Despite this I’m yet to see a dry cleaner go on the offensive to increase their revenue or take market share.  I’m sure many think that location is enough to take customers and get loyalty.  It’s not.  I travel all over my town every day.  If Purple Tie shows up in the workplace, that would automatically become a good candidate to steal my business.

The lifetime value of a customer is potentially huge.  Even in these slower times, my household easily spends $500 annually on its dry cleaning.  Knowing little about the business, I have to imagine that the margins are pretty good, possibly as much as 50%.   This implies that a customer in your neighborhood who visits your business for five years is worth well over $1000 to you.  So it’s amazing that dry cleaners do so little to attract customers and retain them.

So after the jump here are a few modest low-cost proposals for marketing a dry cleaning business to bring in new customers and keep them:

1. Loyalty programs: It’s incredible that in a market where it’s as easy for customers to switch vendors as crossing the street – literally so on Oakland’s Grand Avenue – that cleaners do so little to lock you in.  If the average annual value of a customer is $250 profit, I’d gladly give you a few dollars back to make sure you keep coming to me.  How about $10 back on every $100?  Or a baker’s dozen for shirt laundry?
2. Tiered pricing: Most of the time when I come in I ask for rush service – and then don’t pick up the order for days afterward.  Yes, I suck, but I’m betting this is pretty common practice.  Why should rush service priced the same as “regular”?  When I come in and demand 24 or 48-hour service when the business’s standard is something more, essentially what I’m doing is asking to jump the queue in front of every other customer.  Clarify your pricing policy, charge a premium for premium service and give customers a perceived break for getting your regular service.
3. Be a community hub: There are few places in the neighborhood that everyone uses as they do a dry cleaner.  Put up a bulletin board and encourage flyering.  If you tell your customers that you are a center of life in the neighborhood, then they will treat you that way.
4. Take advantage of word of mouth and low-cost advertising: The big easy money in dry cleaners clearly comes from doing specialty items like carpets and wedding dresses.  I’ve never seen a dry cleaner that asks for reviews on Yelp, but that’s the first place folks of a certain age go to look for that kind of service.  Further, opportunity abounds through tight geographic targeting on AdWords, Facebook and the like.  A quick googling of “dry cleaning” around me yielded ads for national services and one in San Rafael – a mere 30 miles away!
5. Introductory specials: First time there?  Give discounts for a big-ticket items.  If they like your service, they’ll be back.
6. Have a sale: Sometimes that big-ticket item just lingers.  I’ve had it on my ‘long list’ to get our living room carpet cleaned for literally years.  If you offered a 10% discount for a limited time, I bet that would motivate me.

Finally a cynical word about “green.”  Some of my locals have higher prices – sometimes outrageously so – because they don’t use perc.  Many of your customers will appreciate the opportunity to support a safer, more environmentally friendly technique, but remember: by not using perc, you reap all the benefits, both your own health and the extra profit implicit in the premium pricing.   The customer gets no tangible benefit, so to reach & retain the average customer, especially in more frugal times, you’d better be offering ‘something else’ to land them.  Either that or you need to offer premium service – open Sunday? Delivery?  Something.

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Quaker Oats, one of America�s great venerable supermarket products, staged a complete relaunch of its brand over the last two months.� The campaign has won kudos both for its general positivity in these otherwise dark times � sick of bailout-themed ads yet? � but also for the way that it reframes oats as a �power food.�� That is indeed a new, compelling USP for the brand and subtly introduces the idea of value as a �bang for the buck� food.�

A closer look shows something else: a new emphasis on �bang for the buck� marketing.� By bringing all of its product lines under a single campaign, however big or expensive, Quaker must be saving here, there and everywhere on its promotional and internal costs.� The most obvious way is the now-gone requirement to discretely support each of its panoply of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, Quaker Quick Oats, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Quaker Oatmeal Squares and on & on.� It also means potential reductions in tmarketing personnel, in-store marketing, graphic staff (fewer executions), agency support,�and so forth.� One wonders once the initial advertising launch blast is over with where the savings will go: into the product (reaching consumers) or simply as a hedge against falling revenue.��

Either way Quaker looks smart.� The company gets a new convincing USP out there, it cuts costs and � as James Surowiecki points out in this week�s New Yorker � finds a way to keep innovating and marketing in the throes of the recession.�

�a major study, by the Strategic Planning Institute, of corporate behavior during the past thirty years found that reducing ad spending during recessions did improve companies� return on capital. It also meant, though, that they grew less quickly in the years following recessions than more free-spending competitors did.

The Quaker Oats campaign may be a bellwether for the overall marketing economy. As long as we see only one campaign for all its many products � I count 30 currently on its web site � we�ll know that US brands are still in cost-cutting mode.� But when the company starts to support its individual brand lines again � especially though general advertising, not just couponing and in-store marketing � then we can surmise that it�s sufficiently confident that spending is rising again.�

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