Polle de Maagt 
Polle de Maagt
Story.
You give your name at the door, get shown to your table and sit down. On your plate lies a red napkin. Every other table has a white one.
Then small things start to happen. The waiter takes a little more time to explain the menu. Someone checks how the food tastes. A dish arrives that you did not order. It is on the house because this is your first visit.
On the way out, the manager hands you a handwritten card with an invitation to return.
Nobody explains the napkin. You just remember a place that seemed glad you came.
So you come back.
What they did.
Hospitality consultant Jon Taffer uses a red napkin to identify first-time restaurant guests. Every waiter, runner and manager who passes the table immediately knows: this person is new. Give them a little extra.
The napkin is only the signal. The strategy behind it is to market to three visits, not one.
On the first visit, the guest gets a dish on the house. When they leave, the manager writes a personal offer for a second visit on a card. During that second visit, the guest receives another handwritten invitation, this time for something free on the third.
The restaurant does not leave loyalty to chance. It designs the first three visits as one sequence.
Why it works.
The red napkin makes a strategy visible on the floor. Nobody needs to open a customer profile, read a note or remember a briefing. The table tells them what to do.
It also changes the time horizon. Most acquisition campaigns focus on getting someone through the door once. Taffer plans for the second and third visit before the first has ended.
By his numbers, someone who has a flawless first experience has about a 40% chance of returning. After three good visits, the chance of a fourth rises above 70%. He compares a few dollars in food cost with the 40 to 80 dollars he says it can cost to acquire a new guest through traditional advertising.
These are Taffer’s claims, not independent research. The principle does not depend on the exact percentages: make new customers visible and design their path back.
Try it yourself.
Ask how your team knows, in the moment, that someone is new.
A restaurant can mark the reservation or put something on the table. A hotel can flag a first stay in the booking. A software company can show a new-customer marker in its support system. The signal should be obvious to the team and invisible or unobtrusive to the customer.
Then define what a little extra means and plan the second and third interaction, not just the first.
Choose one visible signal your team can use tomorrow to recognise a new customer. Attach one concrete action to it.
Source: Jon Taffer on Gary Vaynerchuk’s show, July 2017. The figures are Taffer’s own claims.
