Incentive based marketing can be rocket fuel if they get it right – Talk Marketing 066 – John Dwyer

Today’s guest has been running his business, the Institute of Wow for more than 22 years. In that time, he has been the secret weapon for brands including News Ltd, McDonald’s, 7 Eleven, the NRL, Madura Tea, KFC and BP to name some of them. He is the author of The Wow Manifesto Giant Book. He is known as Australia’s leading business marketing expert and the Seinfeld guy. In his professional headline he claims to teach how to double your client base in just six weeks. What you need to know about this man is that he absolutely loves a dad joke.

Today’s guest is John Dwyer, also known to his friends as JD.

00:00 Introductions.
14:33 How are you qualified to talk about incentive based marketing?
35:00 What is the number one incentive in the world right now?
54:41 Who do you worked with and how have you add value to their life?
1:03:16 What’s your recommendation for someone who wants to get better at incentive based marketing?
1:16:02 What should people read?
1:21:02 Who can you introduce us to who might enjoy to be a part of the Talk Marketing series?

Martin Henley
How have you been involved in into it? How long have you been involved in incentive based marketing?

John Dwyer
Oh, my career like decades. I swapped across to the small business sector about 10 years ago only because, you know, I said to my wife, look, we’re not getting any younger. I was consulting to McDonald’s and KFC, 7 elevens and News Ltd. I would do all the big scratch games. I mean, you guys in London would be very familiar with newspaper scratch games. I did pretty much all of the production and design of Rupert Murdoch scratch games throughout all of his newspapers. McDonald’s and the KFC, Looney Tune mugs and Daffy Duck that you’d get when you bought a bucket of chicken, all that sort of incentive based stuff. It was good, but you had to sort of go from boardroom to Boardroom. So I said to my wife, look, I think there’s a lot more money to be made if we swapped to the small business sector and we provide this IP to small businesses. I’ll never forget, I walked out of my first seminar here in Australia, and we had 100 people in the room 100 business owners, and I asked the people in the front row, what did they do for a living and the first one was a psychic. The second one made garden homes. And the third one was a she was a prediction, a predictor of the future. And I remember it morning tea.

John Dwyer
It was a lady who made garden gnomes, another level three lady sexy, but the lady who made God knows a lady who was a psychic. The other one was a gypsy like fortune tellers very similar. Yeah, I said to my wife, what I said, my wife thought, What the hell have we done, I’ve gone from the corporate world where people were business people, and we’re coming to the seminar world, just kill me. That’s when I said to him, I’m driving to the hardware store to buy some rope and I realised that if you talk to a small business owner in the corporate language, for example, KPI, they thought I was talking about a new chicken chain. So I had to understand that, you know, small businesses are very, very good technicians. They’re great at what they do. So they’re a good pool cleaner, or they’re great carpet cleaner. Or they’re a great landscaper, or a butcher or a baker. But they don’t have a lot of time and a lot of skills in the area of marketing. The silly thing that I did was went down the path of providing consultancy, and as I said, right at the very beginning, I’ve learned in this last few years, really they don’t want consultancy, they just want done for you package promotion. So that’s what we do.

Martin Henley
Okay, so that’s what brought you to the incentive based marketing. So how does so we get a sense of how this works for big businesses? How does it work for small, what kind of businesses does it work for? That’s what I’m interested to know.

John Dwyer
Well, the one that we do these days, and it’s the number one incentive in the world that statistics show that there’s two incentives that are probably the best in the world. Number one is holidays, you give someone a free holiday when they buy your refrigerator or your air conditioning system, or you clean the pool or whatever it might be. Holidays, particularly after the pandemic. Of course, a red hot is the hottest Happy Meal toy you could possibly think of. The other one, which we’re just launching in a couple of weeks time is fuel discounts. So therefore, we’re launching at fuel discount and in Australia, the biggest supermarkets, which are Woolworths and Coles, if you spent $30. With them, you get a four cents a litre fuel discount, we’re going to be able to allow the local butcher, baker down the road or cafe to give up to $1 per litre fuel discount, and it will only ever cost him 10% of his revenue. So he’s got a choice. You either discount my butcher shop goods by 10% or I give them petrol discounts up to $1.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?