Our local Domino’s Pizza franchises are once again running their five-dollar, no-wait medium pizza promotion – complete with guys on street corners dancing around shamelessly, waving giant signs.

I think it’s a great idea – a medium pizza faster than you can get a prefab cheeseburger, for pretty much the same price.

The last time Domino’s ran the promotion (last summer, I think), we took them up on it at least five or six times – to the tune of two or three pizzas at a time. The first time, I walked up to the counter, placed my order, payed, and walked out, very pleased, with three hot pizzas.

But every time after that first visit, I had to wait for the no-wait pizzas. They always seemed to be “all out of our five-dollar pizzas” – even when I stopped in about ten minutes after the start time for the promo. And I had to sit and wait a long, long time – at least twenty minutes, and on several occasions over half an hour (longer than it takes to have a Domino’s pizza delivered to our house from the same store!).

It became obvious pretty quickly that the local franchisee’s, or store manager’s, or personnel’s interpretation of the promotion was that, sure, they’d sell their medium cheese, pepperoni and sausage pizzas for five bucks – but preparing them in advance, at the risk of having to toss them out if they didn’t sell, was a chance they just weren’t willing to take. Cost-effective? Yes. Good marketing? I’d say no.

It’s a case of what I’ve come to call “WalMart Greeter Syndrome.” A company comes up with an idea, sometimes even a good one, to offer a new service to their customers, only to blow it in the training, or the personnel selection, or the oversight, or the execution. And then, instead of an opportunity to provide a new service, to showcase the business at its best, it becomes a new opportunity to provide poor service.

The Domino’s promotion started back up, I’d say, about a month ago. We’ve had pizza numerous times since then, but we haven’t been back to Domino’s for the no-wait pizza. I just don’t see the value in more aggravation at a lower price.

Is your business better served by your coming up with some novel service that might (or might not) impress your customers, or by your keying in on the basics of service, beating your competitors at the things that matter to your customers?

Any business owner who’s managed to survive to his or her fourteenth birthday knows this. It’s pretty obvious.

But once we dive into the day-to-day grind of overseeing and operating our business, any thoughts of marketing strategy are pretty much the first things out the window. And what’s left, day by day, is just the implicit hope that customers will come, that, even though nothing’s changed from yesterday, potential customers will see the business differently today.

Well, they won’t. In fact, they won’t see our businesses at all if we don’t force ourselves to set aside time to work up a simple strategic plan and then force ourselves to devote time every day to implementing it, monitoring results, and modifying our approach.

Marketing your business is a core activity. In fact, marketing your business is your business. Think of everything you do (that isn’t accounting) as part of your investment in marketing. It all works toward bringing in and building sales.

If you don’t devote time to it, who’s going to?

And if you don’t take charge of marketing your business, who are you going to blame when it doesn’t grow?

EFFECT[ive] Marketing is meant to be a discussion center and resource for small–business owners and operators.

Our goal is to initiate and host a dialog, to be an interpreter, between evolving marketing strategies and practices in the web–based economy and business operators who, because their products and services can only be sold in the real world, need effective ways to apply those strategies to their local, on–premise businesses.

A quick search online, or even a detailed search, on “online marketing” or “web marketing” will return hundreds of millions of hits, some small proportion of which offer useful information – but you’d be hard-pressed to find even a handful of those that pertain to online marketing for offline, brick-and-mortar businesses. And until some rocket scientist figures out how to beam someone a haircut, e-mail a hot meal or Tweet a new roof, offline service businesses are stuck doing business in the real world. But that shouldn’t mean they’re stuck with old, obsolete marketing strategies.

We’ll talk here about marketing strategy, tactics and principles, using examples of what’s effective and what’s not. We’ll talk in English and not in marketing–speak. We’ll occasionally present case studies on customer service gone bad—not to vent or to beat up the companies or individuals responsible, but as lessons, to analyze what went wrong and what could have been done differently to prevent the disaster or to turn it into a positive experience for both parties. And, because customer service plays a pivotal role in successful marketing, and management sets the level and tone of customer service, we’ll toss in the occasional thought on leadership philosophy and principles.

We invite your insights and comments. After all, it’s not much of a discussion without them.