As a marketing strategy, the idea of routinely committing random acts of generosity may not be something that has occurred to you. When I was in Starbucks this morning, my friends behind the counter told me that my lattes were on the house. There was no special reason or occasion to warrant this action. They just did it. And I appreciated it. Heck, I’m writing about it in my blog.
This reminded me of an article a colleague passed along to me from the New York Times Magazine on June 21, 2009. The article by Rob Walker was titled “Favor Enhancement: Real gratitude can be profitable. How, then, to create it?” The article talks about how Hyatt Hotels plans to randomly do unexpectedly generous things for its guests as a marketing tactic. “The idea is that the unexpected nature of the fits will leave the customer not just pleased bu also grateful. Gratitude is a powerful, and potentially quite profitable, emotion to inspire.” (Source: NYT Magazine, June 21, 2009) You can check out the article online at http://tinyurl.com/klttwn.
For his article, Walker interviewed Robert Palmatier, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington and an author of an upcoming paper in the Journal of Marketing addressing the power of gratitude.
“While Palmatier says there has been a lot of research on the psychology of gratitude in the past five or six years, he points to an older study that’s now considered a classic. Participants waiting for an experiment to begin were treated in one of two ways: Some were unexpectedly given a soft drink by an assistant posing as another participant, and others were not. This seemed like an act of pure generosity on the part of a fellow participant, but it was actually part of the experiment. When the same assistant later asked subjects to buy raffle tickets, those who had been given a soda were far more likely to do so — and on average bought twice as many tickets as those who didn’t get a soda. This says something about the human animal, and Palmatier adds that other studies have found that we feel pleasure from reciprocating out of gratitude, and guilt when we don’t. This, he adds, is something a business can use to its advantage or, depending on how you look at it, exploit.” (Source: NYT Magazine, June 21, 2009)
When you’ve got a moment, check out this article online. Walker’s column is always interesting, and this one ventures into the realm of being thought provoking. And it certainly applies to how we treat patients in the healthcare environment. How far would it go in helping preference numbers for a given hospital, maybe yours, if the staff was coached to perform random acts of kindness and generosity? What kind of loyalty and positive word of mouth marketing would that generate?
Post by Dan Dunlop, The Healthcare Marketer
