Worldwide Salon Marketing

What Has Vegemite Got to Do With Marketing Your Salon?

by Greg Milner on 01/10/09 at 9:05 am

I bet you know at least one person who’ll tell you snobbishly “Oh, I don’t watch television.”

And with that nose-in-the-air elitism comes the clear implication that they’re far too intelligent/busy/high-minded to stoop so low, ‘because most of it is trash’.

Well I DO watch a lot of TV. And I read a lot of books, magazines, newsletters, as well as taking in the occasional movie. Because yes, there might well be a lot of crap on TV, but for every book worth reading there are a hundred that’d be better employed as toilet paper, too.

I watch a lot of TV because I’m curious. And if you’re serious about marketing your salon or spa, you should be too.

If you do, you might just pick up something – an idea, a concept, a strategy – you could use to better promote your business.

But I’ll assume you watch like most everybody else watches TV, with 90% of the brain turned down, in inverse proportion to the volume from the screen.

Here’s what I picked up recently, that you should have:

There are clouds with silver linings

Creative Theft Example 1:

A name so dumb that Kraft was forced to back off and think again - and in the process, generated priceless publicity by mistake.

There isn’t an Australian alive who hasn’t heard of Vegemite. (For non-Australians, it’s a black, yeasty kind of savoury spread you slap on toast in the morning)

Vegemite is an iconic Aussie brand. Pick a hundred suburban homes, 99 of ‘em will have a jar of the stuff in the pantry.

In the past week, the company that owns Vegemite has won itself free nationwide publicity it couldn’t buy, thanks to a promotion that went pear-shaped.
(For those outside Australia, the company held a public competition to name a new version of the gooey black spread – and out of 40,000 entries, picked a name so dumb – iSnack 2.0 – it had to quickly dump the winner and announce a re-think, thus generating even more free publicity.)

Here’s what’s instructive: What can you do to get customers involved in naming your products/services?

Creative Theft Example 2: Any real student of marketing/TV watcher – like I am – would have noticed not one but several compelling recent examples of niche marketing that are easily stolen, tinkered with, and applied to any salon or spa business.

Shannons - just an insurance company, but unlike the big, dumb competitors, specialized in a niche of rare car owners

Insurance companies are guiltier than most of boring, ‘me-too’ style marketing. Blindly, they’re all trying to be all things to all people, all promising the same things, all delivering the same dreary stuff that nobody wants.

But two of ‘em are smarter than most.

Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency and Shannons are just insurance companies, but their marketing’s a lot smarter than their big, dumb competitors.

I doubt that if you compared their rates and policies with all the others, you’d be able to see daylight between them. But APIA owns the insurance market for the oldies. And Shannons didn’t try to be all things to all people, they specialized in a niche that’s an inch wide but a mile deep – collectors of specialized/rare cars.

Creative Theft Example 3:

Similarly, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has for years made a fortune from its Panadol® brand of paracetamol painkiller.

The TV snobs wouldn’t have noticed that GlaxoSmithKline have been recently running ads for something their ad agency dreamed up called

Back and Neck Pain Panadol

It's just garden-variety Panadol, dressed up to appeal to a niche market.

Heck, it’s just the same stuff. But they re-branded the generic product to appeal to a small, niche market of neck and back-pain sufferers. Smart.

Here’s the homework: Take your own list of generic treatments/services, lay ‘em down on the kitchen table. Pick one at a time, and start re-branding, eg

The Screen Star Facial for Working Mothers

The Truck Driver’s Tired Muscle Massage

Retiree Remedial Skin Rejuvenation

Beautiful Hair for Boomer Babes

There. I’ve already done half the work for you. Now, go turn the TV on, and do your own research. Only this time, watch the commercials, and write notes during the program.

In the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® there are dozens of examples of this kind of ‘sales thinking’ you can ‘steal’ for your own salon or spa. If you do NOT yet have the Toolkit, if you are not YET a member of the Inner Circle Marketing & Mentoring program designed ONLY for salons & spas, then you are fighting your marketing battle under-gunned, blind, re-inventing the wheel everyday. Go here to find out more about the system, and apply for a 30 Day Trial of the whole damn thing.

(PLUS you’ll get access to a whole pile of new, FREE salon & spa marketing videos you can watch online right now.)

A post by Greg Milner The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach. He (sometimes) accepts private consulting clients.

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