It pays to be kind / generous

Just came across two recent examples to illustrate my point.

1) Mooncake shopping at Takashimaya basement

We went down to Taka for our annual trip to shop for mooncakes. In the basement there is probably more than 50 stores selling almost the same thing. There is maybe afew stores that sell unique flavours to attract buyers. This year new flavour we noticed is the orange-lemon snow skin cover and red wine as well.

But we also noticed 1 thing - Singaporean sotres are rather stingy. Yes they do offer free sampling but the size of sample is soooo miserable - slightly more than the size of 2-3 grains of rice. Some even put in a box and cover them up - sure way to piss your potential customers away.

When we were at japan / Taiwan, free samples are uausally of generous portion to make testers feel happy and to the point where feel abit paiseh if you don't buy from them. Well maybe that's their strategy but to me it's better than the tinny winny sampling strategy in local shops.

In the end we bought 4 boxes from 食珍。One reason is because their teochew fried skin with Yam paste tastes very very nice. Another flavour of snow skin red bean/yam combo also blended nicely. We had been repeatedly buying from them since 3-4 years ago.

But I also noticed how their chef handed out free samples to the browsers / customers - by chunks as big as a fish ball - no question asked, non-stop, happily. In the end many are impressed with their generosity and decided to buy from them. (The mooncake business is sooo lucrative high high profits, just dun understand why some store are still so stingy.)

(Incidentally, this year is the 1st time students gave us mookcakes!!! In the past I buy mooncakes for the students/staff to try and enjoy together...this year there is the return of favour finally. Thanks Angela / LYL / SLT /Shumei).


2) MSN Catan settlers game

some of us are heavily hooked on this game. Can't get ppl together to play face to face all the time, so instead we play the PC version as practise to brash up our skill. There are quite afew site for you to downloan the free trial game. Yahoo! / MSN also have it under their game section.
But only MSN version is kind enough not to cut u off in the middle of the game when 60 mins is up. When your computer goes hybernate, it will continue allow you to play on. Quite a kind gesture.

So in the end when I decide to buy a computer version, it is no surprise that my 1st choice of the download site is from MSN.

So you see -- a little bit of kind gesture actually goes a long way towards your potential customers / friends etc. Yes you may lose out a little bit but who knows, u actually will get back much more in return. If you calculate too much on the gain and loss...then you just missed out on the potential big deals.

I do hope you agree with my opnion. :)