One of the first things many small business owners say they need is more marketing or help with marketing. For most, better marketing promises to be the key for more sales, hence better profits, and a more successful business. Yet for many businesses, whether new and small or older and bigger, more marketing may not really be what they need; right now.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant’s grand opening only to be greatly disappointed with the overall experience? Many times, a well-meaning manager or owner, of a restaurant or other type of business, will go to great lengths to market a grand opening that corresponds closely to the opening day of the business. The marketing efforts include press releases, advertising, email blasts by the local Chamber and, of course, a big effort to spread the word on social media. The big event comes, and employees are overwhelmed by the crowds that result from the marketing efforts. The crowd of customers is disappointed as the business fails to meet, let alone exceed their expectations. A great marketing effort at this time, may result in three to five times as many people being disappointed as compared to a “soft” grand opening without all the buzz and fanfare. Future marketing efforts must be three to five times bigger and more expensive, to attract all those customers disappointed by the initial grand opening effort.

The same thing may happen when a restaurant or other business heavily promotes a special event or tries to leverage a large event happening around them. This happened to me recently while dining in an establishment during a busy festival. The service was slow, but I am somewhat tolerant of that given how busy they were. The quality of the food was not good. Busy or not, I’m less tolerant on the food quality side. I’m not sure I’ll go back. I believe most other people, given a bad food experience, will likely not return.

What the businesses above needed was not more marketing, but a chance to figure out how to create the positive customer experience, excellence in quality and service. A “soft” opening, maybe inviting a very few friends and family members, would give restaurant owners and staff a chance to work out logistical kinks in service without disappointing a large population of new customers.

For existing businesses, when particularly busy events are coming, perhaps extra planning to minimize bottlenecks and maintain the quality of product and service would help keep the customer experience on the positive side, ranging from good to excellent.

I’m not just picking on restaurants. Many businesses, of all types and sizes, go to great lengths to bring in new customers while they don’t have their processes in place to ensure the exceptional customer experience. Larger companies and institutions have marketing and sales departments whose goals are to bring customers in the door, whether or not the production side of the house is ready to serve them. A perfect example is the cellular and communications companies. They are all great at marketing, but many are not so great at delivering the customer promise.

Sometimes people coming to Fab Lab ICC for the first time will say something like “So many people don’t know about this Fab Lab. You need more marketing to get the word out.” I always thank them but then say we are happy with the organic growth in membership resulting by word-of-mouth. We want to work to develop and tweak our processes to improve the member experience before doing more marketing to bring in more members.

So, most businesses need more marketing at some point, but we all should be working to improve the customer experience so that when our increased marketing efforts bring in new customers, they won’t be disappointed.