26 Degrees in the Shade . . .

Point of Sales Promotional Activity Ideas for Bars in Spain

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These idea are aimed at keeping your regular customers happy, so that they come to your bar restaurant as often as possible and also to encourage regular customers to introduce new customers to your business.

There are many, many ways in which you can promote your business from within your area, without going out delivering leaflets or paying to advertise in the local press.

Please note we do deliver leaflets in November and January and we do advertise special events in the local paper about twice a year, but today I am focusing on easy and free ways of promoting at the point of sales.

Here are some of the things that you can do to stimulate trade and some of them also have the advantage of raising money for charity, which is great for the charity and great for the good will of your business too.

• Raffle a hamper and give the profit to a local charity. Make sure that you put together a nice selection of interesting grocery items, include a nice bottle of wine or two and use tropical fruit to add bright decorative colours to your hamper. The hamper will look really great, if you cover it with cellophane and tie it up with say a golden ribbon. This must always be done for charity and can be run a few times each year. You’ll find that it stimulates a lot of interest and also is a good PR exercise and will bring in new customers.
• Weekly darts or pool competition. This will work if one of the partners is prepared to join in and play. It’s not suitable for all bar restaurants, but it will definitely boost your trade. You may end up playing away legs and if you are in a very localized league, you will win new customers from other bars in the league. (You’ll be expected to provide free eats, usually sandwiches, but you’ll take loads of money on drinks.) The darts and pool folk drink a lot of bottled beer, such as Budweiser and Heineken, which sell for quite a lot more than draught beer.
• Second hand books. In our bar restaurant we sell both Spanish and English books, which are given to us by friends and customers. All the profit goes to Street Children in Nepal. (Customers are very enthusiastic about the scheme and people who come in specially to buy books also increase our turn over).
• Supporting a charity in the name of your bar: We have a group of clients who have called themselves Friends of Graham’s Pizzeria. And they all make a donation to sponsor a Nepalese street child to go to school. They do this once a year. We start the collection rolling ourselves and then the customers take over. We put up news of the child we sponsor on the notice board and our regular customers just love to be involved and to chat to each other about the project. (We make this annual collection primarily because we want to help the child concerned, but it does also generate good PR for our business.)
• If you are solely a restaurant you may want to do a grand BBQ or a special dish such as giant paella, every second Tuesday or whatever.

Well there are just a few ideas to help you create PR for your business, keep your clients entertained, whilst also helping charities.

Note - We are just too busy to run any of the above activities in the busy summer months.

The photos show Deepana, the child from Nepal that is sponsored by us and our clients in our Spanish bar. She is a good artist - that is her work in the letter she wrote.

How To Relate To Customers in Your Bar or Restaurant

Public Relations : An Overview on Conversing With Customers and Avoiding Arguments

This is a big subject, which has taken Ines and I 20 years to learn and we are both still learning, so all I can do in this short post is cover the main points. I will come back frequently in additional posts to give more detailed advice on how to maintain good PR in your Spanish bar.

There are three types of PR system commonly adopted in bars and restaurants:

1. The impersonal approach used by big restaurants, which is inappropriate for a small or medium sized English bar or restaurant in Spain, so we can forget about this one.
2. The full-on gossipy (Annie Walker) approach. This will lead you into endless conflicts and arguments and cause people to boycott your bar, so I would advise strongly against this approach.
3. Finally our system, of trying to be friendly with everyone, treating everybody equally and never talking about any one behind his or her back.

The Friendly system may sound easy, but believe me it isn’t and no matter how well you get on with people in normal life, you will probably have to learn to be more discreet when handling people in a bar situation.

Learn to be friendly, whilst keeping the details you release about your private life both very vague and to an absolute minimum.

Become a Good Listener

Now that I have outlined three systems and recommended the one that has work well for us over many years; I’ll mention some books you can read to help you with your PR and in a subsequent post I will try to shine a light on :

• Why people spend a lot of time in bars, and
• the basic types (categories) of people who will be visiting your bar.

Vital Reading

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

This book was first published in 1953 and is still one of the best books to help you learn about how to relate to other people and get them to like you. Of course if you prefer you can Google for other titles that will help you.

Don’t forget; if a customer doesn’t like you he or she won’t spend their money on a regular basis in your bar restaurant.