Part of our back yard before the blitz....

A few weeks before Christmas, Michelle and I were putting the finishing touches* to a major  renovation of our backyard. I was looking for an electrician to install some fancy lighting, wire up the fountain and run cabling up to the house so we could switch everything on and off from the kitchen.

The Yellow Pages was bursting at the seams with electricians advertising their wares. I presumed they could all do a competent job. After all, electrical contractors are  heavily regulated and highly-qualified, so their customers don’t fry or burn to death.

After - the Garden Lighting Guy perfectly matched what I was looking for. That's precisely why he got the job...

It was pretty much a ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ exercise.

Then I saw an ad that leapt out at me. Here was a guy offering not merely “All Kinds of Electrical Work – No job too big or small”

as you would expect, but one who’d figured out – granted, perhaps unconsciously – the immense value of not trying to be all things to all people.

His ad read

“Light up Your Garden with the Garden Lighting Guy!”

What he had implemented was one of the Key Success Strategies:

Shrinking your target market so that whatever resources you’re prepared to throw at it has the maximum possible impact.

Key word here: shrinking.

Most owners of businesses, when asked what their target market is, reply with something along the lines of “Oh, the White Pages.” And in being all things to all people, they sooner rather than later become nothing to nobody.

Many of our own Members of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program have figured this out to great advantage.

Inner Circle member Amy Mitchell with baby Macy - a sudden rush of new clients thanks to 'niche' marketing

Example: a year or more ago, Amy Mitchell joined the program and got her marketing Toolkit, hoping it would be ‘the’ answer to boosting her struggling massage business.

But in the course of a brief conversation with me shortly after she enrolled in the program, Amy let slip that much of her existing business came from pregnant women.

I made a suggestion. Amy acted on it. She found a target market that’s

An Inch Wide but a Mile Deep.

Today, Amy has a super-successful new business that focuses on a very narrow, easily-defined niche market, called

Yummy Mummy – Australia’s Only Pregnancy Day Spa.

Amy focused on a narrow niche market - expectant mothers.

Like the Garden Lighting Guy, she recognized that there are Riches in Niches – that the mistake most salon and spa businesses make is jumping up and down in an ocean and expecting the ripples to spread far and wide.

Smart business owners have figured it out; what you want to do is jump up and down in a puddle, where you’ll have massive impact with relatively few resources.

There is case study after case study to prove this incredibly important strategy.

Here’s one way of figuring out if there’s a niche you can easily exploit – and the more information you already have about your clients, or can obtain through surveys, the easier this will be:

1)      Go through your list of current customers and look for ‘patterns’ of behavior, demographics etc. See if you can ‘slice and dice’ your customer list into segments.

2)     Is there any kind of common theme among a large group of clients? For example, do many of them work in a particular company, or a particular industry…do they live in a certain area…do they have children?
Is there a group of customers that have a common interest of any kind?

3)     Once you’ve identified a ‘trend’, you can then start to think about creating a specially-branded service that appeals to that group and that group only.
For example, let’s say you’ve identified that a large group of your customers are ‘working mothers of school-age children’.

So you could re-invent an existing service or package so that it directly appeals to that niche market. For example,

“Attention Working Mothers! Tired of that ‘what about me?’ feeling?

At last! How to Look and Feel Drop-Dead Sexy in 1 Hour with our Cinderella-to-Princess Hair & Make-up Glamour Make-over – ONLY for Working Mothers, and ONLY available 4.30pm to 6pm Monday to Wednesday!”

(And if you’re reading this and thinking “Oh, I’m already far more sophisticated than that…” – no doubt there are many who have already implemented some kind of niche marketing, or perhaps many types. But this is just one very simple example, just to show the structure or the idea.)

I could go on here and write an entire ad or flyer campaign based on this simple premise, but you should by now be getting the picture.

This process is called ‘Creating a Business within the Business’, but you could just as easily create an entirely new business – as Amy Mitchell did – that focuses on this or any other single niche market.

There’s another BIG advantage to creating and investing in a small, narrowly-defined niche market. (I’m a particularly lazy guy, so this is what attracted me to the salon & spa niche when I started Worldwide Salon Marketing 7 years agoJ)

It’s one heck of a lot easier to create and manage marketing campaigns, advertising material etc based on a narrow niche than it is to create and manage marketing material that tries to speak to ALL kinds of people, all at once.

So, now that you have some homework, get to work!

* Disclosure in the Interests of Honesty: when I say that ‘Michelle and I were putting the finishes touches…’ don’t take that too literally. I long ago gave up pretending that I’m any kind of tradesman. What I actually did was watch the chaps who lift heavy things, and continuously hand over large lumps of cash.

Yet the information about what makes great advertising – for the salon business, for any business – has been public knowledge for more than a hundred years.

It was six o’clock on a May evening in 1905 when John E. Kennedy sent a note up to A. L. Thomas, the senior partner of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. Thomas was just getting ready to leave the office when the messenger brought him the note. It read as follows:

“You do not know what advertising is. No one in the advertising business knows what advertising is. No advertiser knows for certain what advertising is. If you want to know, tell this messenger that I should come up. I’m waiting in the lobby downstairs.”

It was signed: “John E. Kennedy.” Thomas read the note with an amused smile then handed it to Albert D. Lasker, the junior partner in the firm and said to him, “Well, you have been asking this question for years and nobody has yet satisfied you. Maybe here is the answer…You see the man.”

Albert Lasker saw Kennedy that night. It wasn’t until 3 o’clock in the morning before they left the building. And when Lasker left that night, he had the answer to what advertising was. What Kennedy told him that night was simple. Advertising is

SALESMANSHIP-IN-PRINT.

Salon advertising doesn't get much worse than this. It smacks of pure laziness, ignorance and desperation. With advertising as pathetic as this, the salon deserves to fail. And it's so easy for a competitor to counter with "We fix $5 haircuts."

And the core skill of ‘salesmanship in print’ is in creating a compelling offer – then building a story around that offer which virtually forces the reader to keep reading.

Most business owners are too lazy to bother with this. About the best that most can bother with is a plain and simple discount. For example,

“Half price waxing!”

That’s not an offer. All it does is train your clients to expect a discount. It devalues what you sell. And it takes money right out of your wallet.

But it doesn’t take much effort to do so much better. Take a look around at what you already do in your salon or spa – things you currently provide your clients for free, in the normal course of business.

Now, what if you put a notional value on each and every one of these things?

A stylist will typically give a client a brief scalp massage during the shampoo. A beauty therapist might, in the normal course of doing a facial, relax the client with a soothing hand massage, some eyebrow grooming, perhaps a mini pedicure.

All of these things have a value. Yet, if they’re merely provided as a freebie, without declaring that value, then in the client’s mind they are worth…nothing.

It’s only when you clearly ascribe a defined value of each and every ‘extra’ service that you provide, that you create in the mind of the client what we call in marketing ‘perceived value’.

Inner Circle member salons will know all about this. The hundreds of ad, flyer and sales letter templates in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, and in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ of this website, all contain some form of what we call

value adding.

Once you ‘get’ this, it suddenly becomes easy to create massive added value – and it allows you to actually increase prices under the valued-added ‘shelter’.

Of course, there’s much more to creating a successful ad or flyer than just the offer. I’ll cover some of those issues in future articles on Salon Marketing 101.

WSM graphic artist Vanessa Goh and copywriter Chanelle Van Der Heijden with the all-new Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit - the first major update since the product was launched in 2004

Try the Toolkit and the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program RISK FREE for 90 days – and see for yourself how you can literally DOUBLE your sales in the next 12 months. Click here to find out more.

]]> http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/salon-marketing-101-the-basics-of-building-a-compelling-offer/feed 1 http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/how-a-fool-idea-helped-this-us-salon-owner-double-her-sales-in-two-weeks?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-a-fool-idea-helped-this-us-salon-owner-double-her-sales-in-two-weeks http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/how-a-fool-idea-helped-this-us-salon-owner-double-her-sales-in-two-weeks#comments Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:11:50 +0000 Greg Milner http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/?p=3932

IC member Molly Verbrugge of Indulgences in Little Rock, AK - staggered at how a single, simple and cheap little promotion helped DOUBLE their June sales.

“…We are stoked and plan to run this sale the entire month of June in 2011!”

Inner Circle member (3 years) Molly Verbrugge of Indulgences in Little Rock, Arkansas, is justifiably glowing after a Worldwide Salon Marketing promotion she used for just two weeks in June this year boosted sales to $81,235 – a staggering DOUBLE her takings of $41,956 for the same two week period in 2009.

Now if that doesn’t get your attention, you’d have to be comatose from the neck up.

It came about after a coaching call with Tim & Kanna Reilly in our Arizona office, after they’d modified and implemented a WSM marketing campaign in their own clinic in Scottsdale.

“After speaking with Tim and giving my review of our discussion to Leslie (my spa manager), she and I decided we might benefit from running the promotion ourselves! Well, we started running the sale on June 17th.

We sent email blasts along with approximately 5 newspaper ads totalling a cost of around $750. We began the sale on June 17th and it ran until July 3, 2010. Last year during the time-frame of June 17th thru July 3rd, we had total revenues of $41,956, this year our total revenues were$81, 235!!!

We are stoked and plan to run this sale the entire month of June in 2011.

Thank You Tim and Kanna and Worldwide Salon Marketing for your invaluable marketing ideas!

Husband-and-wife team Tim & Kanna Reilly's Body Solutions Laser & Skin in Scottsdale, Arizona, grew 63% in 2009 - after a massive 500% increase in 2008 - thanks to the marketing and 'sales thinking' tools in the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program...

Successful marketing is NOT about re-inventing the wheel, unless you’re particularly a) rich, and b) prefer to risk your money on experimentation. Tim and Kanna had proven this particular strategy works, having rolled it out with massive results every year for three years.

Here’s how Kanna describes the promotion:

“We started it in 2008 when we came to our One Year Anniversary, and now do what we call the “Penny Sale” every year.  It happens to be June.  We ran the Penny sale for the entire month.

We printed the copy on paper with US pennies around the borders.  We also e-mailed out to our database of customers 4 times that month.  No other advertising at all, just e-mail and in store flyers! You can also mail out to your client database in an envelope with pennies printed on it.  This year our total gross sales for June was up 62% over our average monthly sales.

We originally did this for a few reasons:

1.  To let clients know that we are celebrating our anniversary and to let them know that we appreciate their patronage and loyalty and to reward them we offer the penny sale.

2.  July and August are brutal in Arizona as our temperatures reach 110 degrees F and over.  Many people leave town for weeks on end to avoid the heat.  So in order to boost sales and keep people coming in we offer the Penny Sale.  Originally, this helped us pay the rent for the two months in advance while our books were slower in the beginning for those hotter months.  You can also use this strategy to pre-pay for equipment investments or Salon renovations etc.

What we found:

1.  We found that many of our higher margin, more costly services was what people bought the most of (which was fine with me).

2.  We also found that clients purchased services they didn’t regularly come in for or had never tried before.

3.  We received and still receive more referrals in the month of June than any other month of the year.

There are many ways to use this program. You can run it for only a few days, or a few weeks, or for the entire month as we do.

Remember to remind your client base about the Penny Sale and when it will end.  We had a majority of our sales come in the final week as people rushed in or called their orders in by phone.  And when we ran our final e-mail  that in 24 hours the sale would be over we could hardly keep up with the phone volume.

FOR INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS:

Want the exact same flyer Kanna, Tim and Molly used so effectively? Members can log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ here and download the promotion in Word format so you can start marketing yourself – and watch your own sales skyrocket!

FOR NON MEMBERS: If you think your salon deserves the same kind of results Molly is getting, go to www.salonhowto.com now for more information, and complete a simple online form to apply for a 90-day Risk Free Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit.

Here’s where Molly’s salon is located: (Click here to see where ALL our Members are located around the world)

View Larger Map

WSM Canada director Catherine Hanson (middle) with some of the team from City Looks Salon & Spa in Winnipeg, Canada

The owners of City Looks Salon & Day Spa in Winnipeg, Canada have lots to smile about these days.

$30,000 in 2 days. That was what these happy ladies sold in Mini Memberships in 2 days last week! Their clients are happy, their staff are happy, so of course, that makes them happy. Look, they’re all smiling!

How do you turn regular, loyal clients into “Raving Fans”?

Client loyalty rewards come in all different packages but this is definitely a win win for everyone.

All too often we are so focused on getting new “bums in the chair” that we forget to appreciate those loyal, steady, regular clients who come month after month year after year and are the backbone of our business, so what better way to say thank you!

City Looks joined the Inner Circle Premium program and received their copy of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® in July 2010.

With instant access to the Members Only ‘sealed section’, they downloaded a bunch of marketing templates, including the posters so many Inner Circle members have used to rake in instant cash with ‘mini-memberships’.

Selling memberships – just like gyms, airline lounges and a dozen other business types – is a great way to get cash ‘up-front’ from your clients. There are lots of ways to do this, but typically, our Inner Circle members pre-sell say, $350 worth of services and offer it for $200 if paid in advance. Or $500 worth of services for $300 up front. You get the picture.

City Looks only promoted the mini memberships in house…. there were posters everywhere, and by e-mail, to their regular clients as a thank you for their loyalty to City Looks. The posters went up in the salon 3 weeks before the memberships went on sale and it definitely had the whole place buzzing!  Creating excitement is crucial to executing a successful marketing campaign! If you’re not excited why would anyone else be!

Remember, anytime you do this kind of campaign, don’t run out and spend all the money at once…. treat it just like gift certificates, put 52% of the money aside and inject it into cash flow as the memberships are spent.

How to get the kind of response City Looks is getting from their marketing:

Canadian salons who want the same kind of instant success as City Looks should apply for one of only 30 places available in the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program each month. Click here to find out more, fill in the online form, and we’ll call you from our Vancouver office within 24 hours.

I actually feel a bit sorry for the banks. The fact that they’re in business to make a profit – just like every other business – appears lost on media and government, who relish in taking a shot at this soft target every time interest rates hi the news. Pity nobody in the banking industry has the balls to stand up and say ‘Hey, wait a minute, we’re a business not a charity, it’s our job to make money…!’

(Isn’t it funny how most bank customers moan bitterly every time their mortgage rate goes up, complain about the ‘greed’ of big business when the banks publish their billion-dollar profits – but don’t twig that their own retirement savings are heavily invested in bank shares.)

But that other public whipping boy – the airlines – deserve every dose of doggy doo thrown at them. Dumber than a bagful of hammers, for years they’ve competed with each other on little more than price, a strategy that – in any business – can only lead to death.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, US airlines collectively lost about $5billion in 2009. Now, they’re fighting back with an almost-universally despised trick of ‘un-bundling’ air fares so that passengers have to pay extra for things that have traditionally been included in the price of a ticket.

More and more airlines are charging an average of $25 to check in a bag. Several will slug you an extra $8 for a blanket. It’s now common for cut-price airlines to charge extra for exit-row seats which provide a bit more room for tall passengers.

Airlines are beginning to charge extra for what was previously part of the deal - like $8 for a blanket. Oh well, at least you get to keep the blanket....

After years of cutting their own throats by discounting, these big dumb companies have suddenly realized they need to make money. But the way they’re doing it smacks of desperation, and worse, complete ignorance about the concept of adding value, packaging, differentiation and giving themselves an ‘unfair advantage’ over the competition without discounting.

Salon owners who are Members of the Inner Circle Marketing & Mentoring Program could give the airlines a much-needed lesson in such market-making processes.

In Australia, I fly Qantas exclusively. Of all the competing airlines, Qantas is regularly the most expensive carrier. That’s why I fly with them. The food is free, and good quality – even in Economy Class – unlike the inedible trash on US domestic airlines. There are no extra charges for blankets, checked baggage, headsets, movies or anything else. On many flights, even beer and wine is free in Economy. It’s all included in the price.

Where even a profitable airline like Qantas falls down is in its failure to capitalize on this competitive advantage. They still attempt to compete on price alone, too timid to shout from the rooftops

“Hey, we’re the most expensive – but there are no hidden charges, sneaky extras or nasty surprises when you get to the airport. When you buy a Qantas ticket, everything is included in the price!”

Here’s what’s instructive for your salon business:

Take a lesson from bumbling mistakes of the airlines. Instead of constantly trying to compete with rivals on price (discounting), figure out a way to package your services. Don’t allow your customers to ‘cherry pick’ your treatment menu on price alone. By learning to package – as our Inner Circle member salons have done using the templates and tools in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® you’ll find yourself attracting customers who are more interested in value than mere price, want service above perceived (often phantom) savings, and are prepared to pay for it.

It failed my report card.

I won’t name the salon, but if its owner is reading this, she’ll recognize herself. This salon is one of three owned by a young entrepreneur who’s done a lot of things right, but still lets money fall through the cracks through lack of attention to detail. And there is magic in the detail.

I wandered in late yesterday afternoon, a Monday, to get a haircut. The layout is impressive – 20 chairs line the walls, with a massive raised catwalk down the middle for the fashion shows the salon has become known for.

That’s a tick for laterally thinking about how to create a ‘buzz’ that spills over into attracting new clients, an ‘involvement device’ to acknowledge that as the majority of customers are women, they’re interested in all things fashion and style, not just getting their hair done.

I was greeted at reception by a pleasant young lady (one of five staff on duty, only one of whom was actually cutting hair, being a Monday) who informed me that my haircut would cost an eye-watering $71. This for the privilege of having the services of the company’s ‘art director’, an innovative way of describing their most talented stylist.

When I visibly gulped at this – in a town where an average male haircut might stretch to $35 – she offered me instead, one of their ‘artists’ – another inventive term for what ordinary salons would call a ‘senior’ – for only $62. And if this was too much, I could have one of their ‘designers’ – their version of a mere apprentice, for a few dollars less.

Another massive tick from me for innovation. This salon owner is doing what I’m constantly nagging our Members to do – to re-think what it is they’re selling, to re-invent the business in such a way that it differentiates itself from the competition, simply by re-branding the common and thus making it un-common. Out of thin air, creating more perceived value. “Ordinary salons have seniors and apprentices. We have ‘artists’ and ‘designers’.”

Here’s what’s instructive: using differential pricing, you can elevate the perceived value of your own services. Example – clients insisting they only want the owner pay more for that privilege.

Next, I was asked to complete a client details form – name, all my phone numbers, email address – and crucially, tick-boxes for how I found out about the salon. A database-building system most salons are too lazy to implement, too ignorant to recognize its value.

I was introduced to my ‘artist’ who led me to her chair.

Unfortunately, that’s about when the shine started to come off an impressive start.

I was handed a selection of magazines. They were dog-eared, months old. As she washed my hair, my ‘artist’ cheerfully asked me the standard questions – ‘had a busy day so far?’ Yes, thanks. … ‘Got a big weekend planned?’ Mmmm…couple of social functions, that’s all. ‘What line of work are you in?’

I knew she was going to ask this, so I threw in a truthful answer, specifically to check her pulse.

‘Er, I show salons how to market themselves more effectively, more efficiently, how to increase the per-visit ticket price, and get customers coming back more often…’

“Really….and do you live locally?”

She might have been thinking, but it wasn’t about what I was saying. Nice enough girl, no pulse.

But the wheels really fell off back at the reception desk. Here I was, a brand new customer just walked in off the street, happily paying my $62 buzz-cut bill. I stood there idly chatting with the receptionist, my ‘artist’ attentively nearby.

Sigh. No attempt to sell me product, despite earlier telling my ‘artist’ I always use gel in my hair.

No request for feedback (i.e. testimonial) about my experience in their business.

Not even the slightest effort to re-book me next month.

I walked out the door, the sound of staff chattering to each other about their Christmas plans fading in my ears.

What a crying shame that it’s like this in almost ALL businesses. Attention to detail is its own economic stimulus package.

]]> http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/does-this-happen-in-your-salon/feed 2 http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/audio-recording-listen-in-as-these-salon-owners-reveal-their-success-strategies?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=audio-recording-listen-in-as-these-salon-owners-reveal-their-success-strategies http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/audio-recording-listen-in-as-these-salon-owners-reveal-their-success-strategies#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:37:23 +0000 Greg Milner http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/?p=1823 Listen in as these salon owners reveal exactly how they’ve grown their businesses in spite of
(perhaps because of!) the global economic downturn!

I loathe cliches, but there IS truth in many of them – like ‘Success breeds Success’. In this conference call, three of our most dynamic Inner Circle members reveal the strategies that have taken them from Struggle Street to owning salon businesses that are bursting at the seams with customers, sales and re-bookings.

My guests on this call are:

Rechelle Mackay (nee Watt) of Lamonde Hair Face & Body in Sydney. Rechelle reveals how 2009 has been her ‘best year ever’ – and how breaking her leg before Christmas last year was the turning point that took her ‘off the floor’ – and took her business to huge new highs. “We did not quite $300,000 from January to October ’08 – and for the same period January to October ’09, a stunning $407,000 – that’s a 38% increase,” says Rechelle. On this call, find out how she did it.

Susi Keswani of Ministry of Hair in Adelaide has seen her re-booking rate go from an ordinary 30% right up to 70% since joining the Inner Circle program and getting her Toolkit 6 months ago. On this call she reveals how her ‘cheap and cheerful’ marketing has brought in scores of new clients.

“But the biggest advantage for me is how it’s helped my systemize my business,” says Susi.

For Gail Smith, 2009 has been a stellar year. Her Charmed Hair & Beauty salon in Queensland has leaped from sales of $30,000 in June to a remarkable $57,000 by August, and on this call Gail reveals all the steps she took to achieve that stunning growth.

Settle in with your headphones and press the ‘play’ button – or download this as an MP3 file to your iPod!

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.)

Niki and Jane only joined the Inner Circle program three weeks ago at our Melbourne conference, and they’re already swamped with new customers.

“Well the letters (the Hollywood Woman sales letter from the Toolkit) were finally sent out last night. This morning the phone has been ringing off the hook!!! I’ve had clients who have been coming here for 3 to 4 years and have never called up to book!!! We have already booked in 13 packages since 10am its now almost 3!!! Just thought we’d let you know…”

And from Robyne Squires in Queensland:

“Just had to share this with you, came in this morning and Sarah only had 1 client!!! So I tweaked the current beauty offer to incorporate nails, I sent 271 text messages at 10.15am (today Wednesday)  – well,  the phone started ringing before all the texts had gone out, I answered the phone and while on the phone had a client run in and say ‘I just got a text I’ll have one of whatever it is!’, handing me $70. I had 5 calls and bookings in the first 15mins, and another 20 calls in the next 2 hours,  booking 15 for nails, 2 for the facial special as they already had nails, and 1 to call me back, plus 2 I have  been playing phone tag with.
What was interesting,  2 of the 1st 5 that booked had text/emailed their friend (who are not clients) and told them of the offer.. of course they booked ..now I have 2 new clients. UNBELIEVEABLE! Thanks, Robyne.”

Actually, not all that unbelievable Robyne. Same story every time: If you put the right message, out to the right market, at the right time, it’s pretty much a foolproof formula for success.

Sure does help though, to have all those marketing messages already done for you, in the Inner Circle toolkit.