This post about "Shoestring Marketing" touches on the subject of why "Time and Money are Interchangeable" and how a mechanic who specializes in BMWs drives around parking lots when his biz is slow and leaves flyers on each of the cars notifying the owners of his specialty, which usually nets his business before he even gets back to the lot.

This same topic was raised by John this weekend when we batted around the value of a local takeout place dropping flyers off to everyone in the neighborhood on a Friday afternoon. I'm partial to building an email list and sending emails to people at work while they're thinking of dinner, but the result is the same.

Which gets me thinking more on this subject. What if I were a local take -n- bake pizza company, like Papa Murphys, that collected email addresses at their retail POS with the promise of just in time deals and coupons for customers. I then declare Thursday "local pizza bonanza night" and send emails at 3:45 to everyone on the list with the promise that they could order online from their local chain and the pizza would be ready for them to pickup on the way home, and stick in the oven for dinner. Every Thursday, I send new email deals.

Taking it a step further, I ask people "What's your favorite pizza night?" and allow them to choose which days they want to get email deals. I them build an automated backend system to blast out the latest specials, I track the user behavior, and start sending more and more personalized info. The info is linked with the instore POS so that I don't lose the huge pizza that they bought for their kids birthday party on Saturday...

Better yet, for businesses, everyone keeps a "Menu" folder - I have, and I was always the "goto person" for menus. Whatever I had for takeout menus is what we chose from. What if you were to build an online "local menu" favorites system or something like that that you could forward around the office,

Ok, maybe that's a bit too geek, but It sure is damn fun to think about!