In early May 2012, Monkey Creek Cafe opened at 227 Chifley Rd, Bell NSW on the drive down the mountains on the western side. I went there for lunch. To enable Monkey Creek Cafe to work out their pricing structure, in the first period after opening, they asked their customers to say how much they’d pay. The menu was an A4 page showing the various meals with $_________ underneath. I’m sure that if we tried to pay nothing, they had a minimum price, but their approach had several benefits.
We discussed what price we thought our meal was worth.
- The people I was there with had gone there for dinner previously, and they said how they valued the same meals at a higher price when eating it at night than during the day. I’m sure this isn’t uncommon.
- The cafe is self sustaining which had branding benefits, but there were disadvantages. The meal was on a special paper plate that breaks up easily in the cafe’s worm farm. Sounds great for the environment, but somehow your meal didn’t feel it has as high a value when we were eating it off a paper plate. The chef came and spoke to us about our meal and we raised the issue. She told us the story about how sustainability was part of the cafe and explained the various aspects to the sustainability. It was excellent to hear. I hope they now have the environmental features promoted at the cafe as it added to their appeal.
- We discussed how the wonderful view of the Blue Mountains added to our sense of value of the meal and were willing to pay for it.
- As a business owner myself, it was great to see what they were doing.
Great customer feedback cycle
From a market research perspective, where I value a customer feedback cycle, it was excellent. We learned more about the cafe from being able to talk to the chef and felt engaged with the experience. They received both qualitative feedback from their conversations with us and quantitative in terms of price of their menu at different times of day. This allowed them to understand the sense of value their customers saw in the experience. Also they didn’t have to collect the information using complicated statistical techniques. In your business How do you measure what your customers think your products or services are worth?
