I’m a member of 24 hour fitness in San Francisco; I went to the usual 24 hr locaton that I usually go to, only to find a sign on the door that says they were closed due to a power outage…”damn I really wanted a workout” I thought. In front of the closed 24 hour fitness were two young ladies that were telling me I could go get a free workout out their gym 1 block down the road. Of course, I accepted their invitation (a little card they gave me) and went over to their gym called “Crunch.”
I thought this was a very interesting way for “Crunch” to capitalize on the 24hr fitness shutdown. When I went over to Crunch they had me fill out a little card with some of my basic information; they must have had over 100 24hr fitness customers come in throughout the day. Now Crunch has all of their information and can try to sell them on their gym. Of course, I only saw the outage at 24hr fitness today, if it has been going (or will go) on for a few days then Crunch can potentially get hundreds of people to migrate gyms.
This made me think about how large companies could exploit competitor faults. What if during the Amazon crisis not to long ago (where they were down for a few hours) Ebay issued some sort of radical promotion to all sellers and let them list for free without charging them for photos, bold text, etc? What if during the few hours that gmail was down a few days ago, Yahoo ran some promotion giving all users a credit on their add network if they signed up for a Yahoo account? What if the next time twitter is down, Plurk makes a massive PR attempt to migrate people over to their platform?
Now nobody said any of the above things would be easy to do, but the return should be huge. The best time to get someone to change to another product or service is when their existing one isn’t working. There are a lot of opportunities to dip into the competitor customer pool but I don’t see much of this going on. Sure there are price wars, marketing and sales pitches, etc. But nobody is really taking advantage of timing, and I think that is a huge opportunity that companies are missing out on. What Crunch did to 24 hour fitness was a great example of how opportune timing can boost your customer base. Now, with the internet and social media, spreading the word about a new promotion is not that hard. I think what Crunch did to 24 hr was great and clever strategy.
Have you seen companies use timing (vs competitors) to increase their customer base? Who?
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