Best-practice street hussle marketing Sunny Beach style Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 21:23, in Labels: bulgaria, case study, marketing, tomi heikkinen

During my vacation I recently visited Bulgaria, tourist-filled but cozy Sunny Beach to be exact. Sunny Beach is a vibrant resort sprawling with numerous albeit mostly homogenous bar&restaurants. And like in every other major tourist resort, the streets of Sunny Beach were riddled with stalls and over-eager people trying to get you to buy stuff/into their restaurant. It didn't take long before I readied my marketing eye and really started to consider their activities from a proper marketing perspective. What could be learned? How would I develop their marketing? Hence my shot on best-practice street hussle marketing.

A good businessperson knows that a quality offering is the basis of everything. Each restaurant more or less offered the same foods, even though their communication mostly loudly promoted the wide scope of their variety of foods. I realized after a day of walking through the congested boulevards of Sunny Beach that same stuff; pork, veal, chicken, pizza, was served everywhere. Thus we can deduce that the "product" was the same among all competitors.

It was not a surprise that differentiation in communication and promotion were the keys to success. My favourite bit of differentiated communication was "Michael Jackson is going to dance in two minutes", shouted to a group of tourists by a employee of a beach restaurant. A bit inappropriate, gross even, considering the recent passing of the King of Pop, but I laughed (and went to have a dinner the next day). The same employee also always managed to keep a (genuine?) smile and vigorously seached for eye-contact when approaching prospective customers in the street - winner traits were positivity and genuinity. In one hand I saw many tired and apathetic, and on the other hand happy, but irritantly unsurprising marketers, but their energetic and exertive competitors were easy to spot. Not surprising: the importance of empowered people doing right things was again proven.

Flyers were the other key marketing tactic of the beach restaurants. Almost all listed the same boring typical meals offered and were filled with flashy pictures of their spaces and meals. Some had maps to illustrate the location of the restaurant. Like with husslers, they were monotonous and easily forgettable. I wondered how could the best marketers stand out of the competition if they all had more or less similar flyers? Of the dozen or two of flyers I collected, just for this blog post, only two or so included actual example prices of their meals. This is hugely important for prospective customers to assess the price level of the restaurant when making a quick decision where to get a dinner or a lunch. Even billboards standing next to restaurant exits rarely had the prices of typical meals. Customers were not given a chance to measure and compare adjacent restaurants. Horribly inconvenient and time and effort consuming for the customer!

Location and the facade were other important marketing aspects for the restaurants, but where the restaurants eager to improve their marketing, I'd believe aforementioned communication would the easiest (and cheapest!) aspect to develop. Starting with a bit of innovation in flyer and billboard design and seeking out the best employees to work as husslers would help many restaurants stand out in a crowd. Maybe then there would be more than one restaurant, Djanny, in Sunny Beach with a queue in the rush hours of the evening. It was however word-of-mouth recommendation that led me to Djanny..