Living in Kabul, sometimes I notice a new restaurant has opened recently and it looks like a good enough one to try it once. So I have a lunch or dinner there for the first time and I notice everything is fabulous about it. The staff is friendly and professional, tables and plates are supper clean and food is amazing. So I decide to come more often.
It usually doesn’t take more than a couple of month when I notice the change. Not change for the better but change for the worse. Now usually the restaurant is crowded which shows that I wasn’t the only one who discovered it. But the staff is not that friendly anymore. They are too busy! Tables, plates and floor don’t look that clean anymore and even food quality has changed. I visit the restaurant for about another couple of months before it reaches a point that I find it intolerable.
You see many such restaurants and other similar service-based businesses around Kabul that have their first year of glory and then soon they are doomed to lose their regular customers to the new competitors in town. Since they are to concerns about not losing their business, they put a lot of focus on attracting new customers. They spend heavily on advertisement; make their service and product to stand out significantly than their competitors and offer their service or product with a very attractive price. But once they have a lot of customers, they think that can now sit back, relax and enjoy a life-long successful business.
It appears that they were oblivion about where the problem is. They soon forget how successful they have been the first months of their business and where they have lost the glory.
Marketing is not an activity for a start-up for its first few months but an ongoing and constantly improving activity throughout the life of the business. Not only you need to keep improving the quality of your service and products you also need to continuously promote your business through advertisement, promotions, and above all keeping the regular customers happy and loyal to your brand.