Good packaging!

Good packaging and good marketing can mean the difference between success and failure. And more expensive does not necessarily mean better.

There is a coffee shop in the building I work in. Instead of following the practice of other coffee shops in our area of having a happy hour where coffee is half price, they package their deal slightly differently. During happy hour when you order your coffee, you flip a coin and call it in the air. If you are right the coffee is FREE and if you are wrong then you pay the regular price.

Based on probability theory, over time all coffee sold in that hour will work out to half price. So the coffee shop is not losing any money over time. Patrons get a cheap thrill hoping to get their coffee for free. If they do, Hurray! If not, well you pay normal price - no big loss.

But on the plus side for the coffee shop, if I was buying coffee at that time of the day, I would try my luck. The outcome is that they could attract more customers by offering the exact option as their competition, just in different packaging.

So the question is, what are you doing to attract customers?