Do something 'unexpected' extra, each time, every time

Marketing lagniappe (lăn-yăp)
The first few minutes, looking at the word mentioned in the title, just went in struggling to get the pronunciation right. Anyways...

Its a very interesting concept that i have come across and thought of having it mentioned in this site. The definition of 'Marketing Lagniappe' is act of differentiating your product or service by providing something little 'unexpected' extras.

It was interesting beacuse out of the whole list of examples that one gets to find on the blogs by Stan Phelps @ http://www.marketinglagniappe.com/, so much so that he is writing a book on this 'Marketing lagniappe - in search of your purple goldfish'.

I found the whole thing extremely simple, yet intriguing. After reading some of the cases, some of them were very run-of-the-mill, but I guess the presentation and ability to perform the task at all times was the real differentiator. One QSR - serves peanuts, while customers wait in the queue to get their order; while a hotel room – welcomes you with a funny animal (made out of towel) kept on the bed. There are whole loads of them and wonder why i haven’t seen any of them anywhere. Or is it that some of them are so simple (and subtle and not hitting straight in your face), that the experience lingers in the back of the mind for a long time..

I was attending a loyalty summit and the speaker gave us an example (as of now, it was one step towards lagniappe). He and his son were waiting in MacDonalds to get their burger and took unusually longer time. Observing them, one of the employee walked to them and asked about their irritation. Having heard their story, the employee was back with thier order, with an additional softie, for the son. This made the man (our speaker) more loyalist to MacDonalds than his son.

Taking this as a cue, do you think, the speaker and his son would have got almost same treatment at any other MacDonalds store. The answer is 'May or May not'. Here, I feel that the lagniappe was created by the employee (in an individual capacity) and not the corporate and this is the difference.

The beauty of this concept is not a little extra one time, but over and over again, which means that the dna of the org has to be aligned towards acting in a particular way (as a practice) that every individual in the org performs the task to turn the customers visit into 'an experience'. An experience, which he keeps talking about. It is an on-going concept (a practice, a mandate, a habit) to thrill your customer on any aspect of your business.