Marketing Plan For A Beauty Salon: What to do when your competition COPIES you…

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.

Hair Salon Marketing Tips: When your competition copies you…

Hair Salon Marketing Tips: When your competition copies you…

Do you find it annoying when a competing salon sees how successful you are, and simply copies your advertising for themselves?

Yep, there it is, virtually a direct copy of the ad you ran only last week.

Well, get over it. Pay it no more attention. In fact, you should be celebrating it. Because what they’re seeing (and copying) is only the tip of the iceberg of your success.

What they cannot see, and therefore cannot copy, is all that bulk below the waterline – the systems that turn that great marketing into solid sales behind the counter.

I know this because it happens to us all the time.

Just this week, one of our operatives in England emailed me a link to the website of yet another salon marketing wannabecopy.jpg who’s seen how Worldwide Salon Marketing has grown from a spare-room start-up into a multi-million dollar business – and wants ‘in’ on the action.

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Yet another one – if you search the web long enough you’ll find more and more of these sites popping up, purporting to offer salon owners ‘the’ answers to all things marketing.
Apart from a website, few have any more depth to them.

 

This new player – he’s by no means the first, and won’t be the last – has even gone so far as to blatantly copy our product names, e.g., he’s promoting his own ‘Inner Circle’ program, he’s offering his own ‘7-Step Mini Marketing Course’, and more carbon copies of the systems and marketing collateral we’ve developed over the last 5 years.

Our ‘spy’ was worried about our new ‘competition’. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. Because I know that 99% of all start-up business owners fail to do the things which create depth, structure and longevity for their business. In other words, they do no more than enough to skim the surface for short-term cash, and don’t invest in resources to create a long-term business.

The bigger we get (400 current member salons, growing by 30-40 per month) the more we invest in strengthening the foundations.

Here at head office, there are ten staff engaged in coaching members, providing member services, marketing, internet support, accounts and product development. In New Zealand and America, we have franchisees devoted to supporting our Members in those countries, and soon, similar operations in the UK.

Over the years we’ve invested millions on establishing systems for database management, offline and online marketing, seminar events, product packaging, product delivery, intellectual property development, member services, and office management.

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