A poor review usually hurts your business and turns people away from your little pocket of the commercial world. But strangely enough, sometimes it can have the opposite effect…
Weird eh? You’d think copping a bad review on TripAdvisor is a business’s worst nightmare. But then again, how you handle the review can make all the difference in the world…
Take Nook Neighbourhood Coffee in Stockport, England, for example.
Source: Nook Neighbourhood Coffee Facebook page
The Nook cafe was the recipient of a bad review on Tripadvisor earlier this year on 13 February 2016. The customer, user dodd18, complained that they were served “tepid and undercooked” porridge at the cafe not once, but twice, after rejecting the poor excuse for porridge the first time round.
So what did the Nook team do in response?
Well first, like any professional business, they replied to the user on TripAdvisor.
But then they decided to take things a step further and actually make fun of themselves and flaunt their bad porridge with the below sign out the front of their cafe:
The cafe’s comedic spirit would’ve been localised to the Stockport community were it not for the posting of the sign on Instagram and Facebook by English stand-up comedian Justin Moorhouse. Since the initial posting, the sign has received over 1.7k likes on Facebook, and the story has been picked up my media outlets all over the world, such as the Telegraph and Mashable.
But most importantly, the sign has attracted an increase in customers, and according to Nook Neighbourhood Coffee manager, Arlo Calderbanke speaking to Manchester Evening News, things have really taken off since penning the signs:
“The customers have been loving the signs. They’ve been telling us how funny they are.”
Arlo Calderbank, Nook Neighbourhood Coffee.
The signs have been so successful, in fact, that the influx of new customers ordering porridge is starting to be too much to handle, as this sign clearly shows:
Except @justinmoorhouse who clearly will have a lifetime free supply! #nooknc #porridgegate pic.twitter.com/WGFOsGT2pz
— Nook (@thenookNC) September 7, 2016
Now this isn’t the first time the Nook cafe has flaunted its self-deprecating sense of humour.
According to a Unilad article, another sign parked outside the cafe once read: “Come into our cafe that Gary from TripAdvisor said was ‘small and cramped’. We’re called Nook, for a reason Gary. (We don’t really know what you were expecting).”
LOLZ!
Earlier in the year, KarryOn reported on some of the funniest responses management flung back to bad reviews on TripAdvisor. But this is certainly something completely different and just goes to show you that yep, there really is no such thing as bad publicity!
