Very often, some types of businesses have a bad reputation. We all know how your neighborhood watering hole can get a bad rap from a parking lot fight gone totally bad. But this can also happen to a relatively simple family business. Take a bowling alley, for example, where late-night skaters and loitering teens turn it into a graffiti menu, a parking lot drug-dealing area, and a business associated with troubled youth.
It doesn’t take much for this to happen, soon the leagues tire and families stop coming or let their kids go bowling and then sales drop. To overcome such potential eventualities, it may be necessary to work very hard to create excellent goodwill in the community and promote a strong public relations campaign.
Maybe a bowling marathon to help a local youth raise money for a bone marrow transplant or raise money for a very popular non-profit group in town. Bowling alleys can help generate money for youth organizations by donating 20% of a night’s sales and allowing the group to help spread the word, invite more people and generate large amounts of word of mouth. Public relations for bowling alleys is possible in the community and the opposite of good public relations could bankrupt them. Consider this in 2006.
