Pet Food Scare A Boom for Some

I had no intention of having a theme week dealing with “when lightening strikes” stories about small businesses, but just could not resist one more story in this vein.
The pet food scare has created a boom in business for small pet food companies that manufacture all natural products.
From TwinCites.com:

In the month since the recall, Pet Chef Express [in the Twin Cities] added 150 accounts, increasing its customer base to 1,100 pet owners. The small business’s typical weekly sales of $2,000 to $3,000 almost doubled in the past few weeks.
Kukla can barely keep his warehouse stocked. The 1,300-square-foot room sat more than half-empty Tuesday. To meet the demand, Pet Chef Express broke ground this week on a 2,100-square-foot warehouse in Lakeville.

So let’s recap some of the lessons from the posts this week on what happens to small companies that have a sudden boom in demand:
– Publicity is one of the most powerful forms of bootstrap marketing for a small business. Just ask the folks at SeeMore Putter and Bamboo Comfort.
– But if you don’t meet demand, the benefits of the publicity soon vanish, and you run the risk of alienating even your most loyal customers. This includes those from before your “fifteen minutes of fame.”
– While meeting your new-found demand, you have to balance opportunism with realistic caution. I hope that demand for the pet food in today’s example will continue. But this can never be assumed. Pet Chef Express must work deliberately to build loyalty from new customers who certainly came to them in some cases out of desperation. Their marketing plan must now include tactics to lock in their newly expanded customer base, and build on the sudden windfall that the national news story has brought to businesses like theirs.