The Marketing 24-7 Podcast

In my business I like to use the content I create in articles, blog posts, white papers, podcasts and interviews to develop a position in marketing called omnipresence.

Omnipresence means your prospects can't look in any direction bumping into you. Somebody is talking about you, somebody is showing them you, you are in the media they see you on socials. 

The most effective thing you can do for yourself is to put yourself in the centre of the right group of people who you want talking to each other about you. This will lead to a mass of potential clients to “swim upstream” into your network and start paying you money.

To evidence the power of this phenomenon, I outline my client acquisition data from the last full year of the consulting arm of my business.

For the year I attained 76 new clients. 10 of them came to me directly from my marketing, two found me through my wife and eight others had worked with me over the years but are now in their own business or are fronting a new business and sought out my services. The “eye popper” a whopping 63% of last year’s new clients amounting to 45 businesses “swam upstream” via my network (of which I am in the centre of).  

Eleven (11) came from purchasing a book. That too is a little deceptive, because most of them said they bought the book as the second thing after hearing about me somewhere in a newsletter they read, or someone mentioning me to them. They then went to Amazon and bought a book. 

There are two things about these numbers that I think are extremely instructive. 

One is that upstream is a significant strategy. 

Meaning you should find ways to put yourself in a similar position. Whether it is builders feeding clients upstream to a Mortgage Broker or a fabulous restaurant finding ways to get other types of businesses with the right customers, feeding clients upstream to them. 

Keep in mind, I specialise in advertising and marketing and yet 63% of my new clients came from someone else. What is more when I drill down into the 63%, there is no source that is really good by itself. One from here, one from there. two from here, three from there. It would have been nice just to have one or two sources that they all came from, but that is not the case. (In fact, it wouldn’t be nice because “one is the worst number” you can have in business – as I have already talked on about in multiple podcasts.

In my world, I like to provide my referral network with great content and resources to use for their purposes. I trade on the fact that everybody is lazy when it comes to content creation and, they welcome good content that they do not have to create themselves. This provides a positive benefit for them. In doing this what I have essentially created is around a hundred influencers who expose me to their customers on a regular basis. 

From this, the best customers swim upstream. 

The smartest one’s swim upstream. 

The biggest spenders swim upstream. 

The most common comment I get is, I have heard about you here, heard about you there, so I decided to go to the source, and find you for myself. 

The second thing to understand is that if you assume that the 45 new businesses are worth on average forty to eighty thousand dollars in annual value as customers, that is a pretty big number. Which all came to me from simply stitching together little numbers, which cumulatively became a solid number.

This strategy takes work, this strategy is not for the faint hearted and at times this strategy requires you to get out of your comfort zone, but a considerable number of my clients that have adopted the same “swimming upstream” strategy conclusively swear by the results. 

To find out more about my Fast Money for entrepreneur strategies please visit petergianoli.com/fast-money

There was a time when coffee was coffee. Ice cream was ice cream. A phone was a phone. Even a pair of jeans was, just a pair of jeans.

There are still businesses stuck in this time warp, continuing to conduct business as if people still purchased products.

Today, that cup of coffee comes with more options than a Porsche. A double shot, soy milk, almond milk, extra hot, topped up, half strength, in a takeaway cup because it tastes better. Thus, the $5.50 price for the 50 cents cup of coffee.

But even that is only half the story.

Breaking the price - product link

The profit margin of the double shot of extra something far exceeds the profit margin of the cup of coffee itself. The Prada Shearling Tote selling for $4,450 does not cost 200 times more to make than the tote at kmart for $20. This is a path to profit and to greater acceptance by affluent consumers. But as I said, it is only half the story.

Ordinary products morphing into their own category

Like them or not, Starbucks altered the coffee drinking world.

It redefined itself from a coffee shop to the "third-place" - home, office, Starbucks in between. It positioned itself as a merchant of feelings, of status, and most of all, of experience. A new category. And many other businesses have followed. Dean & Deluca (groceries), Under Armour (undies), Varsity Burgers and my favourite Burning Man (a camping trip in the desert with a bit of music ), have jazzed up their offerings to be in a new stratosphere with luxury pricing to match.

Price is no longer tied to product.

Far more appealing to "people with money"

As soon as you disconnect price and product in your own mind about your own products and services, you'll be liberated to make a great deal more money and to have much greater success appealing to the affluent and the top-end-of-town.

The future of luxury is still very much in brick-and-mortar stores. 

Not online, despite many consumers having been forced to become more literate vis-à-vis online purchasing since COVID. Luxury is not a commodity, not needed, not repeatable, not an afterthought. Gaining time and getting a deal is essential for commodities. 

Spending time and money and feeling good about it is the principle of luxury.

Luxury will remain a purchase with a purpose, a space where brands count – and will retain pricing power.

Stores are much better adapted to developing an emotional tie between consumer and the brand. Telling a story in store is easier than it is online. Shopping is social. Done well, it is a communal experience. Shopping online is not remotely comparable. 

The exclusivity factor also plays a role. 

“If it is luxury, it should be limited distribution. 

E-commerce is innately democratic, luxury is not.

For a while now at Nike, you have been able to try on a pair of sneakers in store and have them shipped to your home for no fee, which will avoid you having to carry the box around all day. This is now described as “phygital” a seamless and unified brand experience that offers the best of physical and digital platforms. 

Gucci also announced that in certain cities around the globe, they would deliver a selection of Gucci items from “store to door” in ninety minutes.

Do you need that handbag in the next hour?

There are considerations beyond convenience. If you want a custom experience, custom service, product personalisation, and a unique memory of how exciting it was to hold or wear your product for the first time, e-commerce has limitations that in-store can exploit.

The irreplaceable value of real-life experience will ensure the future of luxury includes a heavy reliance on physical stores. 

Particularly if luxury stores adapt to better serve and connect to customers. 

More luxury stores will be unique, “third places” (not work, not home) that offer opportunities for learning, community, networking and entertainment, in addition to selling watches and handbags.

There is the potential for stores to become places for “story doing” beyond just “story telling”. 

Gucci Wooster features a screening room with custom 3D screen technology, headphones and armchairs in turmeric velvet. 

The multi-sensorial space also features resident DJ’s and has a dedicated in-store Gucci app utilising augmented reality allowing the customer to point a provided iPad’s or iPhone’s camera at the tote and sneaker, customise it, and see it in a real-world setting. 

Check it out Here!

The wealthy person is a complicated creature. 

Research indicates the typical top-end-of-towner seeks incremental steps up, in a lot of things, makes major steps up, in one to three things, and remains unmoved by luxury, brand, experience or other factors in many other purchase categories. 

The wealthy are selective in what they indulge in.

Price is literally out the window in the care and feeding of the poodle, but the wealthy often recoil at the price of a Lexus, often preferring a Toyota.

This makes marketing to the wealthy a strategic undertaking. 

Clever brands have worked this out.

Luxury-goods have caught on and are engaging in a strategy called "luxury drop-down". 

Luxury goods like Mercedes or Coach bags have created lower-priced products - usually smaller, with fewer features, but of the same quality and bearing the brand name - encouraging the affluent consumer to cross the luxury line without qualm. 

Further, some luxury brands have found enormous leverage in leaving a huge chasm between their top-priced items and their new lower priced merchandise. 

Women who can't afford one, and even those who can, might blanch at a $10,000 Vera Wang dress but be quite happy to pay $199 for a Vera Wang blouse. But without knowledge of the $10,000 dress, they'd balk at such a high price for the blouse. 

It serves to have an ultra-expensive offering.

Some marketers, even go so far as to create and promote red-herring-priced goods or services they hope no one buys, only to set a standard that makes their actual prices seem imminently reasonable by comparison. 

Take a look at the Fullarton Spdoingapore's wine list for a perfect example of this!!

“How much money will a raving football fanatic, who has money, spend on football?

Virtually an unlimited amount!

This need not be restricted to football. Basketball, racing, sailing you name it, passion abounds.

“Sports fanatics’ insatiable itch”

Season tickets, VIP boxes, private memberships - they all sell to somebody!

Despite a single ticket to the football costing $60, season tickets can go for up to $2,000. But, the most luxurious VIP boxes require multi-year commitments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

How do sports get 50% of their revenue from 1 percent of customers? They scratch the “sports fanatics insatiable itch”!

Sport's marketers harness a very special kind of desire.

Fanatics will spend upward of a million dollars a year when bundled together with sponsorship and an all-inclusive experience. 

Become completely immersed in football, literally and figuratively. At the FIFA world cup for the right amount of money, you can invite your friends and clients and know that everyone will be treated like foreign dignitaries.

Even a usually frugal, conservative gentleman who drives a six-year-old Lexus, despite the fact he can afford the latest top of the line Mercedes, if he really, really loves football, he will buy a VIP box. 

Somehow, he will find a way to justify it. 

Half the money in the sports industry comes from exploiting this amazing propensity for a tiny percentage of fans to spend outrageous amounts of money. Whenever there are rabid, obsessive customers, there is a great business. 

And sport knows how to tip you upside down and empty your pockets.

You just need to find your clients insatiable itch, for your offering!!!

Kim Kardashian is one of the top copywriters on the planet - FACT! 

Even though she has probably never even heard the word “copywriting”. Nor, ever written a sales letter in her life. And though she may very well not even know what a good ad was if it fell out of the sky and landed in her bosom.

Brands seek her skills.

What makes her one of the best copywriters?

Let’s just put it this way:

Brands offer her circa a million dollars for a single social media post. Think about that: Seven figures for a few sentences of copy, mentioning a brand, selling a bag, cosmetic, or other commodity that probably is not that much more intrinsically valuable than its equivalent at Kmart.

She beats A-lister copy day in day out.

Show me any copywriter, A-list or otherwise, who can do that.

If you summoned the ghosts of David Ogilvy, Gene Schwartz and Gary Halbert, locked them in a secluded cabin with 10 A-list copywriters on the planet today and gave them a year deadline to write a similar tweet, with all the market research modern technology can deliver.

They couldn’t do what KK does with a single tweet.

The reason: 

It's not the “copy” doing the selling. 

The heavy lifting selling is being done by all the positioning, all the built-up celebrity, all the marketplace leadership, all the cult-like legions of followers, the omnipresence, and all the massive marketplace demand already in place before that copy is written. 

The copy merely pitches & asks for the order from there.

Which brings me to the point:

Stop deriding her, stop diminishing, her achievements, they are real.

We need to swallow our pride and see what KK can teach us when it comes to positioning, and I am not talking missionary 🤣

Sales are like legs day. Hard and brutal.

Punishment! Yet, when you work out legs, you're also activating muscle fibres in the rest of your body, arms, shoulders and even back. Just the same fashion, when you work in sales, you're activating muscle fibres in your marketing skillset as well.

So, the best advice you could ever give a business owner is to start doing some sales.

In most struggling organisations, there is tension between the sales team and the marketers.

Sales team complain that leads are lousy and insufficient. Marketing complain that sales want everything handed on a plate.

Enter the entrepreneur to adjudicate.

Before making a call, to side with marketing and or sales, at least "sharpen your saw".

Do a small amount of selling, take a half day "ride along" with one of your sales team. It will fire up your other skills, like marketing. Learning to better understand your customers and knowing how to cut through with messaging will be forever helpful.

With time, this will make you a better business person.

Why is it that so many people brag about legs day on social media? 

Very amusing! 

Yet, there is a million-dollar sales and marketing lesson embedded in the legs versus arms debate.

A lot of people build their upper body and neglect their legs. Fact. Unfortunately, doing this sets them up to fail. Same for entrepreneurs who focus only on marketing and place no effort in sales!

Boomers are rich.

They bought houses when they were affordable and sold off at the right times. They purchased hovels downtown, they sold for millions. Didn’t know how to pick stocks so invested long-term, a boring yet profitable strategy.

Patience and delayed gratification have been virtues.

As the wealthiest generation in history, Boomers currently hold $2.6 trillion in buying power.

Today, Boomers are RE-INVENTING their lives.

They are finding NEW places to work, NEW places to travel to, NEW ways to spend their days, NEW ways to spend time with their children and grandchildren, and NEW ways to stay vital and connected as they age.

Each choice represents enormous business opportunity.

Today's boomers are planning their full retirement at 80, not 65, and are looking for second, third, or fourth careers or new businesses.

Shrinking, fixed incomes, minimum spending are out the window.

Ken Gronbach, author of Common Census: Counterintuitive Guide to Generational Marketing states:

"They know what they want. At this point in their lives they want only three things:

1. Life made easy.
2. Time saved.
3. Not to be ripped off.

Boomers already own a lot of stuff.

Their needs are getting increasingly fewer, thus they are less interested in or seduced by things.

Boomers are service consumers more than product buyers. They want nothing as a thing; they want a thing that gives time, convenience, freedom, or ease.

Boomers still think in terms of "classic credibility".

Brand names matter, credible, relevant celebrity endorsements matter, years in business, professional affiliations, access to live humans for resolving problems all matter.

Above all else.

Boomers have had enough life experience to have been disappointed or felt ripped off by a number of purchases and marketers. And they are not eager to repeat the experience.

What happens to your business when the economy tanks?

It depends which part of the market you serve.

The impacts are not equal.

Avoid the middle:

The middle is the worst place to be in any market and doubly so when it tanks. 

Entrepreneurs targeting the middle find themselves unable to compete with the bottom on price or selection, or with the top on style, status, or service. 

They have no unique selling proposition to take to anyone.

The bottom is treacherous:

All the wars are waged at the bottom.

Buying rarely drops more than 5% to 10%, because the poor spend 90% of their money on necessities. Necessities somehow always get bought. But the profit margin goes away, as merchants battle over these consumers' shrunken spending power with price cutting as the only weapon.

The sanctuary of the Top

At the top, buying also drops by 5% to 10% because they only spend a tiny percentage of their money on necessities. Economic movements such as Inflation is not important to the wealthy, they continue to buy not just necessities but whatever the devil they want, regardless. 

Best yet for the merchants’ profit margins don't have to erode.

Then there is the Uber Top.

Sales of big yachts, custom made shoes, designer-name wristwatches, corporate hospitality and the like increase, when the economy upheaves. All such businesses serving this niche do very nicely despite the turmoil. Some can even afford to travel private into space.

The mandate.

To fully earthquake proof your home on a fault line, may require moving. 

Economy proofing a business does not necessarily require its physical relocation. Instead, it's as simple as moving to a different, more affluent group of customers.

I have over 25 years of experience as a sales and marketing strategist, and the epiphany I had before I even got started has been my most powerful.

I was a personal trainer before personal trainers were ever heard of 😂. In order to prevent my clients from hurting themselves, I produced a fact sheet called “Exercises to avoid and safe alternatives”. Strangely, my clients kept asking me for more copies and when I got a phone call from the local primary school asking for 500 copies, the penny dropped, and I realised what was going on.

I had become trusted in my niche.

That fact sheet was being passed around to family and friends. Bit by bit my fact sheet was positioning me as an authority. I was becoming seen by my niche community as an expert. The "go to guy for safe and effective exercise!"

I was wondering why my business was growing, with more and more clients coming to see me for exercise. I soon realised that this was due to my very effective marketing strategy!

My first "Marketing Epiphany".

Marketing Epiphany Number 1 - "Positioning yourself as an Authority turns the equation around". 

Clients come to you.

Fast forward to what I do today. 

I work to help my clients succeed by finding a place in the market that they can own. Sometimes this requires completely reinventing their business, but it's worth it in order to be successful.

Authority is a fast growth entrepreneur strategy

People often follow the lead of credible, knowledgeable experts when it comes to making decisions about their lives. 

Entrepreneurs who commit to utilise this strategy, do so, because they know that it will be wildly successful.

I have developed a resource on how you too can claim the authority position in your niche and or marketplace – to find out more please visit 

petergianoli.com/authority