Ice Cream for Breakfast - Good Marketing Trumps Dynamic Pricing

If you can get past my poor photography, you will see a line of people outside a Baltimore ice cream parlor. At 9:30 AM. In February.

They are lining up before the 10AM opening of The Charmery in the Hampden neighborhood of the city to attend an "Ice Cream for Breakfast" event featuring waffles, people in pajamas, and  breakfast-inspired ice cream flavors.

I enjoy the ice cream at the Charmery, as do my kids. But I appreciate this marketing even more. They have done with window dressing what other companies do usually with discounting.

The Economist recently wrote about dynamic pricing and the effort firms are going through to both extract more income from those more willing or able to pay a higher prices, as well as smooth out demand to less trafficked times with discounts.

The Charmery has not done anything with prices here, but they certainly managed to increase demand at an otherwise slow period. And they did it with an event publicized on Facebook and Twitter, and with the same waffles and ice cream available at other times.

That's a treat.