How ‘common’ is common sense? Not very… here’s a story (true) that illustrates what I mean.

A local new business, “Have A Sushi Bar” (name changed to protect the innocent was scheduled to open in a few weeks. It was positioning itself as an upscale shushi restaurant/bar and it had created a bit of a ‘buzz’ in our town of 55,000.

To get the marketing campaign rolling the owner decided to give 50 people a special invitation package that allowed them to invite one other person, of their choice, to the restaurant on a special night to sample the menu and have some drinks. It wasn’t free, you had to pay for your meal and drinks (I think they said something about some ‘free’ champagne) but still, it would be kind of a fun thing to do.

I liked the idea… thought it was a pretty smart way to get people excited and involved in the opening. But like all good ideas, if it isn’t carefully planned and all contingencies accounted for, it ends up backfiring.

First off, who do you choose to give the invitation packets to? At first I thought they would hold a drawing… they could have gotten some free publicity with one of the local radio stations and offered everyone who called a special number to be entered to get one of the “Invitation Only Day” packets.

The owners could collect the names and addresses of the callers…that would have had the dual purpose of building a mailing list as well as getting a ton of people who hadn’t heard of the opening a chance to discover it.

Out of the hundreds of people who would call in to the get the special “Invitation Only Day” packet they would have randomly picked 50 lucky winners!

I mean what a great idea!

Everybody wins! The owners get people excited about the opening, they get at least 100 people to come to the restaurant on this special day to have fun and try it out and they get a ton of free publicity from the station!

And, if this was my restaurant, I would have contacted every person who called in to get the packets. I would have told them that even though they didn’t get chosen for *this* night, that we are scheduling a second night and they would still be able to get special “Invitation Only Day” packets but for another night!

In fact, if there were enough people who called in, I would have immediately scheduled 3 or 4 or 5 “Invitation Only” days and stretched it into a “Invitation Only Month!” so that my restaurant was filled any day I wanted it filled!

And you know what really happened instead?

What did the owner do instead? He hand picked 50 of his closest friends, relatives and business partners to get the invitation packets. They in turn could invite only one person to attend this ’special’ opening day with them.

That still would have been ok… but what happened is that the word got around that some people received the Invitation ‘packets’ and, not knowing beforehand that the person who received the packet was limited to inviting just ONE person, people started asking if they could go with them. When the person said, “no”, that they could only invite ‘one’ person, people started to get offended.

The owner was notified that there were a lot of people who wanted to come, but were turned down. He didn’t seem to care. He just told everyone they could only bring “one” person and that was that.

At that point he still could have ‘rescued’ the situation by getting the names and addresses of everyone who wanted to come and offer them something else, but he didn’t … instead, a lot of people were really offended, and they had the impression that this restaurant (and owner) was not very friendly (a snob).

I know one person who told me that they didn’t care if they had the best sushi in New York State, they would drive 60 miles to a larger neighboring city than ever step foot in this restaurant.

I think the restaurant was open about 14 months before it closed.

The owner was not using common sense, or any kind of sense.

Is ‘common sense’ that common? I don’t think so…