Sen Ze’s Business In Your Pajamas! Blog

Wow…honestly, I didn’t quite expect the quality of some of the answers submitted as seen in my last post on World Cup Hits And Opportunities.

You showed lots of creativity and I’ve had lots of fun reading them all.

Before I get to the winners - here’s what that piece of paper said:

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Congratulations on winning your bet against us!

This coupon entitles you to redeem one jug of beer. Please fill up the form below with your details, tear this coupon out for safekeeping and return the other part to us.

Redemption of your jug of beer can be done after July 10th between 6pm - 8pm every day.

This coupon expires on August 31st.

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If the winner wins 4 jugs, he gets 4 coupons, and fills up the form only once. Each coupon can be redeemed on separate days as long as they’re redeemed between July 10th and August 31st.

Here’s what this can accomplish:

1. It brings the winners back to the restaurant after the World Cup is over
And therefore filling it up in the aftermath of it - which is the objective of the restaurant.

2. There’s a deadline for redemption
Deadlines are important for them to act on redeeming what they’ve won. The restaurant WANT the winners to redeem the beer because by doing so, it will make more money even though the beer is free (see No.3 below).

It can’t make more money if the winners forget to redeem the beer. This is likely to happen when it doesn’t impose a deadline.

The deadline also ensures that the winners redeem their beer after the World Cup and before the football season in the various countries start again, so that it can fill up its seats during the slower months.

3. They have to redeem it between 6pm - 8pm
This is dinner time for most people. Unless you don’t eat during dinner, this will result in food orders AT THE FULL PRICE (no discounts offered) because, well, they’re already in the restaurant drinking their free beer, so what’s missing is just the food that they should be hungry for at that time.

Quite a number of you are offering discounts on food when the winners return to the restaurant.

While this can be a good tactic in bringing the winners back, the discount in this case has already been given to them in the form of the free jugs of beer won by them.

Thus offering even more discounts to bring back a Customer who’s already coming back anyway at a time when he’s most likely to order dinner at the same time is simply going to eat up the restaurant owner’s profits, with little additional gain.

The goodwill has been created by the restaurant earlier with the “No-Risk Bet Your Jugs” concept, and by turning up to redeem the beer, the winner is still experiencing this goodwill.

Thus ordering food at the full price isn’t likely to be an issue at all in this case.

Discounts can be a good marketing tactic, but being too keen to offer it can hurt the restaurant’s bottom line more.

Having said the above, however, there is no right or wrong “answer” on using discounts as circumstances will dictate how best to use them.

Ok - what of the form asking for the winner’s details?

This is probably even more important than the redemption coupon itself. The restaurant owner is building up its mailing list that it can contact again and again in the future with other special offers like a great party for 20 people on the winners’ birthday, arranged for them at no extra cost. Just pay for the food. The “discount” is in the free birthday organization.

Even better, the restaurant can modify its approach by having this form filled in by everybody before they bet their jugs of beer, so that it can compile a mailing list of not just the eventual winners.

What’s most important to collect are an e-mail address and a cellphone no. Whenever the restaurant wants to fill up its slow days, an e-mail blast or even better, an SMS Broadcast to its list with special offers at the right time of the day will likely bring a number of them back, with very little extra marketing cost.

This contest has been great fun.

The winners will be announced in my next post, very soon.

Warm Regards,

Sen Ze
Click Here To Join The Pajamas Revolution Now

From the way things are going, it looks like Germany may just lift the World Cup. They’re really, really good!

FIFA, the governing body of World Football, reported that its web site at http://www.fifaworldcup.com/ is drawing a record FIVE MILLION different visitors daily. 

Yes, that’s 5,000,000 people checking out its web site EVERY SINGLE DAY (so far - this number will go up as the tournament progresses).

Can you imagine how much money they can make with that sort of traffic?

They’ve served over 1.2 BILLION web pages in just over a week since the tournament started to those 5 million daily visitors.

The World Cup is a competition for only 32 countries who had to qualify over a period of 4 years for it, but it is the single biggest sporting event in the world attracting tons of viewers from just about every country on earth - except for the U.S.

For some reason, my American friends don’t quite find football (or soccer) exciting enough for them to indulge in it the way they do American Football, even though the US Soccer Team have qualified for the World Cup in the past few World Cups (and at the time of writing, still in with a chance of making the 2nd round of the current one) and the US Women Football Team have been champions in the women’s World Cup.

I truly can’t understand why. But then again, I don’t understand why people are so passionate about golf either.

Pubs and restaurants serving alcohol do roaring business during this one single month. Friends, colleagues and relatives all have an excuse to come together once again for food and drink and to watch the games on the big screens specially erected by the restaurant owners for this purpose.

However, there is always a problem in the aftermath of the World Cup. While the pubs and restaurants will be full during the entire month, the number of customers they will get will drop dramatically once the final game has been played.

So what can they do to ensure that they continue to do well after the final whistle has been blown?

One very savvy restaurant in Malaysia executes a very interesting Pajamas marketing tactic that will definitely have some of their customers coming back long after that, bringing them even more profits.

It works like this:

If a game is on while they’re dining there, it asks its customers to bet the jugs of beer that they’ve ordered against the outcome of the match.

If they lose, it doesn’t matter - they get to keep the jugs and owe the restaurant nothing.

But if they win - the restaurant gives them whatever they’ve wagered!

Thus if they’ve bet 4 jugs of beer on England to win their game against, say, Argentina and England actually wins (unlikely, but it’s good to fantasize once in a while), they’ve just won another 4 jugs of beer!

And you say there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or free beer, in this case)?

So how does the restaurant make money this way?

Simple - it gives out a piece of paper to the winners that guarantees extra profits for the restaurant even though the jugs of beer are free, in true Pajamas marketing fashion.

The winners still do not need to pay anything for the beer and they don’t have to order anything else to go with the jugs to redeem their jugs of beer won.

Answer in my next post - unless you can figure it out in which case post your answer by leaving a comment below.

If you hit the nail on the head, or your solution is even better than the restaurant’s, you win one of my products (worth potentially thousands of dollars to you if you follow what it says). I don’t know which one it’ll be, but I’ll make it worth your while.

If your solution is incredibly stupid but you don’t know it, I’ll delete it to save you the embarrassment.

This is my version of the risk-free wager discussed above.

Just what can be written on that piece of paper that will literally guarantee the restaurant future profits from the same customers, taking into consideration the conditions above?

Wanna play? :-) 

Cheers!

Warm Regards,

Sen Ze
Click Here To Join The Pajamas Revolution Now

P.S. You can link to this post with the following URL:

http://www.SenZe.com/business-blog/the-world-cup/world-cup-hits-and-opportunities.htm  

P.P.S. While I may root for Australia this World Cup (to know why, click –> The World Cup), my favorite team is in fact Argentina, which has already scored the goal of the tournament (so far). It was a flowing, continuous 24-pass move that ended with the ball at the back of the net by Cambiasso. Beaaauuuutiful…Click –> Goals Of The Tournament to see them again and again…

P.P.P.S. I forgot to mention this - I’m giving away one of my products to TWO winners with:

1. The exact solution, and

2. A better solution to No.1 above.

I’m the sole and final judge of who the winners are (yeah, you can set the rules on your own Blog for your own contest too if you have one).

In case there is a tie between 2 identical winners, the solution that was submitted earlier in time will win.

I’ve been reading a terrific book in between World Cup football games and durians (of course - this fruit is in season now. Check out my last post on The World Cup on how the durian reminded me of a Pajamas marketing lesson).

This very well researched and written one-heck-of-a-book gives you the entire story and background of how I can have web designers from Romania, programmers from China, India and New Zealand, technical support staff from Russia, phone support staff from the US and Singapore, copywriters from the US, graphic designers from the UK and Hong Kong, and project managers from Malaysia - all working for me at the same time on various projects of mine.

The above isn’t a hypothetical example - I really do have teams of people who have worked or are working on my various projects from the countries mentioned above, even as I’m lazing at home in my Pajamas.

They too, could be working in their Pajamas out of their respective homes - which is the case with most of them.

They have all the freedom they want with their work environment and working hours as long as they complete my job on time at the price they’ve quoted.

I don’t need to house them in a single location, thus saving me a fortune in not having to rent premises for work purposes.

They all use their own computers and equipment to do my work for me, thus saving me another fortune in not having to buy equipment for them to use.

I can pay them only on a project basis, thus saving me yet another fortune in not having to pay out salaries and benefits.

The different time zones between us all means that work happens 24 hours a day. Some work are done by those in the same time zone as I am, other work are done when I’m sleeping and it’s daylight where they are.

Communication between all of us is done via e-mail, Discussion Board, MSN Messenger and Skype - for free. At other times my cellphone will have me connected to all of them.

It doesn’t matter where I may be at any point in time. 

My projects got done by the various people while I was in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Holland, England and Spain over the past few years that I’ve been travelling.

They got done while I was lazing around at the beach or floating a mile or two above the earth in an airplane.

I don’t usually carry my laptop with me during my travels. All I carry is my trusted USB Drive (also called a Thumb Drive) the size of a, er…thumb that contains my most important data necessary for my businesses to run.

I can pop into a cybercafe or use the hotel or a friend’s computer to check my e-mails and communicate with my team if required, or access the data on my USB Drive for other purposes.

My other important data are housed in various servers from various locations on earth which I can accessed directly through the Internet within seconds using a web browser.

So as you were sleeping, the world has become flat, and there are now no borders to the use of human capital at all corners of the world, at fees that are lower than ever.

It’s time now for you to understand exactly how things came about the way they have.

And in the process, see opportunities you never saw before.

I discovered many more product/service possibilities after reading this book - even though I thought I was creating quite a few of them already for many, many years…

Thomas L. Friedman is a 3-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has written an amazingly readable and thoroughly enjoyable book called “The World Is Flat” which is also a best-seller.

It’s a book you must read if you want to catch up with how the world has changed since the Sony Walkman was all the rage.

You’ll finally understand how you are affected for better or for worse with this thing called Globalization.

Thomas calls the current version of this Flat World of ours Globalization 3.0.

Globalization 1.0 and Globalization 2.0 have long gone.

Globalization is already happening whether you like it or not - and it happened because the numerous forces that made it happen came together in an astonishing series of events that shook the entire world.

You were watching it happen without even knowing it. And now you can’t escape it.

You or your job may even have been affected by it.

You’ll also discover also how you can become an “Untouchable” in a flat world - where your job or expertise can never be replaced by computers and cheap labor elsewhere on the planet.

Get this truly remarkable book written by a top-notch author that summarizes for you all the events you’ve missed or dismissed that shaped the world as we know it today for the better, in just under 600 pages.

Click on the link in the footnotes below and order it NOW.

Believe me - it’ll be one of the best books you have ever read.

Warm Regards,

Sen Ze
Click This Link To Join The Pajamas Revolution Now

Note:

1. You can easily link to this post with the following URL:

http://www.SenZe.com/business-blog/business-resources/the-world-is-flat.htm

2. Click below and buy “The World Is Flat” now:

The World Is Flat