Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

Digital Marketing Heats Up in Latin America

In the latest episode of Marketing Thought Leadership, David Uribe of Interaktiva talks about the key digital marketing trends he’s seeing in Latin America, including four reasons why digital marketing campaigns are so effective throughout the region.

Listen now.

When the Customer is Never Right Part 2: We Know What You Want, Deal With It!

More musings from Miami...

Still smarting from our adventure with the Sushi Nazi, a smaller group went to an outdoor café for dinner the following night.

The salmon dinner I ordered came with 2 side orders. I asked the waiter if the green beans were cooked in butter, since I can't eat butter. He told me, no they weren’t, so I ordered them. However, when my dinner came out, instead of green beans I had an order of French fries.

I called the waiter over and told him there’d been a mistake. He said, “There’s no mistake. You told me you wanted French fries and you even asked me if the French fries were cooked in butter.”

French fries in butter? Now maybe I’m suffering from culinary impairment, but I have yet to hear of anyone anywhere cooking French fries in butter—let alone that was not what I’d asked for.

To prove his point, the waiter pulled out his pad and showed me that he’d written down French fries. “There! See! I have it right here!”--as if the fact that he wrote down the wrong thing confirmed that that’s what I asked for.

After an argument, he took my entire plate away and 20 minutes later finally brought out a new order of salmon with green beans.

To add insult to injury, the restaurant had a policy that “for our convenience,” automatically added 19% gratuity to all checks—so I couldn’t even express my displeasure with the service with the tip. And, to top it off, the check came with a mini survey that asked me to rate the restaurant on several factors—except that the only choices were from 5 to 10. Since nothing about this restaurant rated anywhere near a 5, and the restaurant already knew what I wanted to eat and how I wanted to tip, it seemed futile to waste time on the survey.

Amazing how this restaurant knew what I wanted more than I did…too bad they got the whole thing wrong from top to bottom.

 

p.s. I had an absolutely wonderful Miami dining experience at a restaurant called Rare Steak the following night. Both the food and service were exceptional.

When the Customer Is Never Right...Part 1: The Case of the Sushi Nazi

Maybe it’s something in the water, but I had two memorable instances in Miami Beach restaurants last week. Here's the first.

You’ve heard of the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. I met his cousin, the Sushi Nazi, at a small sushi restaurant in South Beach.

Ten of us showed up for sushi dinner on Tuesday evening, which happened to be the restaurant’s All You Can Eat Sushi night. For $37, you could get all the sushi you could eat…provided you wanted to choose from the limited items on the all you can eat menu.

Several members of our party were not big sushi eaters and opted to order off the menu. However, our waiter, the Sushi Nazi, informed us that wasn’t possible. Either the entire table of ten had to order all you can eat, or all of us had to order off the menu.

We offered to put the all you can eaters on one end of the table together. Nope, that was not acceptable. When we opted to all order off the menu, the waiter came back with a compromise. The restaurant would charge half price for those who really didn’t want much sushi, if we all chose the all you can eat option.

We took the compromise, only to find out that all you can eat meant all you could eat from a limited selection of items…which were brought out in a prescribed order. So even though we wanted more of some pieces, we had to cycle through the sushi in the order they chose to bring it out before we could get more of what we really wanted.

Items that were not on the limited all you can eat menu were verboten. Nope, couldn’t help us with that. What we wanted was not relevant, they served us what, when and how they chose.

Somehow by the time they finished, we wound up each paying more than $40 for this “great” deal. How we got there from 1/2 price for the limited eaters was never quite clear.

The food wasn’t bad, but the whole experience was a bit fishy.