'Fatmaaaa…My Shoes' - A successful marketing model

I used to watch what she does before entering the mosque to pray and after finishing my prayers.

Some of the praying men gave her their shoes to watch, she would look after their shoes till they returned. She has a partner who is a shoe polisher; additional value is added to the service by polishing the shoe upon request.

Once the praying men finish their prayers and leave the mosque they call 'Fatmaaa….my shoes', Fatma immediately picks the caller's pair of shoes and hurries to put it under his feet, then hurries back to the rest of the shoes to wait for the next caller.

She has an amazing skill of linking the shoe to its owner without using any aiding tool for identification, she has over 20 pairs on average in front of her, once she hears the call and sees the caller, she picks the correct pair without thinking and delivers them in less than 2 seconds.

Fatma created a very successful Marketing Model, it is all about identifying a need amongst one group or more of the society and satisfying this need better than anyone else. The phenomenon of stealing shoes from mosques during prayers prevails, consequently, there is always the feeling of insecurity among praying men. Fatma, in a very smart way provided a solution to bring security to those men, looking after their shoes during praying, that being a real value, and after the successful partnership with the shoe polisher, the value was increased to shoe polishing upon request.

Fatma was smart enough to find out that superior customer service is the key too maintaining and growing her small business, she delivers the caller's pair of shoes in 2 seconds, she is fully aware that if she is late, the caller will wait with bare feet at the narrow exit of the mosque which will eventually be crowded, which will irritate the caller, dissatisfy him and finally she will lose that caller (Customer).

She is smart enough to know that 'Word of Mouth' is the most powerful promotional tool for her business and maintaining the high quality of customer service is the fuel of positive word of mouth, the number of shoes in front of Fatma is increasing daily, but she is very careful to maintain the same level of excellent customer service to keep her small business.

That was Fatma, the poor and simple girl, yet she understood the rules of the game.

In another example a huge local company manufactures and sells air conditioning units, they spend many millions of pounds on promoting their products in every communication vehicle you can imagine, it happened that I bought one of their products 2 years ago, its performance was very bad at the beginning of this summer so I decided to call their service team (Via a call center) asking for help, the lead time (between my first call and having my air condition fixed) was 2 months, that meant summer was about over, more than 20 calls, begging from my side, giving me dates for visits and no body shows on time, etc…., what was the outcome? A dissatisfied customer who decided to switch to another vendor and who decided to promote negative word of mouth about that vendor.