal customers because they are even more vital to your success than the people who dine in your restaurant.  They are your goodwill ambassadors, whose every act and deed make indelible impressions on your guests.  If your internal customers don’t buy into your mission, you’re doomed.

Other merchandising zones include your current customers, the main lobby, the front counter, dining room, table tops, your banquet rooms, restrooms, kitchen zone, the valet station and parking lot, and the drive-thru lane.  Each of these zones provide enormous opportunities to offer your customers additional incentives to make purchases, create powerful impressions that will help build your brand, drive customer loyalty, and  generate an exciting buzz about your business. By marketing in each zone of your place of business, you create an “uncluttered medium that is more effective than radio, television or print because you don’t have to share it with anyone else.” Basically, 4 walls marketing is an infomercial that runs for 12-15 hours every day in each store.  Every inch of physical space and everything that occurs inside the four walls can be controlled. Within the four walls is an opportunity to differentiate your business from your competitors.

Remember, every solid strategic neighborhood marketing plan begins within the four walls of your business, before it can extend to your property line and beyond.  Before you embark on any outside advertising or promotional activity, dazzle your patrons with persuasive messages within all the merchandising zones of your business.