As I declared in my previous posts – I am a sucker for good marketing. Whenever I go I constantly keep my eyes open for extraordinary business and Gene & Jude’s hot dog stand in River Grove IL is one of them.

As the name suggests it is stand alone hot dog shack that makes great and cheap hot dogs and tamales.

What’s more remarkable is that it is not just surviving but thriving next to McDonalds, which is inside a gas station.

No matter what time of the day it is there is a long line of people to get their hands on the greasy and delicious food while you can hardly see anyone in McDonalds.

Price wise Jene & Jude’s is cheap – a hot dog and a generous portion of fresh-cut fries is less than $3 but I think that’s not the only reason for that, because no one can get devoted fans with cheap  prices only.

The place has a cult following and if you go to eat you will see media mentions from the likes of Wall Street Journal, yes that Journal.

As you can see the place is nothing special, rather old.

Yes it is clean but you can say that the owners are cheap and don’t want to put money into renovating it, maybe because it will loose its appeal. Who knows.What I know is that they don’t have ketchup (long time ago one of the owners decided that it is too expensive) and you have to go to the near McDonald’s and steel some.

Anyway, that wasn’t my point. My point was that it is possible to survive and thrive next to McDonalds. Both places are located next to a busy road and are easily seen, so there is a constant flow of potential customers.

All marketing books say that one has to have USP (unique selling proposition to survive) and the best example is domino’s with their 30 minutes or less campaign.

However, I doubt that Jene & Jude have ever sat down to think about that. What I think has happened is that their customers created one for them.

People always try to put new things into categories to understand them and I think the category for the hot-dog place is cheap, fast and good food. The fresh cut fries are also one of the things that have people talking. It is like currency – you give it to your customers and they give it to other people.

I think that this example of David vs Goliath is inspiring. If you think one dimensional – it might inspire you to open a hot dog stand yourself by coping what Jene & Jude’s are dong right (don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of borrowing ideas that work and applying them for achieving my own purposes).

If you think multidimensional you will be inspired to think of different ways to stand out and differentiate your business or the business of your clients.

Often times we see on the news about small businesses closing their doors upon WalMart opening a store in the neighborhood. Stupid! Instead of thinking about the opportunities that WalMart offers (foot traffic) and how to capitalize on that (contrary to the popular opinion I don’t think that only broke people shop there) they just surrender.

If you know about such a remarkable business and would like to share it with me – please, leave a comment. I will be happy to blog about it.