This is too cool! Got my title from the article.
Ontario cafe offers coffee and a cat
Some people enjoy a newspaper with their weekend coffee. At one Ontario cafe, they get a cat.
Small
Things bills itself as Canada's first "cat cafe," a kind of supervised
pet-rental experience that in recent years has taken Japan by storm. But
unlike overseas, where patrons pay for the privilege of kitty cuddles,
the Sudbury, Ont., store offers feline interaction for free in hopes of
promoting adoption.
The cafe is part of an emerging trend
toward tactile marketing, designed to tap touch-starved consumers whose
most frequent physical connections are with their gadgets.
"Canada,
overall, is a low-touch culture," says Patti Wood, a noted
body-language consultant. "I call smartphones portable three-year-olds
because people are attending to them and holding them at the cost of all
other interactions."
In fact, even before the dawn of the
iPhone — not least today's tablet frenzy — a 2005 Leger Marketing survey
found the average Canadian was already spending five times longer per
day on electronic communication than on touching other people. Given
this "touch deficit," Wood says it was inevitable the pendulum would
start swinging the other way.
"Clients are now asking me to
train them on safe, non-threatening forms of touch that they can teach
their staff — and this is after a 20-year period in which employees were
told not to touch anyone," says Wood who consults for a number of
Fortune 500 companies.
Martin Lindstrom, a world-renowned
sensory marketing expert, predicts that as people's social lives migrate
further online, the need for tactile consumer experiences will rise in
kind.
Museums that have long been "hands-off," for example,
have started re-introducing touch by way of interactive exhibits and
handling sessions — a trend that caught the eye of Concordia University,
where researchers recently launched a multi-year study of the
transition.
And in Japan, cat cafes have proven so popular
with lonesome city-dwellers that the island nation now boasts more than
100 of the faddish establishments.
Joann Peck, a noted
expert on the role of touch in consumer decisions, says stroking animals
has been shown to lower cholesterol, calm people down, reduce blood
pressure and foster a sense of connectedness. But she cautions that the
benefits of touch don't necessarily apply universally in business.
For
example, although a touch on the shoulder has been widely shown to
increase server tips and multiply the chance of a sale, her latest study
finds it can backfire when consumers are uncomfortable with physical
contact. They may purchase quickly to escape the situation, but she says
they won't return.
"Touch is an amazingly powerful
differentiator (in retail) and I think it's going to be used a lot more
in the future," says Peck, an associate professor of marketing at the
Wisconsin School of Business. "But what we're saying is that it's not
for everybody."
A year into the cat cafe business,
co-ordinator Jan Carrie Steven says they have yet to receive any
negative feedback. She describes visitors as consistently getting "that
'awww' response" when treated to juice, coffee, cookies, tarts and the
company of some rather emotionally promiscuous felines.
"We have floozy cats that will warm up to anybody who comes in," says Steven, laughing.
Per
health requirements, food and drinks are made off-site, and patrons
serve themselves. The cats are all fixed and vaccinated, and sell for
$15 to $75 to those interested in making their playtime permanent.
"The
most cats we ever have in the store is 12 because we don't want people
to feel overwhelmed," says Steven. "We don't want it to smell, either."
http://www.calgaryherald....offee/5588860/story.html