CEO ignores PR advice and pleads to customers for help
Nick Sarillo of Nick’s Pizza & Pub sent a heartfelt email asking for customers to pull his business out of a financial crisis. His PR advisors said it would backfire, but it worked wonders.
But when Nick Sarillo, CEO of Nick’s Pizza & Pub, sent an email pleading for customers to help keep the doors open at his two Chicagoland restaurants, customers didn’t just respond. They rallied.
“We doubled our sales in each restaurant for the first week and stayed at a 75 percent increase for a couple of weeks,” Sarillo told Crain’s Chicago Business.
So what gives? If begging, or at least pleading, isn’t a worthwhile PR tactic—Sarillo’s publicity staff and his bank tried to talk him out of sending the email—why did this work? Gerald Baron, a blogger and principal at Agincourt Strategies, says it comes down to one word: authenticity.
“It was real,” he says. “It was not a ‘strategy’ as we tend to understand it.”
A genuine plea
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