Facebook Ninja 8
Welcome to session 8 of Facebook Ninja. We are going to go ahead and get started. Now, I am very excited to bring to you some really cool content today. Now, we’re taking a tiny break from our normal Facebook content based on the questions I’ve been getting primarily over the last couple of weeks.
Folks are asking us some more, I will call them marketing questions as opposed to not specifically credit card data on Facebook questions. Obviously, we’ve covered a lot of that over the last seven weeks but I’ve been getting questions from folks about, how do I niche my product? How do I make my product or service an experience? How do I make it so that people can’t help but refer me to other people? How do I make it so that my clients will be so loyal that they will pay, stay and refer and never leave?
So I wanted to share with you this information. I wanted to talk a little bit about experiential marketing today. I wanted to talk about what Lobster, NetJets, Exclusive Resorts, Disney, Red Bull and the Blair Witch Project all have in common and how you can apply that business to your business to make you rich. And then of course, you’re going to drive the exact, right, ideal clients, prospects or patients to that business through the use of your credit card data on Facebook Ninja.
So this is an awesome business called Now, I want to tell you if you’re not familiar with them, the Catch a Piece of Maine story because there are so many business lessons in it. So Catch a piece of Maine started out as two brothers who live in Maine and their dad was a lobster fisherman and they were lobster fishermen part-time while they’re working their way through high school and college. And they would go out on their boat. They’d fish for the lobster. They’d bring the lobster in and everybody have this little booths set up on the dock and kind of like this open air fish market. And everybody, all the customers, all the folks who lived around and the tourists would come down to the docks and buy live lobster. And the brothers got to thinking and said, you know what, everybody, all of the fishermen are selling lobster in the exact same spot. So the customer can go from one booth to another booth to another booth, have their pick of the lobster they want and basically use one vendor’s price to beat up the other vendor. So basically all the fishermen were selling lobster pretty much at the same price. And it was pretty much a commodity.
And they said how do we change that? Well they said we need to sell in a competitive vacuum. We need to sell were there aren’t 20 other fishermen selling the exact same lobster. So they bought three or four coolers, filled it up with their lobster, put it on the back of their pick-up truck and drove like an hour north to another community that was an hour inland not right on the ocean. And they set-up a little booth in another market, let’s say a flea market or a food festival type of thing but did not have any lobster because they weren’t right on the ocean. So they were able to double their prices and sell the exact same lobster where no one else was selling lobster and make a whole lot more money. So that was the first thing they did and it worked phenomenally well. Pretty soon, they had hired some employees to do fishing and employees to go drive lobster to other communities that weren’t too close to the ocean where they could sell all by themselves. And it was working really well. And they said hey, let’s just keep running this business. And their mother said no, no, no. You’re out of college now. You got to go to business school. You got to really learn this stuff. So they said okay fine and they went to business school.
In the business school, they said, “How can we make our lobster more of an experience?” So they came up with a business plan. The business plan was to sell ownership in Catch a Piece of Maine. So what that meant was the customer would pay let’s say a couple of thousand dollars and what they would get in exchange for that is they would get their own personalized lobster trap. So there would be a lobster trap in the ocean that had their name on it and they would have a designated lobster fisherman, one of the employees whose job it was to fish that particular trap. They get a certificate of authenticity certifying their ownership of the trap. They’d get a map of the ocean where their trap was. They would get a DVD of a day in the life of their fisherman, getting up in the morning, at four in the morning whenever it was, going out in the boat, driving out, motoring the boat out to their trap, checking the trap, pulling out the lobster, put it in the box and here’s your lobster.
And then the membership covered the trap with their engraved little nameplate on it and the map and the DVD footage of the fisherman fishing their trap. It didn’t cover any lobster, so they paid for their rights to buy the lobster caught in their trap. So they pay for the right to be a member and then they pay for the lobster on top of that. And instead of just sending lobster, you would call up and say, “Hhey, I want some lobster for dinner tomorrow night.” They would FedEx in dry ice the lobster. The lobster would come with bibs. The lobster would come with sauce. It would come with appetizers. It would come with dessert. It would come with the rolls. It would come with everything. So you didn’t just get lobster. You got a whole meal. And it wasn’t a meal for two. Like you’d get lobster for six and you’re not going to eat all that lobster by yourself so you’re going to have friends over.
And your friends are going to go, where did you get all this cool stuff? And you’re going to show them the DVD. This is our lobster trap in the ocean up in Maine. And here’s our guy who goes and fishes it out for us. Here’s our map and here’s where it is. Like people were framing the maps. This is so cool. I have a lobster trap and a lobster fisherman. So this was their business plan. And the professor said absolutely not. No way it’s going to work. They lost the business plan competition. Their professor said really bad idea. So they said, “Now, we know it’s a good idea”. So they launched the Catch a Piece of Maine lobster membership program and they sold out. I believe they did literally over $1 million of revenue in like less than a year or two.
And the fact that you could buy a membership in Catch a Piece of Maine instantly, they got the national press. They’ve gone on CNBC, CBS, FOX, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS. Literally, every major media outlet covered the story of you could have your own lobster fisherman. So it’s really, really awesome. So first thing they did was they changed the location where they sold so they could sell what was a commodity product for twice as much money as everyone else. Then they got customers to pay them for the rights to buy their highly priced product. I can go down the street literally 3 minutes to Wegmans or a massive, big grocery store chain and buy fresh lobster and it doesn’t cost anywhere near – I mean it costs less than half of what I would pay Catch a Piece of Maine for lobster. Charging extra in this membership model got the national press. And they felt wow, that’s really good. What could we do next?
So then they said let’s charge more. What could we charge for more than just a membership in Catch a Piece of Maine? How about a Catch a Piece of Maine vacation? Where you fly to Maine, we pick you up at the airport, put you up in a hotel. The next morning, we wake you up. Your fisherman comes. He wakes you up at four in the morning, drives you down the docks. You get on the boat with the fisherman. You drive the boat out to your lobster traps. You pull your trap out of the ocean. You open it up, you grab your lobster, you put it in the box and they can ship it to your home address to eat it in the dry ice so it’s there when you get home. Or we can literally serve it up to you the same day right here. And they have a film crew that films your whole process. And they were able to charge a veritable fortune for the Catch a Piece of Maine vacation.
Now, what does it cost them to deliver? Other than sending a taxi to pick you up at the airport, making a guy drive to your house and it doesn’t cost them anything to take them out in the boat. The boat is going out anyway. Literally, I mean a taxi ride, a ride to the dock and that’s it and maybe serving up the lobster. Plus the film crew and the editing. But now, you go home with this DVD movie of your lobster experience. And who are you going to show? You are going to show it to everybody. I mean people love this stuff. They were ordering a lot. The people who did the vacation ordered so much more lobster because they wanted everybody to come over and watch the movie and say I fished this lobster out of the ocean myself and I’m serving it to you. Absolutely brilliant. And they made millions and millions and millions of dollars selling lobster vacations because they kept thinking outside the box and going higher and higher up the market place in terms of customer value. Absolutely brilliant. And we’re going to talk about how do we apply all of this to your business even if you think you can’t.
This is a company called NetJets which is owned now by Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway. Now NetJets is instead of buying a corporate jet for yourself and paying for it to be housed in a hangar and maintained and fueled and a full-time pilot to be there anytime you want.Instead of chartering a jet and paying way too much, NetJets is membership fractional ownership in a private jet. So you say I’ll give you 25 grand, Warren Buffet. And he says that entitles you to 25 hours on Citation Fouror whatever it is. You have to give them 24 hours’ notice. You can be anywhere in the world and say hey, I’m Buffalo, New York. I want to go to California tomorrow. You show up at the private jet section of the Buffalo Airport tomorrow at whatever time they tell you. Your jet is waiting for you. You hop in. They fly you to California. You tell them when to pick you up. You hop in. They fly you home.
So you have fractional ownership in a private jet. Now, what do they do with the jet the rest of the time you are not flying it? Because you’ve only got 25 hours. Well, they sell 25-hour packages, $50,000, $100,000 packages whatever it is to as many other people as they can. They’re literally bigger than some airlines now and more profitable than most airlines because it obviously does not cost let’s say $1000 an hour to fly the thing because they are subsidizing it among their members. And depending on how many hours you want, how big a jet you want obviously the price goes up. You can spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year buying access, more access to a much bigger jet. So it’s very, very cool. So there are now a ton of copycat companies. If you look in Robb Report or Affluent Traveler or Forbes, you will see tons of ads, probably three or four in every magazine for different fractional jet companies all competing with NetJets. None of them existed before NetJets.
They basically created an industry. They swiped an idea from one industry and distributed it in the airplane industry thus creating a new subsegment of the airplane industry. What industry did they get it from? Time shares. It’s basically a time share of a jet just like the lobster vacation, it’s not a time share of a lobster trap because you’re not sharing your lobster trap with anybody else but it’s the same inspired idea. How could you sell fractional ownership of what you do? We’re going to talk that in a minute.
This is Exclusive Resorts. Exclusive Resorts did the same thing that NetJets did except instead of time shares where you get a condo or a room in a resort you get a time share for multimillion dollar mansions. So every home in Exclusive Resorts depending on the level is usually $2, $3, $4, $5 million. It’s like 10,000 square feet. It’s like a cabin in Aspen that’s 5-star amazing. It’s an apartment, a penthouse in New York, a penthouse in London. It’s an estate in Mumbai. I mean these are amazing, amazing properties. So Exclusive Resorts starts at like $250,000 a year and you get X number of days that you can use. Again, there are holiday blackout date stuff like a normal time share but it’s a time share of a much bigger, nicer property. So they’re charging a whole lot more for it. So they took the time share industry and went up market. Instead of paying your $18,000 as a lifetime membership for a week, a year at some Hilton hotel, you pay $250,000 a year for your 2 weeks or 1 month or whatever in $2 million houses. So they changed the industry by just changing who they marketed to.
And it doesn’t just stop with lobsters and jets and houses. There is now a site called fractionallife.com that is completely devoted to just showing, selling fractional shares. You can buy fractional shares in an exotic car. What does that mean? It means I pay my 50 grand a year whatever it is and for let’s say a month or two or how ever long it is I get to drive for 2 weeks, I drive a Ferrari. Two weeks, I pick a Lamborghini. And I have $250,000 to half a million dollar car, exotic sports car for a couple of weeks a year. There is fractional ownership in jewelry. So you know, you want to rent that necklace that you saw Reese Witherspoon wear to the Oscar’s. You can buy fractional ownership in a jewelry line you could never afford. And now for X amount of days, you get to pretend you’re a Hollywood star or whatever it is. Fractional life is really, really cool. And it’s a site, it’s a portal that basically aggregates all of the fractional offers, programs out there into one place. And I highly, highly suggest checking it out.
So what could you sell fractional “ownership” of in your business? Now we’ve done this a few different ways. We’ve did this for a financial adviser. And for that financial adviser, we created a “trading program.” So it was his proprietary method of how he was picking stocks and options and generating these very reasonable consistent returns that were very cool. But how we marketed it as, instead of just a normal financial adviser you know you pay me a percent and a half of the assets that I manage for you, we sold it as fractional ownership. So if you pay let’s say the 1 1/2 percent plus the $3000 membership fee to get access to this portfolio, what you got was you got the financial adviser doing a screen capture video of him placing trades in your account. So you got to watch him do the research of how he was evaluating, what options to buy and what stocks. You got to see him actually place the trade in your actual account and you got a personalized DVD of here’s the research I did for you to identify this opportunity. Here’s me doing it. Here’s how this works. And now here, you can see the premium coming in, you can see the dividends coming in. So it’s like videotaping what he would’ve done anyway just like the lobster.
The guy was going out on a boat to fish the lobster out of the water anyway. You just paid extra to tag along. So for the financial adviser, you paid to watch him do what he does. He was doing it anyway. We’re just charging extra for the rights to experience it. There was even a higher end program where you got to come and sit with him in the office and watch him do all this. And we had some licensing issues with one of these. But we had it where he would let the customer push the button. He would say here’s the trade. It’s all ready to go. Just hit the submit button and watch it happen. Now with the advent of sites like E-Trade and all the online trading, is that as cool as it would’ve been 10 or 15 years ago? To a certain extent, it’s not because anybody can go online and place a stock trade. But if you’re marketing to the person who isn’t going to go on E-Trade, who wants to help, who doesn’t want to do it themselves, letting them be a part of the process, showing them the process, the black box is cool and letting them be a part of it if you sell it right is really cool.