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A Lesson in Keeping the Customer Satisfied.

If you haven’t realised it my now then let me make it plain to you. Marketing fascinates me. We drive down the street and pass a house for sale, Toni asks me what I think of the house and all I looked at was the for sale sign.

We go into the supermarket and Toni looks at how fresh the vegetables are and all I see is the way they have the lighting arranged to focus attention on the produce. So is it any wonder that even on yesterday’s whale watching cruise I looked at some interesting marketing ploys.

But perhaps my passion for things marketing might be rubbing off on Toni because when we got home and compared notes we found that we had both been watching the same thing.

Whale watching is big business here in Hervey Bay. In whale watching season – between July and November over 100,000 people come to town and most of them go out to see the whales.

The tours are promoted with glossy photos of whales leaping out of the water, waving their tails high in the air and coming up close to the whale boats to eyeball the passengers. So the passengers go out with a certain expectation, they’re going to see the most amazing mammals on the planet up close and personal, and they’re prepared to pay for the privilege.

The only problem is that no-one told the whales that. They don’t know that they have to perform and so sometimes they don’t. And yesterday morning was one of those times.

In fact they were so quiet that this was about the best photo I managed to take.

Every time the boat approached a pod of whales they would disappear only to surface quite some distance away. And much of the time was spent chasing – at the regulation speed – after them in the hope that they would do something exciting.

We don’t know how other passengers on the boat were feeling but we were beginning to feel a little let down. But the crew of the boat have undoubtedly experienced the problem before and they were ready for it.

Picture 50 eager people crowding the bow of the boat trying to get a glimpse of what we had all come to see. Cameras at the ready we peered towards the horizon like modern day versions of Captain Ahab as he looked for Moby Dick.

Standing behind the crowd was one lone crew person and every time a whale surfaced in the distance she would whoop with glee, point it out and instil excitement where there really was none. She would tell us how wonderful it was to be so close to those creatures and she would encourage us to look for more.

And all by herself she kept a boatload of people excited about nothing until finally the whales did decide to co-operate. At that point you could almost hear her sigh of relief and I almost applauded because she had done an amazing job of keeping the customers satisfied.

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