Empty Restaurants and Dying Malls

Recently, some friends and I decided to have dinner together at an Italian restaurant in our town. This particular restaurant was a local favorite; however, I had never eaten there before, and my friends had not eaten there since it moved to its current location one year previous. So all of us were quite excited about our dinner plans.

Until we got to the restaurant.

We walked into the restaurant shortly after 6:00 on a Thursday evening; the place was empty. As is, zero customers. None. Zilch. The lights were on, the tables were set, the servers and chefs were there and ready to go. But my two friends and I were the only non-employees in the place.

That seemed rather odd, since it was already an hour into dinnertime, on a not-quite-weekend night. And at a well-known local restaurant. There was no explanation for it - the room had not been reserved for a large party. It was simply a regular evening. With no customers.

After consulting for a moment or two, my friends and I bade a polite goodbye to the hostess and decided to patronize another restaurant for the evening.

Why? Why did we decide to leave?

Robert Cialdini would explain it as a principle that he calls "social proof."

Social proof is the idea that we as human beings - and especially as consumers - infer truths about a situation based upon how others act in that situation.

You attend a get-together at the home of some new acquaintances, and notice that all of the other guests have removed their shoes as they entered the front door; you presume that removing shoes is the policy in this house, and so you remove yours, too.

You walk down the street and notice numbers of people gathering at one particular location and staring up into the sky. You assume there must be something unusual to see in the sky, so you stop and look up, too.

Social proof tends to be especially strong in unfamiliar situations in which the proper behavior is unknown. When we are not sure how to act, we take our cues from the actions of people around us.

In the case of my friends and me at the restaurant, we took our cues from the absence of people around us. We thought it unusual to find a restaurant empty at 6pm on a Thursday; and while we didn't know of anything specifically wrong with the restaurant, we presumed that there must be some reason for customers to be staying away. For lack of better answers, we felt it safer to stay away as well.

Social proof can be a powerful force, for good or ill. If you are a new business, and you give free t-shirts and hats to your all of your customers for the first six months, others who begin to see your logo everywhere will likely infer that you must be a good brand (everyone is going there, after all), and be prompted to investigate and learn more about your company. If you have an excellent product or service and all of your customers continually rave about your brand to their friends, those friends will likely try your product the next time they have a need which your product might solve.

Conversely, if you are a restaurant with zero customers in the middle of a given night, then those potential customers who arrive may likely decide to leave. If you are a shopping mall with 20% of your storefronts empty, then mall shoppers (and potential tenants) may likely infer that something about the mall prevents it from attracting enough customers to make the retailers profitable, and may likely stay away themselves.

How can your organization noticeably provide excellent experiences to all of your customers, such that others will be positively affected by their social proof?