Unless you’ve been in Loompaland for the past week, you will have seen news of the disastrous Willy Wonka Experience. Billed as an “exhilarating and immersive” live experience in Glasgow, it turned out to be an event so abysmal that the police had to be called in due to an angry mob of parents furious and demanding a refund.
Upon arrival, guests discovered that the supposed magical and whimsical place was a virtually derelict warehouse, forlornly decorated with a few homemade props. There’s a big lesson here for MSP & IT businesses.
When it comes to running a technology business, things have to be right, or they don’t work. A classic example is if you don’t have DNS/DHCP set up on your domain controller, then logins are going to fail on the office network.
There is almost a level of perfection required in supporting your client’s technology needs – if something is set up wrong, it isn’t going to work, or worse, it could open the client up to data/cyber risks.
However, this way of doing business can hinder you in other areas. In the case of the Willy Wonka experience, the service delivered was a complete failure with angry customers. The events company behind this debacle did, however, do some things amazingly well that no one is talking about.
If you take a quick look at any of the promotional material, and on their live website – it’s got many errors and obvious AI-generated imagery.
According to the Willy’s Chocolate Experience website, the event promised to be a “whimsical” place “filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn!” While on the surface, the promotional AI images suggested an out-of-this-world interactive experience, a closer look reveals a number of AI-generated spelling mishaps, with one image promising “encherining entertainment” in “a pasadise of sweet teats”.
So, how did a small, almost non-existent company manage to attract many hundreds of parents and their families, even managing to get customers to pay in advance to the sum of £35/$50 during what’s been dubbed in the UK as a cost of living crisis?
With such bad marketing, how on earth did this company manage to attract many hundreds of customers and get them to pay up front?
I put this down to two factors – the first is that they were riding on another brand, Willy Wonka, and leveraging the circumstances in the marketplace (There’s a new Willy Wonka film that’s just been released).
The old saying “feed a starving crowd” – that was their first key to marketing success. The question you now have to ask yourself is how can you do this in your IT Business?
How could you leverage something that’s going on in the world to your advantage – there is, of course, the cybersecurity example and who’s the latest large brand that’s been hacked. Good, but not great – everyone else is doing the same – think harder.
The second key to their marketing success can be seen in all the errors of the marketing material – the overuse of AI, the spelling mistakes.
None of this was perfect, but they got it out there and took action. This goes against the very principles of how you operate your business where perfection is almost a requirement to fulfill the service – when it comes to marketing, done is better than perfect.
Consistently taking action is what matters in marketing.
If you want to see how these successful MSPs are taking action and growing their IT business, check out the checklist I’ve put together for you.
Scott Millar
Scott has over 15 years in the MSP sector, both working in and running an IT business. Passionate about online marketing, he's dedicated to helping fellow MSPs clinch top search engine positions. Through IT Rockstars, Scott provides proven strategies to ensure a steady flow of warm digital marketing leads.