need help promoting

[neilburowes]

I have aquired nightclub in montego bay jamaica, and having a real tough time promoting it. Its a tough market here, i need the help of a seasoned promoter......4000sq.ft, in the half moon shopping village, 2000 hotel rooms in vicinity, ritz, sandals, holiday inn, wyndham etc.....

I find its real hard to fill the place, and am now considering reducing the size of the club with some partitions...... we have had alot of negative feed back "the place is empty"

the locals are relatively poor and we are a little way out of town, so the basically needs some wheels to get out to us.

the tourist go to where the employees recommend, which is margaritaville, the hot spot in mobay, for the last 8 years....

if you are a seasoned veteran in competing for market share in the night club business, i would love to talk with you......who knows i might even throw in a holiday.......

neil

[Baudtender]

How to be a unique entertainment spot:

A) Look what everybody else is doing.

B) Don't do that.

Pretty silly, but poignant to those who have paid their dues.
I'm the first to admit I don't have a clue about your local market
and why the "M" club is so hot and you're not. But I'd like to
throw out some ideas just for kicks and let you chew the cud
on them. They're free, and I'm taking a beer break, so what do
either of us have to lose? I have been to many islands in the
Caribbean (including a stop at Mobay some years ago) so I
bring to the table the tourist perspective as well as the bar
owner's. And, did I mention, it's free!

IDEA #1: Don't leave it up to the tourists to decide where to go,
spoon feed them every reason to go to your place. Tourists
love to be led by "knowledgeable guides", be they cab drivers,
local shop owners, hotel/resort personnel, etc. Establish a
straight out aggressive kick-back (errrrr...referral award) system
to anyone who delivers people to your door. Anyone who has
contact with tourists is a target to become your "partners." Give
them "free drink/1 free cover with 1 paid/free whatever" coupon
with their "partner ID" number stamped on them and then
discretely pay them a nice token for every customer that presents
one at your door with their number stamped on it. Be honest and
you'll make people want you to succeed. And it takes only a
high profit glassware/specialty drink combo inside the building to
make up for what you gave away (see below in the "trinkets"
section for more on this.) Resist all temptations to be tight on
this from the start - empty seats are the most expensive thing
you can ever own in a nightclub no matter what any accountant
tells you. I don't care what it takes or how much it costs, but get
those seats filled and _then_ start worrying about inching up
profits to something you can be comfortable with. No club I've
ever seen could work backwards on this principle.

A club isn't hot because the owners/employees say it is - it's hot
because the people outside the club say it is. Understanding
that your prime audience isn't from there and isn't getting the
drift from the office or their local friends, you have to provide the
information to those they do come in contact with. I'd have
my people working the tourist shopping areas, I'd be talking to
the local "all-inclusive" clubs for when folks want to venture out
of the gates (which means less product out of pocket for them
that's already paid for.) I'd be canvassing the cruise ship docks
and the airport luggage pickup areas. And, of course, I'd do
everything in my power to make it REAL EASY to get people to
my doors. Why not sponsor some obvious tourist activities like
day tours that always end up at your business? Why not
sponsor free Happy Hour seminars in your bar about the best
local shopping, scuba, etc. What can your local government
tourist board do for you, and what can you do for them? People
really do read those tourist rags they put in the hotel rooms -
make sure you get an editorial mention (not just an
advertisement) for something unique that you do.

IDEA #2: Don't sit back and watch your ass get whooped, take
the fight straight to the other club. If they want to name and
theme a "Margueritaville" in your town, let go of the rope and
do what Jamaica does better (which ain't, by the way,
Margueritas.) Give your "partners" a sheet of ideas on how to
sell your place "So, do you want to go to a tourist joint or an
authentic Jamaican nightclub that's also really safe and
reasonably priced?" You aren't saying here that the other
place isn't safe or reasonably priced, nor should you. Let the
tourists draw their own inferences. "Tell you what, I'll take you
to this place first and if you don't like it, you present this card
to the door within 30 minutes and you get a lift to the other bar
free of charge within an hour." Of course, you'll reimburse the
driver, because if your place is worth it's salt, there should be
damned few takers.

IDEA #3: Put the people who work for you, to work for you. Give
them all the same sort of coupons as described above and send
them out to bring in folks during their off hours. Obviously, there's
got to be incentives given for this, and it's a great opportunity
for in-house competitions (perhaps team them up.) But
everyone has to understand and be a part of putting butts in the
barstools. I had to read your post of couple of times, but I'm
still confused as to whose employees are recommending the
other bar to your patrons - if it's your employees, you've got a
sucking chest wound that needs attention before anything else -
if your employees don't want you to succeed, you surely won't.
Perhaps the first step you need to concentrate on is team-building
and common goals. And, since you say you "acquired" the
business (I quote the word since I think I need to presume here
that you are new to this particular store) - you almost certainly
need to flush to toilet and get some new blood in there - my
experience has been to NEVER keep the old help - not one single
person, no matter how much you like them, or how much they
convince you they know about the place and how to make it
succeed - making this mistake can prove very, very, very, very
costly. I'd like to hear more about our situation before I comment
further.

IDEA #4: The "hot button" words to a tourist are FUN,
BARGAIN, and MEMORIES. Fun is what you sell, bargain is what
they perceive, and memories are what are imprinted from the
first two the next morning. Don't be ashamed to give away
a 25-cent bracelet at the door to every lady, or a couple of dozen
3-dollar t-shirts to fellows who survive the scotch-bonnet vodka
challenge (hey, you fill in the blanks there.) Folks on holiday will
go to obscene lengths to get a trinket to take home with them
to wear like a badge - make it easy for them. I read somewhere
that the Hard Rock Cafe chain makes more money from it's gift
shop than from the bars and restaurants combined. What you
need to do here is create a brand......and SELL IT. And the
most effective and efficient way to sell it is to get many, many,
other people selling it for you. Lucky for you, the vast majority
of folks who come to your island don't know which the hot clubs
are until they get there. You have absolutely no baggage
or "that little shooting in the parking lot we had 4 months ago"
reputation to worry about because every 3-14 days is effectively
a brand new start for you - if you play it that way and give up
thinking about what doesn't work but what the club always did
before. Inertia can only be overcome by a stronger and opposing
force. If your club's inertia is not moving towards success as is
and right now, the good news is that you don't need to spend a
whole lot of time worrying about 10,000 small changes you need
to make - because they won't amount to a hill of beans. You
need to simply decide between spectacular revolution or
bankruptcy, and act accordingly. I chuckle here, but it tastes
sour - I've lived this. Paradigm shifts are never easy, but
reinvention is the only way I've seen tired locations become
hot spots.

IDEA #5: Don't think for a minute that you don't have to worry
about repeat business just because you're in a tourist area.
The one person a tourist will trust most is another tourist, and
you don't want last night's guests talking bad about you the
next day at the local shops, tours, hotel bars, etc. Mark 'em -
brand 'em: profanely large permanent ink wrist stamps - wild
T-shirts, hair braids, temporary tattoes - anything to get a
conversation going about what they did last night and how much
fun they had. Your "word-of-mouth" trade could be priceless, or
devastating. Give tonight's customers a really special coupon for
bringing other folks into your club for the length of their visit. To
make this work, you've got to really, really train your door folks to
leave 'em laughing and wanting to come back on the way out.

You can kick ass, but you've got to get off yours and start taking
advantage of what you've got going for you. Personally, I'd
love an opportunity to take a shot at a place that's been on top
for 8 years running. Just make sure that when you commit
yourself, you do it 100% so that when they react, they can only
catch up to where you used to be.

And then, of course, they'll be on this board a year from now
saying "we used to have the hottest club in Montego Bay for
8 years and now things suck and the boss put me in charge
and I need some promotion ideas" and... whoops, that's the
end of my beer break. And that was probably a lot more than
5 ideas, but it's still the same price.

Baudtender

[David]

Neil:

You have taken the first step to a successful Club. You have admitted your short comings and lack of promotional ability.

I agree that you do need to hire someone or a company that deals in these types of situations. Be careful though. It seems that everyone that visits a club is now a promotions expert. Yes, some do know more then others but the bottom line to any promoters worth is his prior success. Not what he/she tells you but the hard numbers. Did the promotions that they did actually increase the body count and gross revenue of the club?

Each promoter should be able come up with unique promotions that fit your cliental and club format. A promotion that works in my market, say a Winter Ski Apparel Fashion Show, would probably bomb in your market.

I have traveled to quite a few areas of the world like yours. It seems like every club that's in the tropics, does the same promos. Free Mai Tai's, bikini contest and so on.

I hope that you are able to find a solution to your opportunity. If you need help weeding out the applicants for the job, I'd be more then happy to help.

[zookeeper]

Anyone ever see the famous "beer drinking pigs?"

I spent two freakin' hours driving around a rainforest in the middle of St. Croix (USVI) trying to find this little grass shack of a bar. Fabulous time! (Getting there was pretty fun,too). Worth the trip just to see these things shotgun a beer (which I gladly bought more than one...and for all the PETA people, I'm pretty sure it was O'douls or something like that.........)

Point is: Baudtender is correct in that you must do something unique to entice people to make the drive (or pay the cab fare). What exactly that is will probably have to come from the well of your mind as you're the one with the best view of your particular market. You're obviously off the beaten path a little bit and that means you have to find something that makes your place a destination.

You have to make people talk...."You have to go to this place and see the firebreathing bartenders", or "Every night at 11:00 they do this show where such and such happens and the whole bar makes a giant conga line" or "they've got the hottest salsa band on the island, man!"

Why not salsa, I'm sure everyone else does reggae. Best bar I went to in Mexico had a reggae band. Go figure.

Think out of the box. People want to be entertained. They CRAVE it. Entertain them.