AGWAM – Dave Ratner and Dave’s Soda and Pet City will be a part of the National Retail Federation’s Retail Across America campaign.

Ratner, who is celebrating 40 years of Dave’s Soda and Pet City this year, is very active with the federation advocating on behalf of the nation’s brick-and-mortar retailers in Capital Hill hearings and acting as a voice for smaller businesses on boards with the heads of national chains.

The National Retail Federation’s Retail Across America Team will be at Dave’s Agawam location Friday filming for the organization’s Retail Across America Campaign. Dave’s Soda and Pet City announced the event in a news release Thursday.

They’ll talk with Ratner about his advocacy and with his employees about their jobs and their favorite things about working in retail.

According to the National Retail Federation, Massachusetts retailers support 920,000 jobs and retail contributes nearly $58 billion to the state’s economy.

Article Featured in MassLive: http://www.masslive.com/business-news/index.ssf/2015/08/dave_ratner_of_daves_soda_and_pet_city_f.html

The post Dave Ratner of Dave’s Soda and Pet City featured on national ad campaign first appeared on Dave Ratner.

My local NBC affiliate put on a lunch sponsored by the network television association. It was great because there was no selling but lots of information. Even with a declining audience, network TV rules the media. The fellow who put on the seminar was very persuasive about the benefits of network advertising. Basically, it has the absolute widest reach of any local media. The problem, as you probably know, is that spots are so expensive and cover too wide an area. If you have one store, it may not really serve your area. However, if there is something going on at your store that folks will travel for it may be worth looking at.

He busted me for spending more money on cable than on network TV. To a certain degree, he convinced me to spend more on some network ads. I bought spots in the morning from 6 to 9 a.m. weekdays at a pretty reasonable rate. Again, I am in a small market. Larger metropolitan markets will be more expensive.

We did get into a discussion about which is the better buy though, network or cable.

I can buy a 30-second spot during the national/local news, which has tens of thousands of viewers for about $400 a spot. I can also buy about 40 of the same spots on HGTV or the Cooking Channel or Lifetime for the same $400. I don’t have the exact figures but probably five to ten times more people watch the network channel than the cable channels but I can’t afford to run enough spots on the NBC news to make my ad visible to viewers. You need to run a spot many times before viewers remember it. That goes for radio, internet or TV.

So what I decided to do is run a flight of ads on NBC from the morning shows through the daytime and into the news. I am doing this on the first and third Tuesday of the month.

If I have gotten you to think about TV, please run as many spots as you can in one day, not spread out over the course of the week. You need saturation and you need to hit folks over the head with your ad. The argument was about spending $400 and getting thousands of folks seeing the ad versus $400 on a bunch of ads on cable which has a fraction of the viewers.

I still say the cable buy is better since the viewers will see my ad more often and will remember it (assuming it is a good ad). So please use your local cable and network reps, you may be surprised how affordable TV may be.

Article Featured in Pet Age: http://www.petage.com/tv-revisited/

The post TV Revisited first appeared on Dave Ratner.

If your store is in a small market or if you have more than one store, radio may be a great way to advertise your business. The trick is which station to buy, when should you run the spots and how often should those spots run. One more small detail: how to make a good radio ad.

Which station gets the most women listeners in your market? You want the most women since they are most likely the bulk of your customers. Radio stations can show you demographics of who is listening to them and when folks are listening.

How much can you afford to spend? The newer the business, the more you need to spend. The better the location, the less you need to spend. Are you the only game in town or, like most of us, do you have too many competitors? Do you have something new and of interest to a broad base of customers? A pretty standard rule of thumb is to spend about 2 percent of sales on marketing. Again, if your business is new, you need to spend more.

So, you picked the station. Now, let’s get the best deal. Do buy packages from the sales reps. Remember that your sales rep is not a marketing expert; he or she is a sales rep.

Here is what I do. I buy a bunch of spots on one day and I avoid drive-time spots since they are the most expensive spots. So I don’t have two spots a day, five days a week, I have 10 spots on Tuesday. Plus I run them whenever the times are cheapest to run.

You may be thinking, “Don’t you get way more people hearing the ad if you spend more to run in prime time?” Yes, but there is too much clutter and your ads will get lost since you can’t afford to run too many in prime time. Plus, wouldn’t you rather have 100 percent of the smaller audience versus 0 percent of the larger audience? Remember, I am in western Massachusetts so rates are very reasonable. Prime drive time spots on the leading station that women listen to are $60 per spot. I am buying Sunday night thru Monday night at $15 per spot.

I contracted out for a year, which makes it easier for the rep to get your deal accepted by management. When buying the spots, you want to own the day even if it’s two days a month.

I do all my advertising on the same days of the month so no matter what media folks are tuned into they will probably see or hear me. As you probably guessed, I do the radio ads myself. It is so important to connect personally with customers. Doing the spots myself lets the listeners know there is a real Dave. They know they are dealing with a real human being, not a corporation. A word of caution however. If you are not really comfortable or good at doing ads, don’t do them. They will be awful and you will bring shame on your family.

What to advertise? I like to solve customer problems. The object is to get as many folks as possible out of competitors’ stores and into your store. What customer problems do you solve most often? Here’s one idea: “Is your dog or cat overweight? We’ve had great results feeding Food X. Here’s why.”
I have been running the following ad for close to 20 years: “Dog got gas? For immediate relief come to Dave’s Soda and Pet City and pick up a bag of Dave’s Simply the Best Dog Food.” That’s the whole ad. Guess what is the best selling dog food sku in my stores?

Are you having a big promotion or sale at the store? Buy your spots right before the promotion. As I’m writing this in October, we are about to hold a Catoberfest event in conjunction with a rescue in one of our stores. Along with emails, Facebook, press releases, etc., I will buy some radio spots promoting it. I will point out the benefits of coming to the store that day, which are discounts, coupons, free food and all the money and supplies the rescue will get.

The question to ask yourself after you script the ad is “Would that make me come to the store?” If you are not sure, make a new ad.

Article Featured in Pet Age: http://www.petage.com/pet-stores-on-the-radio/

The post Pet Stores on the Radio first appeared on Dave Ratner.

BJ is all about creating cult brands and how small businesses like ours can, in fact, do it without spending zillions of dollars. He write a blog called Cult Marketing & Branding Insights. What BJ preaches is basic human nature. People like to feel welcomed, like to have different needs fulfilled, like to feel good about the places they spend money in, and will tell others about their experiences.

Most of my best ideas and the way I run my businesses all have a bit of BJ thinking in them. He trained me to ask the question, “What will my customers think?” before I do anything. The goal according to BJ is to build a business of fanatical followers like Apple or Harley-Davidson. Can you imagine customers tattooing your logo on themselves?

So the question is how do we build such a fanatical customer base? It’s not easy but it is very doable. In no particular order here are just some of the things we need to do. I say need because competition is going to get fiercer and tougher for folks like us.

You have to know who your customers are. You simply cannot build a relationship with someone you can’t communicate with. At the last Central show I ran into a retailer who has been pummeled with new competitors in the past year. I think every major chain has moved close to her. This person runs such a good store and is so on top of her game that even though the store is down, it is not out. Sales are starting to inch back up. I asked the retailer if she is at least collecting emails of their customers. The answer was no: “My customers don’t want to give us their emails.”

Wrong answer!

Your customers absolutely want to hear from you when you are telling them about something that they are interested in. Do you think your customers don’t want an email telling them about a recall or a sale on the brand of food they use? You bet they do.

We just did a postcard with a $4 off coupon for one of the brands we sell. We went into our database, got a list of everybody who bought that brand in the past year and sent the postcard just to them. Typically, we would get at least 20 percent response rate. It has only been three weeks but we have not gotten very many coupons back. Something is screwy. We checked with the post office, the cards went out so this is a mystery. The rep and I were really scratching our heads trying to figure out what happened. Then it hit me: I can email the folks who were sent the snail mail postcard to ask them if they did indeed get the postcard. Then we figured why not resend the coupon in the email? The point is I couldn’t communicate with them if I didn’t have contact info.

Back to BJ. If you know your customers are mostly women, is your store “woman friendly?” Are your shelves, floors, window and sidewalks clean? Are your heavier products easily reachable for the average height of a woman? I suggest reading, “Why She Buys” by Bridget Brennan. As I think about it, a large amount of stores that I visit all over the country are run by women. That probably explains why they are successful; they know how to cater to themselves. You cannot create a cult following if you don’t cater to your followers!

The next thing is you need to bond emotionally with your customers. The one advantage we indies have is the big chains can’t do that. They run great ads saying they do it but they can’t. It is up to you to make your customers fall in love with and spend their hard-earned money in your store.

To me – and BJ agrees – nothing can be built without trust. The easiest way to build trust is make sure you and your crew practice the adage of “when there is a problem, there is no problem.” Fix it immediately and empower your crew to fix problems on the spot.

Article Featured in Pet Age: http://www.petage.com/can-you-imagine-customers-tattooing-your-logo-on-themselves/

The post Can You Imagine Customers Tattooing Your Logo on Themselves? first appeared on Dave Ratner.

SPRINGFIELD — Getting a discount at checkout these days is like the beginning of a magic trick.

Pick a card, any card.

Loyalty programs — where a customer signs up and gives the merchant the ability to track his or her spending in return for discounts and offers — proliferate. And as they do, so do the number of cards, or key-chain tags, associated with these programs. At any given time, people might have cards for one or two supermarkets, gas stations, drug stores, hardware stores or wherever else they’ve decided to sign up. Lots of cards, lots of confusion.

In steps the Loc Card, a universal rewards card that has Dave’s Soda & Pet City signed up as one of its first member merchants. The chain has seven locations in the region.

“What I like about this is it is great for the consumer,” said Dave Ratner, the owner and founder of Dave’s, which hopes to have Loc Card in place before the busy holiday shopping season. “It also allows each merchant to run its own loyalty program. Nothing about my Dave’s Club changes. People just use one card to access it.”

Ratner said he has “thousands” of Dave’s Club members. They earn one point for every dollar they spend and a $10 Rewards Certificate at 300 points. They also get coupons and offers.

“We know you have a dog and probably aren’t interested in cat stuff,” Ratner said. “Not only do we know you have a dog, but we know what brand of food it eats.”

As he spoke, a woman, a new customer, signed up for a Dave’s card and bought a case of canned cat food.

“Now, in her email, we’ll not only send her a coupon for signing up, but wouldn’t it be great if she got a bounce-back coupon for a second case of cat food,” Ratner said, adding that the second coupon would be timed to arrive in about 20 days, about the same time the woman’s cat would finish the first case.

Brian Sealander, a local sales representative of Cincinnati-based Loc Card, said Dave’s Soda and Pet City captures about 90 percent of purchases in its loyalty club plan. That means Ratner has a lot of loyal customers who always use their card.

“That’s because we really work it with the loyalty program,” Ratner said. “We really make it worthwhile.”

Sealander said that loyalty makes Dave’s a good test market for Loc. Also, Sealander, a Springfield native now living in New Hampshire, grew up with Ratner, attending George Washington Elementary, Forest Mark Middle and the former Classical High School here.

The met again recently at a National Federation of Retailers event where Ratner was the featured speaker.

Sealander said he’s busy pitching the Loc Card to other Springfield-based chains. It’s only with several stores signed up that consumers will chose to ditch a scramble of cards for one Loc.

Sealander said the card was developed by retail veteran Jack Kennamer, who was checking out at a store when he saw a woman refuse to sign up for a loyalty program, discount or not, after shaking her stuffed key ring at the clerk and saying “I don’t have room for you!”

“We want to make Springfield a sort of test market,” he said. “It’s a big market, which you need, and it also has a lot of regional companies based here.”

Instead of filling out a form at the store, Loc users take a card and register it on a website – www.loccard.com – or a mobile app. Consumers choose how much information to share with each company.

“They might want to tell Dave about their dog and cat, but not want to share that with anyone else,” Sealander said.

Ratner said he might set up computer kiosks in his stores so customers can sign up for Loc right there. It’ll cut down on people filling out paper forms that then have to be input.

“But I don’t want people to go home and forget about it,” Ratner said. “The whole idea is to have a way to reach people.”

The Loc Card website has a dashboard that lets consumers keep track of all their offers from all their various loyalty programs. They’ll know how many points they have at Dave’s, the gas station, wherever and what offers they have available.

“We’ll also let them know which offers are about to expire,” Sealander said.

The dashboard also allows member retailers to reach out to people who signed up through another store’s program, Ratner said. This gives him access to people who’ve never been to his store.

Loc gets paid an annual fee once a consumer uses it to sign up to a loyalty program.

Article Featured in MassLive: http://www.masslive.com/business-news/index.ssf/2013/10/citing_too_many_cards_daves_soda_and_pet.html

The post Too many cards? Dave’s Soda and Pet City teams up with The Loc Card to get universal loyalty first appeared on Dave Ratner.