Attracting customers is not only about gathering people yourself. Quietly slip your own touchpoint into “a queue someone else has already gathered”—and that alone turns tedious waiting time into the finest customer moment. In July 2026, Del Monte proved it in the queues at Wimbledon.
In July 2026, Del Monte set up a pop-up barbershop run by a popular hairstylist inside “The Queue,” the famously long line that is a Wimbledon institution. It gave waiting fans free star-player haircuts (Borg’s long hair, a tennis-ball-shaped buzz cut, and more) and handed out fruit alongside. The aim: to etch the name of its “Fresh Cut” fruit line into memory as an experience. The plan was backed by the brand’s own survey, in which 78% said “I’d happily queue for 12 hours” and 40% said “I’d get a free cut while waiting.”
Why it worked
A queue is a lump of boredom and idle hands. Slip a “useful free service” into the middle of it, and the brand gets remembered along with the gratitude. On top of that, translating the product name “Fresh Cut” into the experience through the pun of a “free hair cut (Fresh Cut)” gave the whole idea a single clean throughline. The star-player cuts were designed to make people want to take photos, which itself became an excuse to post on social media. Del Monte turned the waiting time of a crowd someone else had gathered entirely into its own touchpoint.
How a small business can use this
Even if you are not the host, places where people are “waiting” are everywhere. A local event venue, the line outside a popular shop, the transfer flow at a station, the waiting room before a meeting—bring in a small free service that plays on your name or a keyword. A homebuilder, for example, could offer an “on-the-spot floor-plan diagnosis” in the waiting line at a housing exhibition; a restaurant could offer waiting customers “a one-bite sample.” The more tedious the time, the more vividly a small kindness sticks. Attracting customers is not only about building a crowd from zero; it can also mean stepping into the “gaps” of a crowd that already exists.
“Which ‘waiting time’ could we step into?”—ASTER keeps a stock of reusable structures drawn from hundreds of cases, and translates them into your products and hiring challenges to turn them into concrete plans. Feel free to get in touch.
