Worldwide Salon Marketing

Is Your Salon a General Motors, or a BMW?

by Greg Milner on 02/06/09 at 11:34 pm

Quite possibly the worst car in the world...and symptomatic of why America's car industry deserves to fall on its sword...

Late last year, Michelle and I needed to get to LA airport from down near San Diego. It’s about a three hour drive up Freeway 5 in peak hour traffic on a Friday afternoon, and for most of the journey you’re either doing 80 miles an hour or sitting in a car park. There doesn’t seem to be much sanity in between.

But that wasn’t the worst part of that drive. The worst part was our tansport, a truly appalling Chrysler convertible Sebring. When the rental company handed over this awful example of motoring negligence, I had not at that stage read Jeremy Clarkson’s now-famous article describing this car as ‘almost certainly the worst car in the entire world.’

Grossly underpowered, ridiculously noisy (even with the roof up), subject to violent changes of direction without you even moving the wheel, not to mention ugly – mind you, American cars have almost always been designed by blind, artistically-challenged third-graders armed only with crayons and mud – this surely was the most sloppily-executed piece of automotive ‘engineering’ foisted on the motoring public in decades. But it demonstrated very clearly why Chrysler is on the verge of collapse, and General Motors has already imploded. Their products are poorly-executed, ill-timed, badly-designed, and delivered with an arrogance totally out of tune with what the customers actually want.

Simply, you can only serve up crappy products and services for so long before the customers get wise, and go somewhere else. (And of course, the buyers have been deserting the US car makers in droves. After our drive in that terrible Chrysler Sebring, I can only say it serves them right.)

No matter how much clever advertising, no matter how many aircraft carrier-loads of money you spend on promotion, cut-price deals, value-add offers, trick packaging and hot-’n-cold running chrome extensions, if your product or service is crap, ordinary, uninspiring or just downright negligent, you’ll fail. And deservedly so.

I shouldn’t have to spell this out, but you know me…I will anyway.

In the beauty business, I often tell seminar audiences that it is ‘Better to be Different than it is to be Better’. And that is absolutely true. But that doesn’t mean your product/service doesn’t have to be excellent. It does.

“Clean toilets IS marketing,” Ray Kroc told his staff at McDonalds.

But excellent marketing is not an antidote for crap service, dirty floors, poor salesmanship, lousy attention to detail. As Ray Kroc used to tell his staff at McDonalds, ‘clean toilets IS marketing’. Yet so often, we hear from salon owners who whine that ‘I tried your kind of marketing, I sent out your flyers, I wrote to my clients using your letters…and my re-booking rate is still lousy!’

Get this folks. If it was ‘our’ marketing that was at fault, it wouldn’t work for anyone. Yet all you need do is read the testimonials, watch the videos, listen to the audio interviews right here on this website, from Inner Circle member salons all over the world, to know that it cannot possibly be the system that’s at fault. If it was the system, it wouldn’t work for anyone. But they’re ALL using the same system. Same ads, letters, flyers, sales scripts, lead generation strategies.

Claiming it’s the marketing system that’s at fault is akin to claiming the earth really is flat, or that there really is an intelligent, considered, well thought-out plan inside Britney Spears’ head.

Here’s the lesson: if your salon is dirty, if your customer service is ad-hoc, random, spotty and lacks systemisation, if your staff are poorly-trained, if the experience you give your customers is anything less than Olympic standard…then NO amount of good marketing is going to save you.

Like General Motors, you won’t deserve to survive.

RESOURCE:
Delivering a Rolls Royce service depends on not just a system to get customers in the door, but a system to hire, train motivate and maintain the right staff. You simply cannot do that properly unless you have the right tools. There is, as far as we know, only ONE comprehensive, salon-specific system designed to give you the tools to do that.

It was developed by our own David Osborne, and you can get it here. I thoroughly recommend it, as do many of our Members who’ve purchased it.

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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