The Seinfeld Incentive Strategy Any Business Can Use with John Dwyer

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today, we'll be breaking down the Seinfeld incentive strategy any business can use. And to drop these value bombs, I brought to John Dwyer in the EO Fire Studios. John is a direct response marketing expert who convinced Jerry Seinfeld to front a record-breaking banking campaign and now helps businesses attract customers using powerful incentive-based marketing strategies. And today, we talk about direct response marketing, the number one marketing mistake, incentive-based marketing, the incentive playbook and oh, so much more.

0:38And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to John and our sponsors. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash on fire. Go to shopify.com slash onfire. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, HighLevel, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

1:27J.D., say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I don't know about disagree, how many people disagree with this, but I would suggest, John, that if you want to be a true entrepreneur, then hang around with people who say why not, not people who say why. And of course, you know, that famous saying that we've all heard before, you are the average of the five or six people you hang around with. So hang around with people who encourage you to come up with crazy ideas. And generally speaking, they're people who say, yeah, why not?

2:03Well, I love that. And Fire Nation, you're in for a treat because today we're talking about the Seinfeld incentive strategy any business can use, and it's going to be a doozy. So before we dive into some really awesome value, I want to talk about the Institute of Wow and what it really does, because your company is theinstituteofwow.com. And for entrepreneurs and business owners hearing about it for the very first time, what the heck does that even mean? What do you provide? What's the core problem that you, JD, are helping them solve? Yeah, John, look, we've been doing this for quite a few years.

2:36I should say quite a few decades, I guess, but we help businesses take their customers or their prospects eyes off the price. So as the name of my company, I guess, infers theinstituteofwow.com, we teach businesses, business owners, but also, you know, CEOs, how to create wow factors so that they are giving a reason for a customer to buy their product or service outside of price. You don't want to market your products or services on price. Leave that up to Costco and Kmart. If you're not built like they are for price discounting, then do everything you possibly can to create a wow factor to take their eyes off the price.

3:14Fire Nation, you can tell the word for a treat today because JD's been doing this for so long at such a high level that I want to move directly into direct response marketing because you specialize in direct response marketing. I want to talk with Fire Nation about what is DRM and how does it differ from traditional branding? Look, if you go to a traditional advertising agency, they will tell you that they will help you get people to fall in love with your brand so that they will taste your product. We flip that. We're the opposite. We get them to actually taste your product so that they'll fall in love with your brand.

3:50And I guess really direct response marketing is very fast. It allows you to advertise on Facebook today and get a result today. Whereas, you know, brand building, that's fine for the big boys. Nike and Kellogg's and Coca-Cola, they can sponsor the Olympics and they can put their logos and faces on the side of buses and on the back of taxis. But if you're a small to medium-sized business, then you really want to get a return from the money you give Mr Zuckerberg today. You haven't got enough budget like Nike or Kellogg's to sponsor the Olympics or football teams. One classic case, John, that we have at the moment, it's a program we have at the moment which we call the Contest Leads Formula, we tell businesses, look, give up your product or service as a prize and we will advertise that on Facebook.

4:37We'll run a Facebook contest. And whoever enters that contest to win your product or service obviously is interested in your product or service. You give one of those prizes away, but you're left with lots and lots of other people who have actually put their hand in the air and glowed in the dark by entering the contest. A classic case is a dentist we had only a month ago. He wants to sell Invisalign braces, which are the invisible braces for children. and I said to him, okay, so we put an ad on Facebook. We laser targeted to the area that he was and we said, how would you like to win a$5 ,000 Invisalign braces?

5:11It only costs him a third of that, right? He spent$20 to$30 a day, just$20 to$30 a day. He got 1 ,000 leads in the first week, like just knockout, incredible. His head exploded. He couldn't understand. He wouldn't get 1 ,000 leads in six months. Right. And so what happened is that, you know, basically he gave one of them away, but every single other person that entered that contest had just said, I've got a child with crooked teeth. So then the follow-up procedure is, listen, Mrs. Smith, look, you didn't win the contest, but the good news is we've got a special deal this week. You've obviously got a child with crooked teeth, and if you get in by Friday, we will give you a free vacation.

5:50I'll tell you about the vacation thing later on. But it's really Dr. Evil from one of the Austin Powers movies. It should not be legal, but it is. I mean, Fire Nation, at the end of the day, I mean, if you can really understand how to utilize direct response marketing in a powerful way, I mean, your ROI, your return on investment can be absolutely incredible. And I mean, JD, I just love that example you gave because everybody can picture that. I mean, I've actually used Invisalign, so I can see that, you know, now I have a two-year-old son. I mean, at some point, this child's probably going to need some form of Invisalign or braces, or who knows what's going to be available, you know, in 10 years.

6:28I mean, that time will tell. But I mean, this is just one example, Fire Nation. There's so many use cases for this. Think about your business. Think about how you could be marketing your services, your products, your value that you can exchange with the world. And JD, I want to talk about the number one marketing mistake, because in your opinion, you've seen this mistake happen over and over again. I want you to share with Fire Nation, the single biggest mistake, in your opinion, that small business owners make with their marketing that is preventing real actual growth? Look, I'm glad you asked that question because I've never made a mistake.

7:08My wife comes to some of the seminar presentations that I put on and I don't know why she does it. I don't think she enjoys it. And when I do that gag, look, I've never made a mistake. Then I follow up with more dad jokes and I say, yeah, well, look, I did make a mistake back in 1992, but the mistake I made was that I thought I had made a mistake. And she rolls her eyes and grossly embarrassed. Yeah, John, look, the biggest mistake I think that most small to medium sized businesses make is that they market on price. And so therefore, if they're selling a washing machine or a refrigerator, or they're selling a solar service or their lawn mowing service, what they do is that they market on price, which means the guy down the road can beat them in a heartbeat.

7:51And if you market on price and you're up against a 40 ton gorilla, so if you're the corner store and you've got Costco opposite you or Walmart opposite you, then you're on drugs if you think that you're going to beat them on price. You're just not going to beat them. So why go down that path? Because price discounting is not sustainable. You might do it twice or three times a year to get rid of stuff in the warehouse and that's fine, but don't make it the first port of call when you're marketing. So that's the biggest mistake that they don't use direct response marketing. I call it, you know, one of the major components of direct response marketing.

8:24We might touch on it in a moment, but that's incentive-based marketing. And, you know, I've got six children and they're all growing up and they've got their own little kids now. But at one stage we had six under 12 and we gave McDonald's, I added it up, it was$7.8 billion because of that damn toy in the Happy Meal box. And you with your little guy is probably about to go through that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so McDonald's for 45 years have taken our eyes off the price and onto the toy. And Kellogg's have been doing that previously. Amazon do it with their Prime membership. If you're a Prime member, then you get special privileges and you get free shipping and free movies and this, that, and the other.

8:57These guys are smart. And the irony is that 97 % of small to medium-sized businesses have never, ever used direct response marketing or have never, ever used an incentive. The big boys are doing it every day and they know what they're doing. Well, JD, you are right. we are absolutely going to be getting into incentive-based marketing and so much more Fire Nation when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Let's talk about that level up mindset. You know, the one you need to take your business from comfortable to next level amazing. In this stage, the basic stuff matters, like how you communicate with customers, which is why today's episode is sponsored by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the modern alternative to run your business communications.

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11:23Go to shopify.com slash onfire. That's shopify.com slash onfire. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business. And they are also our featured partner, HighLevel. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or a course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, HighLevel is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack. Seriously, think ClickFunnels, Calendly, MailChimp, Kajabi, and even your CRM, all rolled up into one powerful white label solution. You can build funnels, send SMS and email campaigns, schedule appointments, manage pipelines, run memberships, and even launch your own branded mobile app.

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12:37So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. JD, we're back. And I want to talk about incentive-based marketing in action. because you're a strong advocate of incentive-based marketing tactics. I mean, you worked with Jerry Seinfeld for three years on a direct response campaign that literally broke sales records. And this was for a bank using a free vacation incentive. So let's go into details. Like I think a lot of our listeners, I know a lot of our listeners love Jerry Seinfeld.

13:19So let's kind of talk about how you developed that relationship and then get into the details about the campaign, how it worked, why it was so effective. So, JD, take the microphone, take it away. Yeah, good stuff. And look, as you know, John, because, you know, we've spoken before, you know that I'm a very shy little devil. So I've never milked the daylights out of this Seinfeld thing. Oh, dear. Anyway, yeah, look, how it came about, I, you know, I have private consultancy clients like you do. And so, therefore, this particular client came on board called the Greater Building Society. And look, it's the 250th biggest business in Australia.

13:56So it's not a small corner store, but they're not as big as the big Wells Fargo Bank of America style banks in Australia. Okay. And so I did about a month's worth of time in motion, had a look at what they were doing. I could see the advertising agency was basically just providing them with brands. I mean, would you believe it? Their tagline, wait for this. They paid an ad agency for this. Sooner or later, it's the greater. I mean, please. Anyway, I said to them, look, I've looked at everything that you've been doing with their ad agency and so forth. And I said, look, you're a challenger brand.

14:27And they said, what's that? I said, well, it's Richard Branson. Okay. When Virgin came along, he challenged all the big airlines by doing things differently. And that's what a challenger brand does. If you're up against the 40 ton gorilla, then you challenge them by doing sometimes the opposite to what they're doing. And so I taught them direct response and they said, well, what should we do? And they wanted to sell home loans. That's where they make the big money. And I said, okay, well, look, I've got a travel client that I do advertising for, and they can give you a$10 ,000 vacation for$5 ,000.

14:57They're a wholesale travel company. And they said, okay. I said, you've got a 1 % honeymoon rate at the moment, like all the banks, there's nothing new about that. Don't have the 1 % honeymoon rate. Take that away and give that to the travel company, and they'll give you a vacation. So that's what we did. We came on television and social media, and we said, get a home loan from the Greater Building Society and get a free vacation. Now, down under, we call it holiday, okay, but get a free holiday. And so that's what happened. In the first three weeks, they had to increase their call centre, which were 15 ladies, to 55.

15:29Wow. We came on TV and Gerry Seinfeld wasn't involved at this stage. He came three years later. It went absolutely nuts. We're talking billions and billions of dollars worth of extra home loans that were being stolen from the big banks because people were swapping across to the greater to get a free vacation. and depending upon the size of your home loan, that basically dictated where you went on your vacation. So if you had a million dollar home loan, you might have gone to Disney World. If you had a$500 ,000 home loan, you might have gone to Hawaii. Okay, so that's how it worked. It was unbelievably successful and then about three or four years into it, the general manager of the bank said, what do we do now?

16:06We've scooped up a lot of the low-lying fruit. What do we do now? And I said, what about a celebrity? And we needed to choose a cheeky celebrity because it was a cheeky brand. Yeah, and so therefore I bugged the daylights out of George Shapiro, which is Seinfeld's manager, and eventually he got Gerry on the phone and I said, look, all we want you to do is just basically take the piss out of the banks until people swap across to the greater. And to our surprise, he said yes. Now, you know, when I met Gerry for the first time in New York, I said, why did you say yes to this? You've got more money than God.

16:41And he said, I just like the idea. He said, you wanted me to take the mickey out of the banks, I'd take the mickey for a living. And I just liked the sense of humour. So that's what happened. For the next three years, I flew backwards and forwards to New York. And Jerry, we went to a little town very close to him in the Hamptons, which was called Cedarhurst. We took out an empty shop and built a Greater Building Society facade. And he stood outside and did stand-up. And, of course, all the shoppers, which were actors, of course, they just all walked past ignoring him. But he was doing a show saying, Whop your home loan to the Greater and get yourself a free vacation.

17:12And it went absolutely nuts. And I remember Jerry saying to me, God, this is a fantastic idea, J.D. He said, what percentage are you getting? I said, no, I'm a complete idiot. I'm a moron. Guess what? I'm charging a monthly consultancy fee and these guys just made billions. Oh, unreal. As you know, he gets residuals for every time the show comes on TV. He said, listen, you better have a coffee with me. I'll talk to you about getting a percentage and how you do it. I mean, Fire Nation, I really hope that this is kind of sparking some flames and sparking some ideas in your mind about, you know, how can you apply these tactics, these incentives into your marketing plan, into your business?

17:50I mean, this is exciting. And guess what? As GD is sharing, it can be really fun to like have some fun with this. I mean, that's why, you know, you're an entrepreneur. So you can have fun. This is why you're doing what you're doing so that you can get up in the morning and say, this is going to be a good time. And I think Fire Nation might need a little more, JD. So I want to talk next about the incentive playbook. Because after seeing success with incentive-based campaigns across all these industries, you created something called the incentive playbook. What is it? Who's it for? And how the heck can business owners get their hands on it?

18:25Terrific. Thank you, John. And thank you for that buildup. That's an excellent buildup. Thank you. I hope I don't disappoint. now. Yes, look, I'll give a URL now, but I'll repeat it later on. Go to incentiveformula.com and you'll see all about it, incentiveformula.com. But yeah, John, look, because we've been doing this since the 1800s when I was born with Little House on the Prairie, we've done a gazillion of these things, okay? So, you know, I'm very familiar with putting together the Monopoly style promotions for McDonald's and we've been involved with a lot of cereal companies doing the Kellogg's sort of thing.

19:02An example would be you guys have Magnum ice cream in America the same as we do. You know, an incentive program for them would be collect the tokens on the wrappers and once you collect a certain amount of tokens and you then put them in, you go to a website and put those codes in, you got yourself a free gold class cinema ticket. you know it could be we had you know a turf farm at one stage that was um you know wanting to sell you know miles and miles of turf and he came to one of my seminars and said look can you visit me and i did because he wasn't far away from where i lived in the rural community and i couldn't the grass just went on for miles and miles and he said listen i've got other turf farms who are you know basically stealing my business because they they're dropping their pants they're dropping the price all the time.

19:47He said, have you got any of that incentive-based marketing stuff? And I said, okay, well, who's your target audience? And he said, landscapers. And he said, because they'll buy two or three homes with grass for the front yard and backyard, whereas mum and dad will just buy one. I said, okay, what do you think they like as an incentive? He said, I don't know. You tell me, you're the marketing expert. I said, I think 99 % of them are men and they probably like beer. So we put out a campaign to all of the landscapers in that particular city here in Australia. And we said, listen, for every homes with the grass that you get from us, we will give you a carton of beer.

20:16We call it a carton, you guys call it a case, a case of beer, 24 bottles of beer. And he said, do you think it'll work? I said, I think it will. And so therefore we sent it out on both snail mail and email because landscapers are not known for being tech savvy. And four days, four days into it, he rang me and said, JD, we've got a problem. I said, what's that? He said, we've got no more turf. And I said, what? He said, it just ran out the door. He said, we're sourcing turf from other turf farms to keep up to the demand for the beer. He said there was a pain in the backside landscaper who used to contact me all the time and say, what's your cheapest price?

20:51Because I can get it down the road. If you're$6 per square metre, I can get it down the road for$5.50. And he said, I'd have to go to$5. And it was a race to the bottom. He said that same landscaper rang me up and said, I want 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.

21:11so that's that's what incentives can do they can absolutely flip the decision making process i mean we have a nappies company i mean you know there's a big brand here in australia called huggies and this is a challenger brand to huggies and i said to them okay well what we'll do is we'll put a code inside every packet of you know 12 nappies for babies and if they collect x number of those codes they then go to a website and put them in and they will get a absolute free plush teddy bear and again their turnover went up by 82 percent within a month simply because they were giving teddy bears away their opposition which was the 40 ton gorilla brand was not and guess what what happens is that when you do get the right incentive you can charge more than anyone else mcdonald's happy milk really seriously when you look at it i mean what you get for the seven or eight or nine dollars whatever it is these days it's very expensive but they can get that money because they've distracted you by putting a happy match around the box so that's what you should do and um look it's not just giveaways like that we we we do a lot of you know fifty thousand dollar price sweepstakes we can get fifty thousand dollars for five thousand dollars okay we can get a million dollars for twenty two thousand from the insurance companies so when you see on TV who wants to be a millionaire, they don't give that money away from NBC.

22:31That's given away by, you know, Lloyds of London. And so we do a lot of that whereby if you actually buy the product, the incentive is you're in the draw to win$50 ,000, but the business only pays$5 ,000 because at the end of that promotion, the person that's drawn gets to choose 100 numbers on a chocolate wheel. And if it comes up, they get the 100 grand. If it doesn't, they walk away with a motor car or some consolation prize. So The incentive doesn't always have to be a Happy Meal toy. It can be the chance to win a million dollars. And all of this sort of stuff, the reason I rapped it on about that, because all of this sort of stuff is in the, you know, what we call the incentive playbook, the incentive marketing playbook.

23:09And really, John, I think I mentioned to you before we pressed the button on this that it's quite an incredible offer we have. And that is that the Seinfeld campaign for the bank down under really worked because we gave away something that was appealing to all ages and all demographics, and that is a free vacation. With this playbook that's normally$1 ,997, it's got a whole lot of content to it, which I'll touch on in just a second, but it's normally$1 ,997. We're giving everyone a unique code here to get it for half price. So therefore, if you go to incentiveformula.com, you'll get it for$997.

23:50But guess what? you don't have to come up with incentive i know that you might say okay well this you know incentive playbook is going to give us all of the formulas it's going to give us facebook ads and landing pages templates and you know press releases and all this sort of stuff that's great jd but we've got to come up with the incentive no you don't we're going to give you 30 free vacations okay and you will use those as your incentive so hopefully john that might entice people to think about running an incentive-based promotion because we're going to give them the incentive. This is incredible.

24:23I mean, Fire Nation, this is what you call an irresistible offer, an irresistible opportunity. And I mean, just to kind of double tap on what JD was just sharing about, people might be like, what do you mean,$22 ,000 for a million? It was pretty crazy. 15 years ago, a lot of people don't know this, but you can find it on YouTube. I was on The Price is Right, and I want a car. And I was like, oh, The Price is Right is going to give me a car. No, no, no. They just gave me a card to contact a Ford dealership. And that Ford dealership gave me the car because they were advertising their cars on the price is right.