An Exercise in How Not To Market Your Endeavor

[mapsedge]

How a trip to the pumpkin patch became a lesson in running a business.

http://mapsedge.wordpress.com/2008/10/12/82/

Comments

[hurricanedeck.livejournal.com]

LOVE it!!

Esp. the part about putting the pretty girl in a V-necked tee behind the cash register!!

[rhiannontherose.livejournal.com]

Let's not forget easy ways to increase profit during their evening market, especially. In many cases, entire families are going to go to a haunted hayride event, simply because they are families -- but many of those families are going to have a younger child who is too scared to go on the hayride, whether that's predictable or a last-minute qualm. And so, one parent will stay behind while the other goes with the older kid(s). If the hayride is all you've got, you're not earning any money off of -- or entertaining -- the ones left behind. You're already a pumpkin patch, selling picked-through pumpkins. Have a table with colored sharpies and glue and construction paper accessories and whatever, and charge people even more, to have their waiting-around younger kids decorate their chosen pumpkin, on the spot! Then there's the obvious issue of ripping people off for food and drink, like every other attraction does. For some reason, I've never been to one of these Halloweeny things that does, though. (Of course, from a patron standpoint, the not getting ripped off part is refreshing, but then again, it would be moreso if there was food and drink available AND it wasn't a rip-off.) In any case, I figure you've got people waiting around in line, as often as not in the cold, and impatient kids....have themed cookies and cocoa available for sale........

[billthetailor.livejournal.com]

An excellent set of points. I'd thought of a few of them but in the fatigue-induced stupor under which I wrote the article I forgot about them. They also had a simple pyramid of hay bales for climbing, a pair of face painters, two games, and an ambulance where you could get a quick tour (but that's quickly done. There's not a whole lot of space to explore in an ambulance.)

So, yeah, stuff to do for the younger set would have been ideal - perhaps even a kids' haunted house. We did one years ago for the Kansas City Children's Museum. It was nothing more than a long cardboard tunnel with a half dozen vignettes: vaguely scary stuff, but nothing active, nothing that would jump out. It was meant to be spooky, and definitely for the younger kids.

We probably had a couple hundred kids crawl through it before it was over. We set up in a vacant storefront at a local (now totally vacant) mall, and duct taped a couple dozen refrigerator boxes to make the tunnel, which probably covered a couple hundred square feet of switchbacks and corners. We set the scenes far enough apart that you couldn't see one "window" from the last and populated them with costumed mannequins. At a buck a crawl, it was insanely popular.

Interestingly, we noted as we were tearing it down afterward, the quantity of children through the thing had actually shifted the entire structure by nearly six inches!

[glesyn.livejournal.com]

Hey I think your idea is smashing. :D

*looks around*

get it?

smashing pumpkins?

*I keeel me*

I vote...

[themadblonde]

for the pretty girl w/ the big smile behind the register. Can we put her in a wench's costume? ;-)