Love, RIPPLE100

Challenge: How do you make your local coffee house (or restaurant or bar or barber shop) less dependent on foot traffic, especially when that traffic is diminished by the day from lost jobs?

Insight: Create a reason to go – or better yet, many reasons to go. But pitch them one at a time, to one audience at a time. First rule of micromarketing: one at a time. Second rule: do it often. Focus and frequency are your best friend. Especially when you realize how limitless your options are to create points of conversion with audiences you never thought you could reach.

Focus: That’s exactly the story of Bru Cafe in New Haven, CT. As with every Ripplecast, Bru Cafe is notable as much for what we didn’t feature as what we did. We could just as easily have talked up Bru’s other virtues: local artists with paintings and sculptures on the wall; indpendent musicians with CDs and performances on shelves; open-mike poetry night and open-air concerts in one of downtown New Haven’s most gentrified red-brick enclaves; eclectic furniture for an eclectic crowd yet universally homey for all; menu items like Cajun Persuasion and Quesadillas, and astounding beverages like Latin American mate, which I can’t find anywhere else locally. And so on.

Out of endless options, we featured Startup Bru. An experiment to support area entrepreneurs through a mix of online, offline and local elements such as only a local coffee house can provide. Startup Bru is a call to action directed at metro New Haven’s entrepreneurial class – students and faculty from more than a dozen colleges within a 20-mile radius, working professionals up and down New Haven’s Hartford and Fairfield county corridors, the displaced diaspora from a long and deep recession. The point is: these segments dwarf the foot traffic that sustained Bru Cafe in good times, but not in a recession.

See it live: Ripplecast 2010: Startup Bru @ Bru Cafe in New Haven

So what: It doesn’t matter what kind of business, politics, or nonprofit you have. This is stuff you can do yourself, now, at your next click.  Here are 3 options:

• Tune into Ripplecast 2010 for more ideas how to start micromarketing now.
• Get started with your own micromarketing kit at www.ripple100.com.
• For other ways we can help: email andre@ripple100.com.