Peter: This is the field guide, practical marketing and leadership guidance for business owners. I’m your host, Wilson of BizMarketing. Each episode focuses on what actually works in the real world. Let’s get started. Today, my guest is John Dwyer.
He’s the founder of the Institute of Wow. He’s known for direct direct response marketing, incentive based offers, building campaigns designed to drive sales, not just look clever. His background includes work with major brands, but what stood out to me in preparing for this is that he also positions his ideas as practical, low cost, and usable for small businesses, both online and offline. He’s probably best known for helping bring Jerry Seinfeld into a campaign for Australia’s Greater Building Society built around a free vacation offer. John, welcome to the Field Guide podcast.
John: Thank you, Pete. I’m glad to be here.
Peter: Great. So we’re going to dig into that Jerry Seinfeld promotion that you did and a few other things, but let’s get started here. I’m really interested in learning more about what you mean by direct response. Now, just to set the stage, our audience is a lot of small business owners. They may have a marketing team.
They probably don’t, they’re probably the marketing team. And so let’s get started with that. We hear, know, small business owners are hearing about marketing and they think social posts, websites, ads, but you talk specifically about direct response marketing. So what is it and what makes it different from the kind of marketing most small businesses are doing right now?
John: Good question, Pete. Guess if you’re a small business owner and you go to an advertising agency, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll say to you, Look, we’ll get people to fall in love with your brand so that they will eventually taste your product. We flip that with direct response marketing. We get them to taste your product so that they’ll fall in love with your brand. I always use the analogy that if you were a seafood shop and you put your face on the side of a bus or you sponsored the local basketball team, chances are people would eventually get to know your name over time.
But when you sit around the dinner table of a night time telling the children that you’ve got 152 likes today, there’s a good chance the kids say, look, but there’s no food on the table, daddy. And so what we call Vanity Metrics what we call Vanity Metrics, which is sponsoring, I mean, for god’s sake, you’ve never been to a basketball game or a football game or baseball game and bought something because there was a logo on No. You know, one of the players’ jackets. It’s, yeah, it’s ridiculous. McDonald’s and Kellogg’s can afford to throw money at that and not get a return, but you can’t.
So what this is all about is in that seafood shop analogy is that you’d have host esses outside the seafood shop handing out calamari samples at a lunchtime and dinner table, and they would taste the calamari samples and hopefully come in and buy the more expensive barramundi fish. So it’s all about making sure that the advertising that you do on Facebook today gets you a response tomorrow.
Peter: Mhmm. Got it. That makes sense. So we’re we’re not looking at just spray and pray, as they say, with advertising dollars. You’re actually doing something on purpose.
It’s the
John: You got it. So it’s all about the CPL, the cost per lead. I’m talking, obviously, you know, online lingo these days, but it wouldn’t matter whether it was that or any other, you know, magazine publication or back in the day, you know, TV and radio. The thing is that you look at your cost per lead, then, of course, you look at your conversion rate and determine whether or you’re making money, but you can do that online within twenty four hours. Whereas back in the day, I’m the baby boomer, so I’ve been in this game for quite some time, And I remember the amount of time and effort we would have to spend on creating television commercials or radio commercials or that ad that went into the women’s magazine and sat there for a month.
These days, you can split test five different ideas within twenty four hours. It’s just a wonderful world that we live in.
Peter: Absolutely. Yeah. I I completely agree. One thing, on your prep page, when I was getting ready for the interview was you talked about a problem solution formula. So what does that look like, you know, in the real world for local businesses?
Like, how would you look at that for a, let’s say, a dentist?
John: Yeah. Good question. Yeah. So you’ve got to be careful with dental practices. We have quite a few dentists.
You’ve got to be careful with the before and after photos Really? Because the likes of Facebook, you know, you can do that for, you know, fixing somebody’s driveway, whereby you can have the high water pressure blaster and you can clean half the driveway and leave the other half dirty, so you can do the before and after. Or what we call SHIT to gold. Okay? So bad stuff to gold stuff.
And that’s a very, very powerful before and after formula. But unfortunately, when it comes to weight loss and dentistry, then there’s certain rules that Facebook, you know, has. Yeah.
Peter: Let’s yeah. Yep.
John: I’ll give you It’s
Peter: like a home service brand. Maybe that’s better. Like, we work with a lot of roofing companies.
John: Yep. Okeydokey. Fair enough. Well, I’ll I’ll give you both. We had a dentist just about three months ago that came on board.
He was getting around about 20 leads a week. We got a thousand leads for him in the first week, and they weren’t just leads, they were red hot leads. 991 to be precise, but it’s near enough to 1,000. And what we did is that he makes money out of Invisalign, which are the invisible braces, and so therefore he sells them for 5 or $6,000, and that’s what he wanted to push. He wanted to make sure that he got rich people, because they didn’t have to bother him about it being affordable, even though he had a finance plan.
So we ran a contest on Facebook in the rich suburbs, the Beverly Hills, California sort of suburbs, and we said, how would you like to wear Invisalign braces for your children if they’ve got crooked teeth? He got 991 entries for $30 a day. He spent a lousy $30 a day on Facebook. We call it the contest leads formula. Okay?
And so, therefore, whoever entered that contest to win braces for their children had children with crooked teeth. You don’t enter a contest to win braces if you look like Tom Cruise. And so that’s what happened. He got a thousand leads in the first week, exploded his brain because, you know, the way that we run these contests is that they might run for three or four months so that you can amortize your prize over that period of time. But what we do is have a weekly Friday draw.
One of the rules is that you can only enter the contest once. Every Friday, when we actually draw someone, whoever entered the contest that week is absolute fodder to be called next week to say, look, you didn’t win, but you can’t enter again. Guess what? Obviously, you’ve got a child with crooked teeth. We’ve got this unbelievable deal at the moment.
So what happens is that we help them close that deal because we give them a free vacation. So we say, look, you’ve got children with crooked teeth, you didn’t win, but obviously you want to fix their teeth. If you buy Invisalign braces before the end of the month, we’ll give you a free vacation to Disney World. And that gets conversions across the line. So we have massive leads and then a conversion tool from heaven, what we call a Happy Meal toy, which of course is a free vacation to Vegas or, you know, Grand Canyon or Disney World.
And by by the way, they get that thousand dollar vacation, which is three nights in any one of these idyllic destinations. It’s worth a thousand dollars, but we give it to them for $50.
Peter: Wow.
John: My middle name is evil, Doctor Evil. Yeah. So in the same instance, if it happened to be a service industry, exactly the same thing. This contest, if anyone wants to have a look at it, you can swipe the ID, you don’t have to use me, but I think you’d probably be well versed to give it to someone who has done this a million times. Basically, it’s contestleadsmachine.com and you’ll see how it works.
But essentially, I’ve never seen anything like it myself. We’ve only developed this in the last four to six months. I come from a contest background, I was silly I didn’t do this until six months ago. But, yeah, we’ve had a 100% success rate. There’s nothing else in my career that I can say to you I’ve had a 100% success rate, but this thing, cannot kill it.
It’s just unbelievable. For a service industry, a roofing company we have on board, as a matter of fact, And other than praying for hail, they basically do door knocking to say, do you want us to go up and have a look at your roof and see whether or there’s any problems? They normally find a problem or two because they’ve got a hammer in their hand. But anyway, so So what we do there is we say, Would you like to win a free roofing repair or guttering, up to the value of x dollars? And of course, whoever enters that knows that they’ve got a problem with their roof.
You don’t enter that if you live in an apartment building. So they’re not leads, they’re red hot leads, and then, of course, once the Friday draw happens for week one, then on the Monday or Tuesday of week two, they can follow everyone up and say, Look, you obviously didn’t win, but you’ve got a bad roof, obviously, you’ve some problems. If you get in by Friday, then we’ll give you a free family vacation. So they not only have a lead machine, but they have a conversion tool.
Peter: So what is it about the vacation? Sorry. What what what is it about the vacation that kind of attracts people? Have you dug into that much?
John: Yeah. Yeah. Look, Pete, I’ve done you know, because, you know, I was born in the eighteen hundreds, I’ve I’ve done every possible incentive that you can think of. So whether it be microwave ovens or dining vouchers or movie vouchers, I’ve never seen anything work like this. And I know I’m going to name drop here, so I have to alert people.
It was a result of the Jerry Seinfeld campaign, and I’m obviously going to ask you a question about that later. The essence of that was we had a bank down under that stood out from the Bank of America and Wells Fargo because it basically said, look, get a home loan from us and we’ll give you a free vacation. And it went nuts. They ran that for ten years, three years of which Jerry was involved, and we just came on TV and social media and said, swap your home loan from the Wells Fargo or Bank of America, come across to the Greater Building Society, and we’ll give you a free vacation. They came across in droves.
They took an extra $15,000,000,000 worth of home loans in the first three years of just doing something different, because they gave away Happy Meltoy. All the other banks advertised on interest rates. This bank held the position as the highest interest rate for home loans in the world for ten years, because we took their eyes off the price and onto the free vacation. I would just say to everyone, if you’re looking for an incentive, don’t give them a movie ticket they know that’s worth $50 Don’t give them a dining voucher for $50 because they know that’s worth $50. Give them something that’s worth a thousand dollars, but only costs you 50.
Interesting.
Peter: Wow. That’s that’s amazing. So let’s, let’s move on. I do wanna talk about the, the Jerry Seinfeld story, and, you know, you’re known for that. I was looking at your background, and you’re you’re kinda known for that.
And I as I recall, Jerry wasn’t doing a lot of TV commercial work at the time that you, were able to, get him to work with you. So give us kinda the short version of that and and why did it work so well? You’ve kind of give you’ve already given a little bit of the background on that, but how did you hook Jerry in particular?
John: Yeah. Look, it was a bit of a coup, as he pats himself on the back, because Jerry had only previously done American Express and Microsoft, and they were a little bit bigger than this bank down under. This particular building society was the two hundred and fiftieth biggest business in Australia, so it wasn’t the local corner shop, but it was nowhere near as big as the Bank of America or Wells Fargo, that sort of bank. And we don’t have Wells Fargo or Bank of America down under, but I use that so that you understand that this bank was a challenger brand. And so therefore, I said to them at the time, look, you know, you’re out there advertising on interest rates.
You’re crazy. You guys are on drugs. Because it’d be like the corner store trying to take on Kmart on price. The big guys, the Wells Fargo, are not going let you win on interest rates, and they said, well, okay, smart addict, what do we do? I said, you’ve to take their eyes off the price.
And I was doing a campaign at the time for a travel company, infomercials on TV, and they were a discount travel company. So I introduced them to the bank, and the bank just stopped giving away the honeymoon rate. Because as everybody knows, when you get a home loan from the bank, they’ll give you a 1% break for that first year, and then it goes back up again. We just gave that one percent to the travel company, and they gave us a $10,000 vacation for five. That’s what we did.
We came on TV and social media and said, swap your home loan to the Greater Building Society and get a free vacation. The thing went nuts. And then about two or three years in, when we scooped up all the low lying fruit, the general manager of the bank said to me, look, you know, where do we go to from here? What we’d like to do is, you know, our audience are working class. How do we get up to people who wear ties?
I said, You’ve mistaken me for David Copperfield. A credit union or a building society will never reach corporates. I said, But we might be able to get to middle management. He said, Okay, how are we going do that? I said, What about we get an endorsement from a sports star or celebrity?
And they said, okay. So a friend of mine had been doing one of these campaigns with Billy Connolly, the Scottish comedian, and I said, what do you do? And he said, well, wherever he is in the world, we just give him a million dollars, and we fly to wherever he is, do the commercials, come back to Australia, cut them up and put them on TV. I thought, oh, that sounds easy. So anyway, we put out a research survey to say we’d created a bit of a cheeky brand, and we said, look, who would be a personality, sports star or otherwise, who would be a good cheeky person for the bank.
And I was hoping it would be an Australian TV star, because that’d be easy to get. Well, guess who came in number one? Jim Carrey, number two came in. Jerry Seinfeld. I had dug myself a hole.
So anyway, I was just an annoying so and so, and I got backwards and forwards with George Shapiro, which was his manager. I’m sarcastic, he’s sarcastic, so we got on quite well. After six months of annoying him, eventually Jerry said yes. When I met Jerry for the first time in New York, I said to him, Why did you say yes? You’ve got more money than God.
And he said, Well, two reasons. I like the Australian sense of humour, because you guys take the piss out of everyone, so therefore I do that for a living. And he said, The second reason is, I thought if I didn’t say yes, you’d never get away. Or words to that effect, and I said, Yeah, look, I believe persistence is more important than intelligence. So that’s how it came about, and for three years, I would go back and forth to New York, and we’d produce all these TV commercials for online and offline.
Jerry came on TV and said, Swap your home loan from the nasty banks and you’ll get a free vacation. It just took the campaign through the stratosphere. It was already successful because of the vacation, but it took it through the stratosphere. Was on sixty Minutes, it was on all the breakfast TV shows. The amount of free publicity that we got was incredible.
Peter: Wow. So was the real lesson there boldness, memorability, the design of the incentive, or, you know, what was the real lesson with that one?
John: I think if you’re dealing with any of these big people I’m gonna name drop again. I’ve had Michael Jordan and even Princess Di many years ago, of course, because Princess Di passed away a long time now. We had these people do a lot of stuff for us, even Steven Spielberg, would you believe? Know I’m name dropping, and I apologise for it, but these people are wonderful giving people if you ask them the right way, and if you are persistent, but in a well mannered sort of way. I mean, because of my sarcasm, of course, there’s always going to be a gag at the end of it.
But if you do it the right way, persistently, then they don’t mind that. And I know it sounds corny to say speech intelligence, but it does. If you just hang in there and treat them with respect and in Jerry’s instance, he didn’t need the money, for goodness sake, he’s the richest guy on the planet, but they liked the creativity. So as long as the creativity all we did is that we had an empty shop in a little country town called Cedarhurst, which was close to the Hamptons, where he lives. We made it easy for him.
We put all of the number plates of the cars, the license plates were Australian license plates, we put gum trees in the street, would you believe them? When you’re dealing with him, obviously, it’s got to be a reasonable budget. And for all intents and purposes, everyone thought that he’d flown down to Australia to do this, which he hadn’t. We just made it easy for him. We had an empty shop there, and we just built a greater building society branch, a facade, you know, on the shops that looked like he was standing outside an Australian bank, and he just did stand up.
The shoppers that were walking past, which were obviously extras, but nobody knew that, they were just walking past ignoring him, and here it is, the one and only Jerry Seinfeld doing jokes on the corner of the street, and nobody even took any notice of it. And so if you made it easy for him like we did, don’t get me wrong, he had a big play, a big saying of this, but if you made it easy, then it’s easier for him to say yes. So yeah, persistence beats intelligence.
Peter: Yeah. I like that. I’m just wondering, our audience doesn’t have that kind of money. So, you know, is there a takeaway for those business owners that want to try something that don’t, you know it sounds like you guys were very resourceful. Didn’t sound like you had the amount of money that would just make Jerry say yes.
It was more about your persistence and maybe the creativity. But if I’m a small business owner, is there some takeaway for us?
John: Peter, look, 85 to 90% of all my clients now are doing less than 2,000,000 turnover. Okay? So I swapped from the corporate world to the small to medium sized business world about ten years ago. Got it. So we have Butchers, Bakers, candlestick makers.
The thing is that a vast majority of our business comes from services, and that’s home services. So as you said, roofing, electricians, plumbers, concreters, and the rest are a mixed bag of professionals, as in dentists and doctors and retailers. I just say to them, Look, do whatever you possibly can to take their eyes off the price. What we call incentive based marketing is the easiest way to do it. I’ve got six children, they’re all grown up now, and a couple of them have got their own little children.
But when we had six children 12 at one stage, we gave McDonald’s $7,800,000,000, I think it was, because of the damn Happy Meal.
Peter: Yeah.
John: McDonald’s took our eyes off the price for a lot of years, and if you asked anyone what a Happy Meal cost, probably most of them couldn’t tell you because they just wanted to shut the kids up in the back of the car. And Kellogg’s did it previously, I mean, a vintage where I used to say to mum, can you get the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes? Because there were the Jetsons or Flintstones toys in them, you know. Nothing’s changed. The actual delivery might have changed in terms of the communication mechanism Facebook and so forth but nothing’s changed.
I mean, if you can give somebody an incentive, then there’s a very good chance that price goes out the window. I mean, Amazon does it every day of the week. If you join their Prime membership club, then you get, you know, free shipping and special privileges with music and so forth. Dunkin’ Donuts do it, whereby you get points, and then you save up the points, and you can actually get things for them. But 97% of businesses in America and Australia have never ever used an incentive.
It’s too easy for them to drop their pants and try and beat the guy down the road, but what they don’t realise is the guy down the road can beat them by doing the same thing within five minutes. As a consequence of the Seinfeld thing, just before COVID, I was contacted by travel company, and they said, Look, we get access to unsold hotel rooms right throughout America and around the world. Would you like to show us how we can sell this to small businesses? And I said, Yeah, okay. Well, how does it work?
And they said, well, basically, the hotels don’t charge for the tariff, so you get a $400 room or $300 room, whatever it might be, for free, because they hope that outside of school vacation periods, whoever stays there will spend money on food and drink. I said, right, okay. Sounded, you know, I’ve seen every travel scam there is because of the game I’m in, so I turned it upside down and found that this was the cleverest thing I’ve ever seen. So the hotels win because they fill rooms outside of school vacations, and they sell food and drink. The business wins because they’ve got a Happy Meal toy that’s crazy.
And of course, the consumer wins because they get a free vacation, and that’s where this came into play. So therefore, we did a deal with this company whereby we represent them, and we provide these vouchers to businesses, you know, vacation vouchers that are worth a thousand dollars because it’s a three to seven night vacation, and we give it to them for $50.
Peter: Wow.
John: So So that means that no matter what business you are, you say buy my product or service, and I’ll give you a free vacation.
Peter: And so you’re we’re so we’re looking at yeah, I mean, it’s relevant. I think the only the only biz well, I mean, you so you’re you’re combining that with, for example, the Invisalign. So I see what you’re doing. You’ve got like, if it’s the dentist, there’s sort of the initial hook. People aren’t putting in their name to win a vacation.
They’re putting their name in to get the service that they actually need. Then they’re raising their hand and saying, I need that service. And then it’s just afterwards, when they don’t win, that you have the incentive.
John: That’s right. That’s one way of doing it. We’ve combined them. But you can use just the incentive by itself if you don’t want to run the contest on social media.
Peter: You
John: just simply come on social media and you say, look, use my concreting services or buy x thousand dollars worth of my product, and I’ll give you a free vacation. So what happens is that because we are giving them the vacations for $50 I mean, we normally sell them for $97, but if I’m on a show like yours, obviously we reward the people for being part of your community, so we cut it in half, But basically, what they’re saying is that, you know, use my product or use my service, and I will give you a free vacation. So that’s one way of doing it, where you just use it as a Happy Meal toy.
Peter: There you go.
John: And the other way of doing it is to, you know, tack that onto the contest formula and use it as a conversion tool. Yeah. So you can use it either by itself or or or with the contest.
Peter: Got it. Got it. So your your business, Institute of Wow, great name Thank by the
John: you.
Peter: The idea is that you should wow your prospects. Obviously, the free vacation is definitely a wow. For a small business in a crowded category, what does wow actually mean in practice? Again, let’s just go back to the roofing company.
John: Yep. Okey dokey. What it means is that if you’re in a me too industry, which most businesses are because let’s face it, your solar panels look pretty similar to the solar panel guy down the road. And so if you’re in a me too industry where everything looks like the others, then you absolutely need to create a wow factor. Now, if you’ve got an organic wow factor, and it happens to be like an iPhone, okay, so therefore I know they’ve got competition, but nonetheless, when this thing came out, it doesn’t need me.
Okay? It’s got organic wow factors in It could be a washing machine, it could be anything, but if you’ve got something whereby it’s very difficult for anyone to copy you fast, then you don’t need me. You’ve got organic wows. But if you look like the guy down the road, and I use the solar panels because it’s a classic case, then you need me big time, or you need this sort of thinking big time. Yeah.
Because, you know, you’re going to be beaten on price every time by the 40 ton gorilla. If you’re the corner star store and you think you’re going to beat Walmart on price, you are on drugs. Okay? They’re going to beat you every time. So why market your products or services on price?
We had a turf farm come on board, and he had about a mile’s worth of turf, as in grass, for the front yard and back out of your house. And he said to me, what should we do? I said, well, who’s your target audience? Because you’ve got to make sure that whatever you use as an incentive is appealing to that target audience. If I walked into a menswear shop and when I bought a sports jacket, they gave me a skateboard, again, I’d say that they’re nuts.
I’m not gonna use a skateboard. But if they gave me a dining voucher or movie voucher, well, of course, that made sense. And so the turf farm, said to him, well, who’s your audience? He said, well, not the mum and dads who own the homes because they’d only buy a front yard or backyard’s worth of grass. My audience are landscapers.
I said, Okay, what do you think is a wow factor that they’d be interested in? I cut the story short because he couldn’t work it out. I said, Beer. 99% of them are men, and so therefore beer. So that’s what we did.
We gave everyone a carton, a case of 24 bottles of this premium beer, not just the ordinary beer, this was the upmarket beer, and for every home’s worth of grass that they bought. And it rings me six days into the promotion, where we sent out the you know, these guys are not real tech savvy, so therefore we sent out a brochure as well as an email and we said, For every home’s worth of grass, you’ll get a carton of this or a case of this beer, and he rang me six days into the promotion and said, We’ve got a problem. I said, What’s that? He said, We’ve run out of turf, and miles worth of turf has gone. Whereas before, the biggest pain in the ass that we had was a guy called Jim, and he said, Jim used to ring up and say, How much for your grass?
And I’d say, It’s 6.5 per square meter. He’d say, I can get it down the road for $6.20. He said it was a race to the bottom, the usual story. He rang up at the beginning of the promotion and said, I need 18 homes worth of grass. I don’t care when the grass gets here, I need the beer by Friday, I’ve got a party.
So that’s when the Happy Meal toy takes over the product, and you’re very happy to do that because you’re very happy to move your product. I would always just say to people, whatever your product or service is, really, you know, you’re in a competitive marketplace where you’ve got a me too product, then provide them with a reason outside of price to buy yours. And just think Happy Meal Toy. That’s the easiest way to think about it.
Peter: I love it. I love it. That’s great. That’s really great. So you have a website where you talk about the you’ve got contestleadsmachine.com if people want to learn more about the specific lead sorry, the contest promotion that you help do.
So you help folks run that. Is that what you do there?
John: Yeah. I found, Peter, and I think you mentioned this at the beginning of the interview, is that if you’re running a small business, you probably don’t have a marketing team. What I found is that when I swapped across from the corporates, doing McDonald’s and doing Kellogg’s and all those bigger businesses, and got into the smaller sector, I found very quickly that, you know, they just said to me, look, my name is John Dwyer, but I get JD, they’d say, JD, look, we can’t implement this. We don’t have a marketing team like you did with the Seinfeld campaign with the bank. And so I decided that what we would do is put these together as a package.
So we’ve got lots of packages, I’ve given you probably the top two today, but I can get a $100,000 prize for you for about 4 or $5. All those shows on TV, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, they don’t give that money away. That’s given away by Lloyds of London. We have a lot of insured promotions where it’s like the holding $1,000,000 thing with the golf So there’s a whole bunch of this stuff that we do, but we realise that smaller business owners can’t implement because they just don’t have the resources. What we do is we package this up for them in a way that they can press a button.
So that vacation is one, for example, if you don’t mind me, Peter just giving you the URL, if anyone wants to have a look at that, just go to vacationsincentive.com. That’s our American website, vacationsincentive.com, and you’ll see how it works for any business. We’ve done it from A to Z, so it doesn’t matter what your business is. For example, if it’s a restaurant, then what you would do is you’d say, look, for every $50 you spend in my restaurant, I’ll give you a vacation point. And when you save up five vacation points, which is $250 worth of expenditure, then we’ll give you the vacation.
We suggest to people is that if the vacation is going to cost you a very modest $50, then just make them spend $500, if you like, because then it is equivalent to a 10% discount. It’s costing you you give us $50, you get them to spend 500. It’s equivalent to a 10% discount, but it’s rocket fuel compared to a 10% discount.
Peter: Right. Right. Yeah. Wow. Now I have a question.
This is out of left field. I know we’re just wrapping up here. Why is it that all of the not all, but a lot of the people with creative marketing ideas, for example, I mentioned Alan Dib, you know, the one page marketing plan, Australian, you, Australian. What’s going on with the Australians?
John: Well, because we’re so far away from civilization, we’ve got to come up with ideas. Yeah, look, it’s funny you bring that up, Pete, because I get asked if I’m doing a podcast or what have you, is it all about the creativity? I’m tempted to say yes most of the time, because everyone’s got ideas. My business is now called the instituteofwow.com, but prior to this, another business I had was called Dynamic Ideas. It was called the Dynamic Ideas Company.
The acronym for that I had not thought through. Dynamic Ideas Company, d I c. It was a silly thing, but anyway. So anyway and here I am, I think I know Markley, I’m an idiot. But, you know, I would have people knock on the door because we had a sign outside, the Dynamic Ideas Company, and people would walk in and say, look, I’ve a Dynamic Ideas for you, and it was all rubbish.
It was just anyone could come up with an idea, but whether it’s practical in terms of the ROI is another thing. So therefore, I think what we do, we add sensibility know how Conan O’Brien is known for intelligent stupidity? When he’s interviewed, Conan O’Brien said, Look, the reason I make money is because of intelligent stupidity. Okay? I know what I’m doing, but I look like an idiot.
So he’s very much, you know, like Abin Castello, but it’s And only one of in this instance, what we do is that we add sensibility to crazy ideas. And I know we’ve got to go, but I’ll give you one that just happened in the last month. I wish I could make more money out of this, but this guy’s a client. He pays me 2 or $3 a month, so therefore he picked up half $1,000,000 out of this idea for giving me 2 or $3. Is a coffee chain.
So he’s got a chain of coffee shops, not quite Starbucks, but he’s got something like 50 coffee shops around Australia. And he said, look, I’m selling enough club sandwiches and everything else, but he said, I want to sell more coffee. The money in coffee is unbelievable. We make it for 40 or 50¢ and sell it for 5 or $6. And I said, okay, let’s have a look at this.
I said, how many people buy a second cup of coffee? And he said, oh, only around about 15 or 20%. I said, okay, we’ll get them to let’s get that up to 80 percent. He said, well, how do we do that, smart aleck? All we did is that when you get to the end of the coffee, there’s nothing there normally, but now what we have he had to buy some new coffee cups for each of his we tested this in three of his 50 stores, and it went nuts, and so, therefore, he’s changed it to all 50 now.
At the bottom of the cup of coffee, it just says, go on, you know you need a second cup. We’ve stamped the coffee cup, and we came up with about a dozen sarcastic silly phrases, know, like, surely you need another caffeine hit, you’re not gonna leave without another coffee, and all this sort of stuff. He went from an average of 8,000 in in the five shops that we did it in, or five cafes that we did it in before we put in a whole lot of it, the average coffee sales per week were about 8 or $9,000, I forget the exact number. It went to 18,000. It didn’t double, it doubled plus again.
So therefore, that idea for him picks him up, like, half $1,000,000 within a few months, and I got 2 or $3 out of it. I said to him, he actually is an annoying so and so because he bought himself a boat recently, and he actually takes a photo of the boat and texts it to me and says, thank you. I told him, said, I hope you die in your sleep, you know?
Peter: Yeah. Look out for the reef, sucker.
John: Yeah. Exactly. So I guess I’m using that as an example. You know, it’s got to be it’s got to be sensible creativity. Everyone’s got ideas, but it’s got to be practical.
Peter: Yeah. Well, I really appreciate that about you, John. That’s that’s great stuff. So, just getting back to a couple of the places to find you. So the Institute of Wow is your, website, contest leads machine, and then what the other one was travel.
What was the other?
John: Yeah. The the vacation one is vacations, plural. So it’s vacationsincentive.com. And if you go there, you’ll see that the vouchers are $97 each, but all you have to do is basically email me. My email address is johnthinstituteofwow dot com.
So if you email me and say, look, I’m interested in that vacation promotion, then of course we cut it in half for you. I have to say to you, though, if you’re after leads and you’re in the home services or contractor area, then it’s going to be pretty hard to beat something that can cost you between $1 and $5 a lead and bring in hundreds of leads a week. I can’t guarantee that, obviously, depends on your business, but by the same token, if your face is unwanted posters in the police station, then maybe there’s another reason you’re not getting leads. But if it’s a regular business, there’s a good chance that you’re going to get leads for under $5 and you’re going get hundreds of them. That one is, yeah, contestleadsmachine.com.
Peter: I love it. I love it. John, thanks for your time today, and I look forward to catching up with you again. This is good stuff.
John: My pleasure, Peter, and thank you for putting up with my dad jokes and psych asshole.
Peter: Thanks for listening to the Field Guide. If you have questions, topic ideas, or guest suggestions, we wanna hear from you. Email us anytime, podcast@bizmarketing.com. You can find this episode and all past episodes on our website at bizmarketing.com. Just head to free resources to catch up or revisit anything you missed.
And if you need help marketing your service business, whether that’s getting more leads, improving follow-up, or fixing what’s not working, you can schedule a free consultation with our team. Just go to bizmarketing.com and click the let’s talk button. I’m Peter Wilson of BizMarketing. Thanks for spending your time with us, and we’ll see you next time on the Field Guide.
