The first one I would like to call a There Is No Tomorrow and the other Super Professional. Both were always around us and I mean always - literally. The first one we encountered in every store, souq and on every street corner. It was the merchants who saw us as wallets and stupid ones as that. All they cared about was the money they could make right then and there, with no thought given to the next day.
Yes I'm sure it's not usual that European tourists stay in Marrakesh for a week, but they didn't learn either. We negotiated on the price one day and they did not remembered us the next, so everything had to start from the beginning. Quite often we were knowingly willing to over-pay for their products and we knew the prices, since we had been around for few days, and that's really all you need. But they refused reasonable offers hoping to make another few % of the purchase price and we ended up walking away.
The whole style of pushing the product on us was just not very efficient. Instead trying to figure out what the buyer is interested in, they kept pushing and pushing. Almost as if what you buy is not really important as long as you buy it from them. Not smart and not efficient. Perhaps they make a quick buck every once in a while, but they would do that anyway, just because of the share size of the tourist hordes in Marrakesh.
Then there's the complete package of customer service from what I would like to call the Super Professionals. It doesn't matter that they were all 8-11 year olds. Anybody who's been to a Medina in any of the cities in Morocco knows exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't then you probably have hard time understanding the whole concept. I'll try to explain.
The Marrakesh Medina is a maze of unearthly propositions. It took us three days before we could find our way to the Riad we stayed at after having dinner on the big square. Well, where there is demand there is a market - enter the Super Professionals of the Medina.
It all started the first night and I'm sorry I didn't witness this personally. We reached the Riad only to realize, that we had forgotten a folder with our plain tickets and some other needful travel documentation in our rental car, that we had parked just around the corner. Maybe 30-50 meters away. So two of my friends volunteered to recover the folder from our vehicle.
Alright., about 45 minutes later they returned laughing out loud. It turned out, that as soon as they walked out, they had encountered the boys hanging on the street. The boys did not bother them,didn't say a thing. They watched on as my friends made their first wrong turn into a dead end. Didn't say a thing when they made their second wrong turn into a different dead end, all this while pretending that they knew exactly what they were doing. I'm sure that must of looked believable- they were just out for a evening stroll.
Only after it became painfully obvious that they had no clue which way to go, did the boys intervene with a simple question - "Are looking for your car?". There was no blackmailing or extortion involved, nobody even mentioned money. It was just all understood. Service and Payment, but Service first. So my friends payed, got the folder and while the kids were distributing the rewards tried to sneak away.
Guess what, couple of wrong turns and they were just as lost as ten minutes ago. So they used the boys again. Now, so you wouldn't get a wrong idea, it had nothing to do with my friends path finding abilities. I confess, maybe I was just a little bit of a non-believer, but all it took was three minutes the next morning. One, two, three turns and I had no idea where I was and that was in the daylight.
So we used the boys several times and what I remember the most is the fact that after every encounter we were left feeling good about the service. They always waited before making serious contact, oh sure they were following us from the get go, but they were patient not pushy.They waited for us to show interest, either in a way of making eye contact or just responding to their jokes.
They waited for the PULL.
I think today's marketers could learn from this. Way too often are they pushing products on us, instead of making us desire the product or a service. There is no stronger logic behind the purchase, than the buyer telling him-self that the whole transaction was his idea.
The combination of push and pull is a very powerful thing.
Here they are - The Super Professionals
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