The Restaurant Effect

Mark W. Schaefer talks about “Social Proof” in Chapter 9 of his book ” The Content Code”. He provides the reader an example of weak social proof: ” it’s like walking in to a restaurant at 7pm and being the only customers there. It’s a bit unnerving and lonely, and you might wonder if you should turn around and leave”. Even though Schaefer uses a restauran in his example, a lot of different types of businesses struggles with the same problem. For example our  campaign client Squeeze Juiceworks is not considered a restaurant per say, but they suffer from this same problem.

Squeeze has a substantial amount of followers on social media. They are active when it comes to generating content on different social media outlets and provide great visual images almost daily.  They also have a good amount of positive reviews on websites such as Yelp and so on. This shows that the social proof is there in terms of social media. However, the social proof does not show in the shops themselves. Very often when walking by or visiting Squeeze, the shop is empty. This creates an unfortunate illusion for the customer just as Schaefer stated.

We hope that our campaign would fix this lack of social proof for Squeeze, and get more customers to come to the shop on a daily basis. We believe that business professionals going in and out of the store, and hopefully bringing business meetings to the Tampa location will bring more life to the store- as well as boost their social proof.