In this inspiring episode, John Dwyer, Owner of The Institute Of Wow, shares how you can break through revenue plateaus with bold, ‘wow’ marketing experiences that attract leads and drive massive sales growth. If you’re struggling to scale your revenue despite early wins, or if you feel stuck managing every detail of your business, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– Why collecting customer data scales sales without extra workload
– How to think bigger with incentives to break your revenue stall
– What five-step formula attracts leads fast without daily grind
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder and today’s guest is John Dwyer. He’s here with us today to talk about what Seinfeld sales and an avalanche of new leads all have to do in common for your business with over 30 years of experience, JD has helped businesses of all sizes achieve remarkable success by focusing on creating unforgettable wow moments. He’s passionate about showing business owners how to cut through the noise with bold results driven campaigns that lead to measurable growth. JD aims to teach others how to craft marketing that genuinely surprises and delights their customers, ensuring long term profitability and brand loyalty. JD, offers resources coaching and insights at the Institute of WoW to help entrepreneurs differentiate their businesses and create powerful customer experiences that turn heads and drive results. He’s here with us today. JD, welcome to the show. Thanks for calling from the other side, the way, other side of not only the pond, but the world. Tell us I wanted to, like, bury this a little bit. Well, we just have to start with the big story here, which jumped out as I was researching for the episode. But what do Seinfeld, how does this happen? Tell us what happened with Seinfeld, and in particular, what fascinated me about the story in the context of the work that you do, was not only the results, which are remarkable and speak for themselves, but the way that you approached the process of bringing Seinfeld and helping your client put together the campaign and ultimately making it a success. So take us from the beginning, how did that idea hit, and walk us through how you brought it to fruition.
John Dwyer
Scotty, I’m glad you brought that up. I thought you’d never get around to bring up the Seinfeld. It’s the number one thing you brought up. I’m so glad of that. Yes, I was lucky enough to get Jerry Seinfeld to be the spokesperson for one of my clients down under about 10 or 11 years ago. And I have not let anyone forget that sense. Okay, I’ve milked the absolute crap out of it. And when anybody says to me, Look, when are you going to stop, you know, pushing that? I said Never. I mean, you know, something like that. Just Just milk it. What it was, Scott is that we’re a direct response marketing agency, which is very different from a marketing agency. Okay, so if you go to a marketing agency, there’s a good chance they’re going to tell you that you should get people to fall in love with your brand so that they will taste your product. We flip that. We get them to taste your product so they’ll fall in love with your brand. And most of the clients that we have cannot afford to sponsor the Olympics or gridiron team or even put their face on the side of the bus. They want results tomorrow from their Facebook campaign today. And one such client was the 250th biggest business in Australia, as you can tell from my accent, I’m down under and this particular building society called the great hub. It had a working class audience. That’s who they were after, and they were up against the big four banks in Australia. In other words, the banks, like the wells, Fargo and I kept on saying to them, Look, you are a challenger brand. You’re not going to beat those guys on interest rates, so why don’t you do things differently? And as it turned out, we launched a campaign, which was get a home loan and get a free vacation, and it went nuts. We basically paid for the vacation by just stopping the honeymoon rate. And Scott, I’m sure that you guys in America have exactly the same thing. When the bank gives you a home loan, they normally give you a break for the first 12 months. They call that a honeymoon rate, and then after they’ve got you in for 12 months, of course, the interest rate goes back up again. And so all I did is I introduced the bank to a travel company I was doing some advertising for, and it was a wholesale travel company. They gave them cheap vacations. And so therefore, instead of giving that honeymoon rate, they came on television and said, get a home loan and get a free vacation. The thing absolute nuts. And about three or four years into it. We took it to another level, because I got Seinfeld to become the spokesperson. And yeah, I mean, really, when people say to me, Look, why did that happen? I wasn’t a fan of Seinfeld. I didn’t watch I mean, I’ve seen the show, but I didn’t watch it religiously. I so many others, but our research told us that if we were looking for a cheeky ambassador, then you could go no further than someone like Jim Carrey or Jerry Seinfield. And I was hoping that the research would probably give me a name but a lesser known star in Australia. But no those names popped up. And so I put it to Jerry’s management, a guy called George Shapiro. And after six months worth of backwards and forwards, it wasn’t easy. It was easy, harder to get during the Pope, but after six months ago, backwards and forwards and forwards and flying backwards and forwards to new to New York. Yeah, we scored it. And so Jerry came on board to be the spokesman for the bank, and basically he came on television in Australia and said, Get a home. Don’t get a free vacation. And the results were absolutely crazy. And I’m an idiot because I was charging a consultancy fee to the. Bank instead of a percentage of the increase in the home loans.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s amazing. So much about that story. That’s a blast. The commercials are really funny too. A lot of his best bits are in there. I nerded out on several of them getting ready for this, this episode, but there’s a couple things that stand out to me. One is just that they were, they were big by some standards, but in the game that they were playing, they were the underdog, right? And I think that’s that’s so important to what you do with folks. And regardless of how big you are or how small you are, I should say there’s an advantage that’s available to you. There’s a there’s a message, there’s that wow experience that we’re going to dive into here in a moment. And one of the ways that you do that could almost get lost in this story, but that home vacation is a really, really clever approach, and I saw that through a lot of your case studies and even website examples. What is it about these offers? Or maybe even better yet, how do you construct these offers to really resonate with the audience that you’re trying to reach?
John Dwyer
Yeah, Scott, it’s called message to market match. So I’m a baby boomer. If I was to walk into a menswear shop and buy a sports jacket, something like this, and they offered me a skateboard as a incentive, then they’re idiots. I’m not going to be on a skateboard. So therefore, however, if they said to me, Look, here’s a dining voucher, yeah, okay, that would suit my profile. And so it’s all about message to market match. And really, having done this for 1000 years, I kicked this business off in the 1800s really, there are only a number of things that are appealing to both sexes and all ages. And number one is vacation. Number two, movie vouchers. Number three is a dining voucher and outside and probably Number four would be fuel discounts, as in, gas discounts at the gas station. We’ve tried everything else, you know. We’ve tried microwave ovens, we’ve tried skateboards and bicycles and all sorts of things. And by far, absolutely, by far, the number one incentive to get people off the fence is a vacation. And the thing is, is that, as a result of that being so successful and having Seinfeld manage, you can’t keep it a secret, I was contacted just before COVID by international travel company, and they’ve given us access to unsold hotel rooms around the world. So what we do now is that that exact promotion that we gave to the greater building society, we now give to businesses in America, Australia, Europe, all sorts of places, and effectively we give them a voucher for $50 and they use that voucher as it’s a three to seven Night vacation, Las Vegas, New York, San Diego, Grand Canyon, you name it, all the hot spots, Cancun Mexico. Basically, they that that voucher is worth about $1,000 because it’s a three to seven Night vacation. And they, they, being business owners, give it to people when they buy their product or service. And that is the Happy Meal toy from heaven.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, wow. And what also struck me about it was it didn’t have to relate directly to whatever the line of work that you do. I think one, you’ll have to correct me on this, because I saw a few, but you were giving beers to someone along the way. If I remember that right, what was that story?
John Dwyer
Yeah, real quick one, it’s a turf farm, as in grass. So they’re selling grass, the stuff in the front yard and backyard, not the other type. And so I visited them. They come to one of my seminars, and they said, Look, you know, can you visit us? As it turned out, they were not far away from where I live, on the Gold Coast in Australia. So I visited them. And he pointed that he had two miles worth of turf grass, okay? And he said, look, we’ve got to move it. But he said, The trouble is, is that we charge, let’s say $6 per square meter. He said, the guy down the road drops his price to $5.80 per square meter, then we have to drop to 550 and of course, the usual race to the bottom. And I said, Okay, well, who are your target audience? And he said, well, not mum and dads, because they would just buy a front yards worth of grass or backyards with the grass. He said, our target audience are landscapers. They’ll buy two or three homes at a time. I said, Okay, what do you think they like? Because 99.9% of them are men. And he said, I don’t know. You tell me you’re the marketing guy. And I reckon they would like prestige beer. They normally drink a working man’s beer, but why don’t we give them the prestige beer, which in Australia is called crown lager. It’s the beer that you only drink if you’re wearing a suit, right? And so that’s what we did. We put a campaign out both email and snail mail, because a lot of these guys are not tech savvy, and we just said, look for every homes worth of grass that you buy from our turf farm versus someone else, we will give you a carton of this prestige beer. He rings me up six days into the promotion and said, JD, we have a problem. I said, Oh God, here we go, Houston. And I said, What’s the issue? And he said, we’ve got no more grass. We’ve run out of two miles worth of grass because of the offer of the free carbon the beer. And I said to him, what? He said, Look, I’ve got one guy who was the biggest pain in the backside on price. He’d always ring me and say, look, I can get it down the road cheaper. He rang me and said, could he get 18 homes worth? The grass by Friday, 1800s with a grass. He said, I don’t care when the grass gets you, I need to be by Friday. I’ve got a party.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s amazing. So JD help us, kind of, to bring this back to to some extent, back to Earth for folks listening. How can they sit down and start to construct their Wow approach to marketing?
John Dwyer
Yeah. Look, first of all, to recognize direct response is very different from overall marketing. Okay, so most of the businesses that we have these days on board are doing south of a million dollars. There’s a few doing five and 10 million. Sudden, I’ve got one on board doing 23 million. But, you know, the vast majority of, well, 96% of businesses in America are doing under a million dollars turn up. And so therefore, they don’t have an advertising agency. They don’t have a marketing manager. They’re running nine to five. In fact, that’s silly, probably nine to eight at night, just, you know, keeping the head above audit. And so therefore what they don’t want, what they’re not looking for, is a brand building campaign, and they just don’t have the money to keep that going. What they want is to be able to advertise on social media today or television or radio, whatever it might be today, and get a result tomorrow. And the best way to do that is to follow the five components of direct response marketing, and they are number one, highlight the audience’s problem. Number two, aggravate that problem. Number three, provide the solution, which is normally buy my product. Number four, provide proof, which is normally testimonials. And then number five is a strong CTA, which call to action. And if you want to condense that down to two things, is problem solution marketing. And so if you’re a weight loss company, you would identify the problem by saying, Look, are you overweight and not feeling good about yourself? Number two, you’d aggravate it by saying, Look, you know, someone’s just around the corner. Don’t you want to look good in your swimsuit? Number three, provide the solution. Come on to my dietary program, and you look like Miss World Within a month. And then number four, normally testimonials, that’s proof. And then number five, of course, you know, come to Jenny, craig.com, or whatever it might be. So it really is just problem solution marketing that they need to get into their heads, because you haven’t got the budget to put a brand campaign out there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. And I think the thing that we, we tend to do is, is get, like, one or two of those pieces, but not all of them. I think we’re just running in so many directions. We’re trying so many things. So what’s your take on where we should be doing this? Should we be doing it everywhere? Should we be doing it on all channels? Or is there a right target, or a right way to target our activity?
John Dwyer
Yeah. I mean, obviously all of us are looking for as least wastage as pop as possible. And Zuckerberg moves the goal posts just about every week. So therefore, you know, makes it more difficult for, you know, Facebook and Instagram to work as well as it did the week before. Let me give you what I think is a pretty clever hack that we’ve come up with. And said, if you’re all going to be advertising on Facebook. And you know, most small businesses have dabbled in that. Then, rather than just put your product there as a video or an image, and then you’ve got your copy on top of it, we’ve got something that we call the Facebook contest formula. And how it works is that we suggest to businesses give away your product or service as a prize. Keeping in mind, I’ve done all the big scratch fingers with Murdoch newspapers around the world, and the monopoly style promotions with McDonald’s and the kfcs and seven elevens, and I’ve done a lot all that big sweepstake stuff. So contest is my middle name, and what we suggest to people is that, look, just give away your product or service on Facebook. And so if you’re a lawn mowing company, you give away lawn mowing services. You know, if you’re selling sweet, you give away lounge sweet. And what happens is that whoever enters that contest clearly wants your product. And so they’ve just glowed in the dark as being a warm prospect, not a prospect, a warm prospect. And to give you an idea of how that works, we have a dentist practice. Just last month, we actually said to him, Okay, why don’t you give away the Invisalign braces? So for kids these days, they don’t want the metal in their teeth, they want the invisible braces. And they’re worth about four or $5,000 they don’t cost him that. So we ran a contest and said, listen to parents, if you’ve got a child with crooked teeth and you might like to win these invisible braces, guess what? He got just under he went for this. He spent $30 a day. That’s all. It was, $30 a wow. So multiply that by seven in a week, and you’ve got just over $200 expenditure. He got just under 1000 entries into that in a week for less than $210 whatever it was. He gave one away. But he’s got 999 parents who glowed in the dark and said, My child has crooked teeth. You don’t get a well knowledge for that. Wow. And so, yeah, that’s a bit of a hack. If people want to consider doing that, you don’t need my help. You can do it yourself. Obviously, you know, we do help if people want it. But that idea in itself can be a game changer for any business to attract massive leads for a low cost.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. There’s some folks who want to know how they can get in touch with you, and we’ll get there in just a second. Before we do, I’ve got one more question for you. JD, and I ask this of all my guests, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
John Dwyer
Yep, two things. Biggest Secret that most business owners, in my experience, don’t use, and that is, is that they sell on price. You should never, ever sell on price, because at the end of the day, the guy down the road is going to beat you pretty easily. If it’s just price that you’re offering, you offer someone an incentive, and that is, buy my product, and you get a free vacation. He can’t copy that in a hurry. He just can’t or buy my product, get movie passes. The fact of the matter is, the very you know, when most business owners went to university or college, they got taught how to be a good technician, whatever that might be, whether it’s, you know, landscaping or whether it’s a doctor or dentist, no one ever taught them how to attract customers. That’s why you’ll see a lot of medical centers empty, because they’re very, very smart, IQ wise. But no one at the doctors Institute ever taught them how to get customers, you know. And the other thing that I have to say to you is that, if I was, you know, talking on stage, and I do that quite often, just collect data, there’s a company out there called Amazon that proves that works. And yet I can tell you you can go to any restaurant. I’m only picking this industry as an example because it’s a classic. You can go to any restaurant in the US tonight, and you can spend whatever you like, and they’ll let you leave and not know who the hell you are. It is insane. And you know when you say, Oh, well, there’s more, but no, McDonald’s don’t collect data. Yeah, they’ll have a QI code or an app sitting on the counter that if you really work hard, you might be able to leave your name with someone. But you know, just the crazy part about it is that businesses do not collect data. And the restaurant game and the cafe game is the classic of all time. I was in a restaurant only last night with my wife, and the guy made the mistake of asking what I do for a living, and that’s just my wife just rolls her eyes and goes, I know he’s going to tell everyone what to do with their business, you know? And I said that to him. I said, Look, we’re going to spend $150 here tonight. We’re going to get up and leave, and you won’t know who we are. And he went, Oh, stupid, am I? And so he patted me on the back and said, That’s a great idea. Guess? What do you think he collected our data before we left. And by the way, Scott, just to give you how to demonstrate how powerful that is, we have a restaurant in Melbourne, Australia called the lobster cave, and it’s an upmarket restaurant that nobody lives but just $204 a couple was the average. Okay, so it’s a reasonably expensive restaurant, and a few years ago, he joined my program, and I said to him, Look, stop the 750,000 he was spending on TV and Facebook and everything else, and just give your waitresses 50 cents for every name and contact details that they get. So when there’s four businessmen having lunch or dinner, the waitress walks up and puts a little bit of paper about the size of an iPhone in front of them, and it just says, win dinner for 10 of your friends at the end of the month. The end of the month. Give us your name, your email and your phone number. It’s the phone number we’re after. And then of an afternoon, at three o’clock, when he checks his 150 seat restaurant is only half full, he tells his secretary to send out one of my text messages, and it would say something like, Chef Pierre would like to invite you and your wife to come along tonight for a special lobster tail meal for two that’s $79 Okay, now they can leave less than 200 a bottle of water is 25 bucks in this place, right? So I shouldn’t say bathe and switch it to seafood restaurant. But anyway, so, so therefore that goes out to only, only probably 500 people on his list, and she comes in 10 minutes later to his office and says, We are all booked out within 10 minutes. And that’s the power of having someone’s phone number that you can text and offer to them every afternoon and fill your business.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, it’s remarkable. JD, there’s some folks this is exactly what they need. They’ve loved their stories, but they want to know how they can put it to use in their world. They want to know more about the work you do. Where they where can they find out?
John Dwyer
No, look, I’m so rich I have my own private island, Scott so I don’t give out any contact details these days. Oh, I wish that was true. I wish that was true. Yes, look at just none of this info at rubbish. Just send me an email [email protected], so my website is the Institute of wow. That’s W, O, w.com, but if you wanted to have a chat with me about anything, [email protected]
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Head on over to the Instituteofwow.com as well. You’ll have a great time, and you will learn a ton as well. JD, thanks so much for being on the show today. It’s just a privilege and honor having you here. I really appreciate it. And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact John Dwyer
With over 30 years of experience, John Dwyer helped businesses of all sizes achieve remarkable success by focusing on creating unforgettable “WOW” moments. John is passionate about showing business owners how to cut through the noise with bold, results-driven campaigns that lead to measurable growth. He aims to teach others how to craft marketing that genuinely surprises and delights customers, ensuring long-term profitability and brand loyalty. John offers resources, coaching, and insights at The Institute of WOW to help entrepreneurs differentiate their businesses and create powerful customer experiences that turn heads and drive results.
Want to learn more about John Dwyer’s work at The Institute Of Wow? Check out his website at https://theinstituteofwow.com/