How can a Host be Different? Breaking Business Bottlenecks in the Hospitality Industry.

So if you are awesome at something, good for you. 

But what about if 1000 other people are too? 

It’s not a great situation.

On the other hand, if you can be great at something that other people are crappy at and its something that really helps other people, your life is probably going to go pretty well!

Knowing this, I read a book last week that was recommended to me by a mentor. It’s a book called “Different” written by anerdy marketing professor called Youngme Moon.

I’m glad I took the time to read her book because it’s all about the benefits of being different in hyper mature industries, like hospitality!

So here is what I took from her book:

To win when providing a service to the people around you:

  Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing

  In an area that everyone is competing for a limited resource

            That makes a big difference for the people you serve

Her book really made me thing about how people in the nightclub industry all look around to see what the new marketing thing is that’s working and then they all just do the exact same thing and then do it more and more until it becomes ridiculous and the customer gets disillusioned: what used to be quite a cool new offer is now being thrust at them from by so many people as a hard sell.

Even fairy floss tastes pretty nasty when there’s an evil clown with a blow torch stuffing in your face and giggling quietly into the darkness.

In the past 15 years I’ve seen this happen with basically every good events communication approach. Think about mail outs – they were awesome in their day! Then SMS. Then we figured out to call people up and invite them in for drinks on their birthday. Then we added birthday drink cards to the offer. Oh, also, can anyone please sell me a ticket for the next music festival. I can’t seem to find out where to buy one. The “deal” is better than ever, but our client has become beyond disinterested and is sometimes even actively hostile to our “great news”.

Something’s missing. People don’t want more. They want something else. So what does a good host do?

What Youngeme Moon suggests is that we figure out a thoughtful and bold way to do the opposite, in a bottleneck area, that makes a real difference to the people we serve.

But what does that look like?

Well, I’ve been trying my little heart out for 16 years to create parties that people want to go to, that they find fun and memorable, and I’ve tried to invite people to these parties in literally hundreds of ways in that time. And what I can say is that you know it when you get it right because people who were yelling at you to shut up the day before respond immediately when you nail it.

So stop looking at the guy next to you in the shiny new car and get out there and experiment. You will know when you have a winner.

But remember: When you find something that works really well, start immediately to look for the next thing that will make you different: each stroke of party genius will only be different for about 12 months – that guy in the shiny car and everyone else is gonna try to copy what you do in a second!