Marketing to Get AFFLUENT Salon and Spa Clients
by Greg Milner on 09/09/08 at 10:10 pm
Following is the text of an article I’ve just completed for Professional Beauty magazine. But you get to see it first.
How to Attract Affluent Clients For Whom Price is the Last Consideration
F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The very rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”
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| Rich people are different – they have more money…. |
In my boat, I have a terrific gadget which allows me to not only navigate precisely to any chosen spot in the ocean, but also to ‘see’ the fish on the bottom when I get there.
It combines the technology of a Global Positioning System with an echo sounder, which sends a sonar signal from the bottom of the boat and reads that signal when it bounces back off any objects in the water. Like fish.
Little more than a decade ago, such equipment was prohibitively expensive, the preserve of only professional fishermen. Now, no amateur fisherman would go to sea without it.
No more ‘shotgun’ approach, no more blundering about the ocean, blindly dropping an anchor and just leaving it to lady luck.
(And never mind the fact that if I amortized the cost of my boat, the fuel and servicing, insurance and annual maintenance, fishing equipment and bait against the amount of fish actually caught, each pound of fish would come out a more than $500!)
What has this got to do with getting customers for your salon? I’m glad you asked,’cos it has everything to do with not only getting customers, but getting the ones every salon owner wants. The ones prepared to hand over more of their cash.
More of the tasty, colourful rainbow trout, and less of the garden-variety catfish.
First, allow me to be brutal. Most salon owners live lives of quiet desperation, buffeted by economic conditions (both real and imagined), dancing to the tune of obstinate staff, practically begging customers any customers to come through the door, and being grateful when they do, all the while groping blindly in the fog of ignorance, not even knowing enough to know what they don’t know about business, about attracting wealth, about getting off the tools and running the thing as a business, rather than a glorified hobby.
In other words, doing it the way they’ve always done it, hoping against hope that something anything will miraculously ‘happen’ to suddenly and irrevocably change their circumstances for the better.
So what follows is about taking control. Control over what kind of customers you want to attract, how much money you want them to give you. And about you deciding when and how they will do business with you, not the other way around.
For many, that would be a first-time experience. So let’s go about clearing some of that fog.
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Recession? Phooey to that.
For a small business owner, the mainstream media is toxic, to be avoided at all costs. Every single hour of every single day, the radio, TV and newspapers pour forth a litany of gloom and doom.
Consumers aren’t spending. The stock market is tanking. Businesses are shutting their doors. Job losses are mounting. It’s enough to scare even the stoutest of heart. If that’s all you watched, read or listened to.
And yet, I have just this morning finished a phone interview for a new book I’m writing (“17 Successful Salon Owners, and How They Did It”) with a spa owner in Scottsdale, Arizona, who went from being on the verge of closing her doors in November last year, with a lousy $7,000 in sales (and $4,000 rent to pay) to June 2008 sales of no less than $73,000
At Essence Hair in Seaforth, NSW, owner Emma Prestidge tells us she doubled her sales in June.
At Face & Body Therapies in Ulladulla, outside Canberra, owner Karelle Johnson says she too has doubled her business, since ‘taking control’ in March this year. According to Nariman Dehaiby of Nariman’s Paramedical Therapies in Wentworthville, she’s done the same.
I could relate hundreds of such reports, all true, all in the words of the salon owners themselves. But you get the point.
But alas, for most owners of small businesses in the beauty industry, such stunning leaps of growth are little more than a dream.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
A good place to start is to
Decide What Kind of Customers You Want.
I could hear the anguish in the voice of the salon owner on the other end of the phone.
“But I can’t charge higher prices. Customers just won’t pay any more,” she wailed.
Hear yourself uttering those sentiments? Let’s face it, when you’re starting out in business, most people will take any kind of customer they can get.
Got a pulse? Walk this way.
Well, that’s okay when you’re starting out. It’s a rush just to get the till ticking over. Move on a few months or a few years and you should be in a position to be a bit more selective.
And that comes down to deciding
What do you Sell?
Theoretically, we live in an integrated society, where everybody gets an equal deal. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth. All people are not equal.
And that’s because people don’t want to be equal. In truth, we deliberately segregate ourselves to the maximum level our circumstances will allow us so that we feel somehow special, different from the herd.
Notice how when you board a plane, they make you walk through Business to get to Economy? Sure, there’s a door at the back end, and yes, they could let you in through that, but the airlines force you to walk through the front door, so you have to walk past all those folks sitting comfortably, smugly in their big Business Class seats, while you shoehorn yourself in between the fat guy with B.O., and the harassed mum with screaming two year old.
Once trapped, you are physically restrained by cabin staff if you so much as peep through the curtain dividing the two sections.
And the folks in Business? They want you to walk past them on your way to Hell, so they feel special, elevated from the herd privileged. (But even they know their place. For, above Business, the cut-glass people in First Class are at such stratospheric levels of apartness they don’t even want Business Class to look at them.)
The property developers know and use this natural tendency to segregation ruthlessly, and build gated communities so the fortunate few can physically drive in and shut themselves off from the masses.
We aspire to drive BMWs and Mercedes, not because a $100,000 car is inherently better than a $30,000 car, but because we feel better driving the Beemer.
We have a natural tendency to seek exclusivity, to covet it, to luxuriate in it…need and necessity have nothing to do with it.
All animals are equal. It’s just that some animals are more equal than others.
So how do you put this complex desire for special treatment to use in your salon or spa?
Last week, I was coaching a hair salon owner who had only recently joined our Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program. His three salons happen to be outside Boston, in the USA, and I’m in Perth, but it’s remarkable how similar are the challenges faced by beauty business owners in all countries.
He was telling me his average client spend per visit was a pathetically low number, something like $40. He complained that his salons were largely walk-in, no-appointment shops whose regular clientele were price-shoppers.
“Those are your clients because that’s the kind of client you’re pitching to,” I told him.
So I told him he had to get to work and deliberately create an ‘elite’ kind of client by offering a separate, elite kind of service.
A visit to the hair salon can be nothing more than a visit to the hair salon. A cut and blow dry, and half a head of foils. Routine experience, for a routine price.
It can mean being collected at your home by the hair salon’s limo, brought to a special area of the floor reserved for VIP Luxury clients, escorted to your fur-lined Club-class chair complete with gently-vibrating massage pad, where your favourite magazines have been laid out for you, along with your preferred brand of coffee, while your Personal Grooming Assistant inquires as to your choice of movie or TV program on the plasma screen on the wall in front of you.
On the bench before you is a small, discrete sign declaring that this station has been specially-prepared for (your name), and while your Personal Stylist prepares your hair for a glamour make-over, your Personal Grooming Assistant is already massaging your hands prior to your complimentary manicure.
At the end of your visit, back to the limo, carrying your complimentary gift basket of soaps and skin lotions, avoiding (of course) the rather low-brow act of having to pay at the reception desk, that’s all been taken care of by your monthly membership fee, automatically charged to your credit card.
And all the while, your economy class customers are watching this process with envy in their eyes. Which, of course, is exactly what you want them to do.
“But my customers wouldn’t pay for that kind of service!”
Well actually, yes, some of them would and gladly.
The Recession Myth
A rising tide really does lift all boats. And a falling tide has the reverse effect. But the assumption, reinforced by the mainstream media, that ALL people are similarly affected by a perceived tightening of the economy is a false one, and extremely dangerous for your business.
Yes, the stock market has taken a dive, driven not by logic but rather, the herd mentality. But apart from certain sectors such as banking and financial services, profits are actually healthy in the corporate sector.
You see, there is more money sloshing around in the economy, looking for a home, than there has ever been in the history of mankind. Your job, as the owner of the business, is to a) identify who has it, and b) offer something that’s attractive to the owners of that money.
Price doesn’t matter. Disconnect it from your product or service.
I’m a baby boomer. For a large and growing segment of the baby boomer population, the price of any given product or service is in 3rd, 4th or even 5th place on a scale of important factors in buying decisions.
For we baby boomers, what matters more is: a) perceived value, b) exclusivity, c) convenience, and d) solving a problem.
But if the only reference point you offer to your prospective customers is price, then you leave them no method of making a buying decision other than to compare your price with that of your competitors.
And if you are only prepared to offer ALL your customers no matter their socio-economic circumstances (level of wealth), their preferences, their desires for elevation above the masses, the same one-size-fits-all service, for the same price, then you are going to attract a one-size-fits-all kind of customer.
Chanel vs Maybelline
Perception IS reality.
Maybelline sells a bottle of foundation for $18 or thereabouts. Buy essentially the same glop in a Chanel bottle, and it’ll cost you $120.
Even a whole division of CSIRO scientists with a million-dollar research grant would battle to get close to a logical argument supporting such a price differential. And yet, a significant proportion of the make-up buying population will automatically opt for the dearer glop because there is no boasting in the $18 supermarket cheapie.
Now, before you give me a severe case of MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) and tell me that ‘my business is different, my customers wouldn’t respond to that kind of manipulation, they’re too poor/too sophisticated/too ordinary ’…
Nonsense.
A buyer is a buyer is a buyer. And people, no matter what their social standing, are always more responsive if your offering – its content, packaging, method of delivery – is tailored specifically to them.
So you can choose the kind of customer you want, by re-inventing what you sell so that it more closely matches the desires and aspirations of your target market. And of course, once your ‘economy class’ clients begin to actually see what kind of treatment your Business Class customers are getting, some of them are going to want to be elevated to Business as well.
I use my boat and its technology to find the fish I want to catch, and ancient mathematical tables to tell me what time of the day those fish are most likely to be hungry. Then I offer them a bait no self-respecting high-quality fish could possibly resist. And almost inevitably, some of them take it.
First, find out where your ideal customers are, what they read, who they associate with, and what makes them lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling.
Work out a solution to that problem/desire/need. Offer it to them.
There is a two-stage process to this. Stage One is ‘sales thinking’ actually sitting down and researching what your target market wants (not what you think they need) and crafting an offer or series of offers that matches those wants.
Stage Two is crafting the message you’ll use to deliver that offer or offers.
There is art and science in all of this. But that’s an entire seminar in itself.
And forget about the incessant reports in the mainstream media that will have you believe, like Chicken Little, that the sky is about to fall in. Recession-proofing your business is about deliberately, ruthlessly seeking out those affluent customers for whom price was never the over-riding decision-making factor and who are least and last affected by any downturn in the economy.
The better you’re able to match your offer to those clients, the more recession-proof you’ll be.
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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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