Marketing Plan For A Beauty Salon: What To Do When Your Competition COPIES You…
We’ve often had Members ask what to do when a nearby salon sees the marketing churned out by one of ‘our’ salons – and attempts to copy it.
For most Members, this is rarely a big problem, mainly because the salon ‘swiping’ the ideas in our Member’s advertising hardly ever ‘gets it’, and invariably makes a botch-job of it…. gets half of it right, but leaves out crucial direct-response compenents and therefore the ‘copy-cat’ ad fails miserably.
When you’re successful, when your success is obvious, you will always get people attempting to copy you. And if a rival sees your salon packed with clients, the queue heading off down the street, they ARE going to wonder what you’re doing that they’re NOT doing, and a (very) few will attempt to second-guess you and some will get it half right.
I know this because as Worldwide Salon Marketing gets bigger, as our reach stretches further and further around the planet, there are more and more people trying to ‘knock us off’. In fact, there is one fly-by-night marketer in Canada – whose name I’m not generous enough to publicize here – who has carbon-copied not only our products and services down to exactly the same brand names, but plagiarised our entire lead generation and sales system as well. He’s got more front than Dolly Parton, effectively passing himself off as us.
This is a guy who was actually representing us for a short time. Enough time for him to obtain all our copyrighted and trademarked material, and for us to realize he was world-class at over-promising and under-delivering, lousy at supporting Members and hopeless at any kind of follow-through. In other words, he wanted the cream but wasn’t prepared to put in the backbone of support infastructure to give it substance.
Now, I’m not going to reveal here the steps we’re taking to counteract this threat. Safe to say, when you’re about to punch someone, you don’t flag it, you just punch. He’ll probably take some of our business from us in the short term. But in the medium term, we’ll win because we know that there are VERY few people in the world who are prepared to invest in all the stuff, the systems, to keep the wheels that nobody ever sees turning.
And sooner or later, the salon owners who sign up for his system (er, actually our system) will quickly figure out that you get what you pay for.
Had to laugh recently when one of our own Members faced this exact problem. A rival salon in the same shopping mall decided to compete via price war, offering $5 haircuts. Our Member soon put a stop to that, with a sign outside her shop that said it all.
“We Fix $5 Haircuts.”
Amen.
