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Views from Across the Pond

The Power of a Simple Goldfish

By Trevor Cole

Indulge me one more fish story. Actually, it's two fish stories that segue together to illustrate the potential power of a little initiative and a single goldfish. Also, you can interchange goldfish for any simple commodity sold in your business. 
 
Story No. 1: My wife likes to read. One day she happened upon an article written by a community columnist in our local newspaper lamenting the death of his family’s 10-year-old pet goldfish. It was a poignant, slightly tongue-in-cheek piece, so she cut it out for me to read.

The article was so witty and well-written that we laminated a copy and hung it over the goldfish tanks at the store. Reciprocating the columnist’s humor, I sent him an e-mail with a gift certificate for a free goldfish of his choice.

Shortly thereafter the writer and his wife, clearly delighted and curious about our feedback, showed up at our store. It happened to be our annual Open House when the store was really hopping and my wife and daughter were greeting customers at the door. Introductions were made, and we gave them a tour of the goldfish tanks. They spent hours wandering around, shopping, visiting and enjoying the festivities.
 
One week later, an article about the writer’s visit to our store appeared in his newspaper column. How can you top what amounted to a glowing review entitled “The Fish House -- Where Dreams Come True?”

We were not pandering for free publicity, but that small, off-the-cuff follow-up resulted in pleasantly unexpected results. The death of Marvin the Goldfish turned in to a nice human-interest story with a positive connection for us.
 
Story No. 2:  My daughter’s school has an annual event for all 1st graders called Parade of Readers. As a community sponsor for the school, we were approached about offering an incentive prize for the students. What could we offer to 250 1st graders? We didn’t have logo pencils or other trinkets, and, frankly, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money because youngsters are not my target customer.

That said, children have parents, and I wanted to get the parents into our store. We decided to offer gift certificates for a free goldfish -- just a small fish that cost us very little.

It wasn’t the largest prize offered by the competition sponsors, but it turned out to be one of the most popular incentives. It was given to every 1st grader who read 100 books -- a major milestone. Can you imagine the child's excitement? Even MY child was motivated.

I did not send the fish to school. The prize-winning children -- more than 200 of them -- brought their proud parents to the store to hand-select their goldfish. 
 
The lesson learned is that the offer of a simple reward -- in this case, a goldfish -- brought a huge amount of traffic to the store, promoting goodwill and lots of free publicity. The cost for both of these actions were minimal.

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