Chris Carr: Welcome to Digital Marketing Masterclass, my name is Chris Carr. As always, I am the president and founder of Farotech and my mission with Digital Marketing Masterclass is to find, identify and talk with some of the greatest marketing minds on the planet. John Logars name came up right away as I started to think of the new format of the show. I’ve spoken with John multiple times in the past. Amazing business guy, an incredible marketing mind, and is just incredibly good at communicating the deficiencies of where people are missing it in the world of marketing. John started his first business when he was 18 and now he is a leading business strategist, marketing maven, and sales process maestro with over 33 years of consulting experience under his belt. He is a top speaker on social media, niche market leader generation and business development. As the founder of Consulting Unleashed, he also coaches digital marketing agencies and consultants. He has also helped 1000s of entrepreneurs, freelancers, and agencies get out of their own way and build the businesses they aspire to have. John, welcome to the show.
John Logar: Thanks for having me, Chris. I appreciate it. It’s good to reconnect. It’s been way too long since we’ve spoken last time.
Chris Carr: I know, we’ve got the whole pandemic thing. I think the last time I saw you was Russell Bronson’s event in Dallas. This was years ago. Now you’ve gone from Australia to California to Austin, but now you’re stuck in Australia. What’s it like?
John Logar: I can tell you because we’re in the future here right now in terms of this conversation. So it’s Saturday morning here and it’s Friday afternoon for you so I can tell you the weather is going to be a balmy 90 degrees today. The water temperature is sitting around 82 degrees. After this interview, I’m literally heading out on a paddleboard and going for a bit of a surf. Here on the east coast of Australia, it’s really pretty. We’ve been very, very fortunate. The rest of the country is in lockdown at the moment again, but we’re open up here and we’ve been relatively safe. But yeah, interesting times, and I couldn’t have picked a better place to be stuck in during a pandemic. I’m chomping at the bit to get back home to the US, man. I’m chomping at the bit.
Chris Carr: I totally get it. I totally get it. You’ve been doing this game for 36 years. Just think, though, if this happened in 1990? Like, what would have happened to the world in 1990 if the pandemic was around then?
John Logar: We did have some pretty interesting times in the 90s. Financially, we did have the .com bubbles, and we were three years out of a major crash. One of the biggest crashes in history was in 1987, so in the 90s, we were kind of coming of age. I mean, this is just before the mainstream internet hit the world. We were in the early days. We’re doing business the way we normally do business. We use traditional forms of marketing and advertising. We’re following mainstream media. We were building like most businesses; through word of mouth, right? Referrals and word of mouth was probably the biggest driver of business in those times. So if this happened back then, without the use of technology, I think the businesses that would have survived would have been those that actually capitalized and invested in their marketing. Even today, It’s really funny. If we look at the biggest brands on the planet, if we look at businesses that have thrived over a number of years, they’re the ones that invested in their marketing, regardless of what time it was, or what year it was. They understood that their brand and their messaging, their visibility, was critical, just as it is today. So if this happened back in the 90s, which would have been old school, I don’t think anything would have been different in terms of the way that people would have approached putting their products and services out there. We would have found a way. Media was still strong enough out there to build that relationship. But maybe the internet changed the game. Today, we’ve just seen so many iterations. I believe we’re only just at the cornerstone of what we see as an industrial age change. We’re only just at the beginning. We’re still buying things directly. 76% of all sales are not made online, right? People are still wanting to connect physically with product and service. In its essence, the internet has literally exacerbated and is just providing people with another channel to distribute products and services faster. It’s just improved distribution, improved access. It’s also allowed several businesses to flourish to bring in massive competitive advantage in new products and new services faster. I mean, before the pandemic, I used to go every year to the CES show, the Consumer Electronics Show. I had a lot of clients in that world. They would come up with brand new innovative products every year and they would bring that to the show and launch their product. Six months later, that product would be in mainstream stores all over the world. So it’d be from CES, to retail. There was a six month gap. Now back in 2019 at the CES show, I was talking to clients and talking to people at that show. They were literally launching brand new products every three months. At CES, they were literally saying that the product that you see here today will be in the stores next week. So it went from a six month lag time, from innovation to mass market distribution, down to a week, right? So things have changed rapidly in pretty much every major industry. I think what would have happened back in 1990, I think exactly the same thing that’s happening right now. There are businesses that are getting innovative in times of challenge. There are businesses that are creating new products, new services. There are businesses that are opening up that have never been opened before in this time. Industries are changing. Industries are going to be adapting and changing their model on how they approach the marketplace. The hospitality restaurants and cafes bars were severely hit. Gyms were severely hit, right? But those industries are thriving. F45, which is an Australian franchise, it’s now a global franchise. In the middle of the pandemic, they got a market cap sale at $1.6 billion. It’s a gym, right? These guys were affected by what’s going on. Here they are, one of the fastest and biggest growing fitness centers in the world, in the middle of a pandemic.
Chris Carr: Yep. I mean, it is a weird world because you have to say, the average person now uses Zoom, GoToMeeting, Teams, whatever online platform they’re using. That saved a big part of american jobs, right?
John Logar: Oh, absolutely. It changed behavior. We weren’t going to go away quietly into that good night, right? As Shakespeare said, “the world was not going to just decide to go to sleep.” I make this joke that Zoom became the number one airline in the world because you literally traveled everywhere on Zoom. You’re on the east coast of the US, I’m on the east coast of Australia, we’re in two different time zones. Here we are, communicating over the interwebs on a platform, right? So yeah, technology has changed the game. Technology has changed behavior, the way we consume, the way we work, the way we communicate. Those platforms were a game changer. I mean, Zoom became a billion dollar company in like three months right? It’s the fastest growing billion dollar company on the planet.
Chris Carr: I mean, I don’t even know how some of the platforms that were already there got leapfrogged by Zoom.
John Logar: I think it was simplicity. Just making it very easy. The biggest problem that almost all streaming platforms have is the ability to handle the volume of data that they’ve got to transfer. That’s the biggest challenge that any platform has, including Netflix and all those sorts of services. The speed of our internet, to be able to compress video and audio, which are massive files, to be able to stream them with limited streaming capability, that was technology Zoom was very good at. GoToMeeting was the one. Most people would go to GoToMeetings, that was the major thing. I think Zoom, like all great startups that make it in the world, there are two things that drive that. The innovation of the technology, but number one, its timing. Zoom came along at the right time. People were looking for alternatives and Zoom was just at the right stage where they were able to take on the avalanche of actual growth. So yeah, they outperformed. There were half a dozen other platforms, Microsoft, Google, you know, GoToMeeting, Cisco, all them had streaming platforms, right? But Zoom, right time, right place. Look at the homepage, it’s just a big white screen just says “press this button to get started”. Simplicity in design makes it easy
Chris Carr: If you’ve ever tried to work on Google meetings, it was clunky. It was just clunky as hell. They paid the price for that and they reformatted it, but everyone remembers Google being clunky as hell. Then a pandemic happens and people are like, “You know what, I’m gonna go for the easiest possible route.” Well, keep in mind, no one’s crying for Google. Google probably doubled their market share in 16 months, but they did miss a massive opportunity in that if you launch a product badly, sometimes people will just move on. It’s hard to forgive a bad product that’s launched badly. We should be talking on Google right now. It was already free, but they missed it.
John Logar: It’s really interesting. When you look at companies like Google and Facebook and those sorts of things, one of the things is that they’ve got their core business, but they understand that they’re trying to protect their assets, so what they do is they go and invest in other technologies. So rather than Google investing in other technologies, Google wanted to own the technology. So they started with wanting their own social media platform, Google Plus, right? They wanted their own meeting platform, so they did Google Hangouts, right? They do have a brand and they do have a market, but like you say, they just didn’t have the capabilities of functionality. They were investing heavily to make that work. So yeah, Zoom comes along, they do one thing, right? We stream your meeting, record your meeting, save your meeting, give you edits, etc,. We can give you statistics on what’s going on in those meetings, we can show you engagement, we can show you the chat, sharing, etc. All of with a very simple user interface, not unlike the platform we’re in right now. Zoom became the number one airline in the world. That’s the biggest airline in the world right now. Then it changed. On the positive side, it showed us that we could communicate easily and effectively, anywhere, anytime. A lot of the times when I’m doing podcasting, or when I’m doing shows or lives on Facebook, I’m actually sitting outside with a hotspot with my laptop on Zoom. I don’t need to be in an office. I can be anywhere in the world. So I’m portable. I’ve done live streaming off “this (cell phone)” with zoom, right off this mobile device. So yeah, changed the game and innovated the product. The number one thing going for Zoom is simplicity and timing.
Chris Carr: Yeah. You also talked about the sectors that were willing to make quicker decisions. Like when you think about health care, If I told you in health care that the number one thing you need to do is to get into telemedicine right now, but they were dragging their feet, dragging their feet, dragging their feet and then a pandemic happened. They weren’t there 40 days ago. The whole industry. You couldn’t have changed that industry in eight years.
John Logar: Like yeah, because they were forced into a situation where they couldn’t physically handle a patient. They realized that they could communicate with a patient like “this”. I mean, if we think of telemedicine, although what’s happening right now, telemedicine has evolved because all of a sudden now we’re opening up, we’re being vaccinated, we’re coming back to work. The impact of telemedicine isn’t continuing on as it was during the pandemic. It’s actually iterated and changed a little. But if you think back, probably about four or five years right now, we’ve been able to do remote surgery for four or five years. So we’re talking about Internet medicine where a doc could be 1000 miles away, or 10,000 miles away in another country, talking to another doctor in a surgeon room, operating on a patient, and the person 10,000 miles away is directing the operation. The person’s eyes 10,000 miles away is directing a surgeon’s hands in a surgical procedure over the internet. So with telemedicine, like you say, you’re right, it took 40 days to pick it up. The reason why is because it had a massive impact on the fact that, “Hey, your patient can’t see you physically, we have to find an alternative.” And that really, interestingly enough, the practices that were communicated to their patients regularly, like they didn’t just serve a patient and then say thanks for coming, we’ll see you the next time you come. But the practices are actually building their patient databases, marketing to their patients, they didn’t see too much of an impact on their surgeries on their practices because they quickly went to their customers and said, “Hey, we can’t see you physically, but we’ve got a way if we can. This is how we can manage our relationship. If you need help with that, we’re going to give you a link, we’re going to give you a place where you can call us and talk to us, and we can help you.” Those businesses took to telemedicine faster than a lot of other businesses purely because they have those relationships. So yeah, telemedicine, like you say, an entire industry was changed in the way they manage and communicate with their patients because they were forced into that situation. What are you going to do? You’ve got to find another way. How many new products were created? The PPE, the personal protection product industry, went through the roof. How many places do you walk into with plastic guards, you know, masks and screens. QR codes are back? QR codes were part of the 60s, right? Nobody knew what a QR code was. Now we’re contact tracing, QR coding everything. I remember one time, I was actually driving on a highway in California, this was a few years back, and I was driving and there was a massive billboard on the highway. And on the Billboard, there was a QR code. In my head, I’m like “who’s driving at 60 miles an hour and pulling out their mobile device to take a photo of that QR code?” Like, how does that work? But here we are, using QR codes. Messaging platforms gone through the roof. We’re message mad. Who would’ve thought that innovation and integration in the time that we are in now is creating massive changes in most industries.
Chris Carr: I have two different directions that I’m going to take this. When you mentioned something here, I was hoping you’d mentioned it. I have this brain for marketing and it’s a very lonely world in the aspect of my wife, my friends and stuff like that. They’re just like talking about things on Netflix and stuff like that and in my mind, it’s operating at a level that… I don’t know how to describe it. I’ve always believed that the expression “you’re only as good as your database” should be the number one phrase that everybody in the world thinks of when they think of marketing. Let me tell you something about two different things that happened and then I’d love to get your input. So when you think about Toys R Us, a monster brand in the United States, it folds because they fail to innovate, or one of the core things that Toys R Us did wrong is that they did their whole fulfillment and all of their e-commerce in a partnership with Amazon. Who owns the data? Not Toys R Us. Now you’re like, “Wow, that’s a big problem.” Businesses should have learned from that, but in the time of crisis with COVID, do you know what all of these organizations did rather than expanding their own brand? They gave their database to GrubHub.
John Logar: Yeah, yeah. Uber Eats too. That’s who they gave their databases to. Absolutely, absolutely.
Chris Carr: It’s still like, you’re not gonna know it, but these technology companies are stealing cash from you. And you think “oh my goodness, I could never survive without them.” People don’t know that the lifeblood of their business is actually their loyal fans and customers. You’re adopting technology that says you can have all of what I give you but you don’t get the blood.
John Logar: I mean, the value of your business is your list. How big your database is is going to determine how well you will do financially in relation to business. There’s three things that we need to be doing. You’re right once you said all these platforms are stealing our customers. We’re using platforms and they’re collecting data, they’re collecting behavior, they’re collecting all the details. They’re seeing geographic, sociographic, they’re seeing everything. They become the biggest databases on the planet. That’s where the true value is. Amazon didn’t make a profit for seven years. The biggest retailer in the world for seven years didn’t make, probably, in fact, they were losing hundreds of millions of dollars every single year, right? It was only until the last four or five years that they actually might have made a profit.You can go back and look at Amazon’s company reports for the last 20 years and you’ll see it’s only really probably the last six years where Bezos, in his letter to the shareholders, starts talking about the company actually making money. Three years ago, four years ago, everybody started talking about the flywheel effect, right? Well, it took Amazon eight years for that flywheel effect to kick in. And so what you’re saying is right, you’re only worth your database. The value of your businesses, your communication, and the customer is the number one thing that everybody had to do at the beginning of the pandemic. Let people know what the hell was going on and let people know how you can still help them to acquire your products. Retail went through the roof. All the home garden centers, the home workshop and DIY companies, they went all through the roof. They were the ones that adapted services to this market. They benefited from that. You’re right, your database is key. Regardless of your small business or a large business, you’ve got to be collecting data. You’ve got to be using that data, right? You’ve got to look at the behavior, you’ve got to look at what they’re looking at, at what they’re not looking at, what they’re paying attention to. The cool thing about technology, Chris, is we’re able to do that now very inexpensively, right? So we can build businesses and companies much faster purely because that one thing we’re able to do. If we can capture and engage our customers and build our lists, and own that list, that’s your fruit for the future. That’s where you’re gonna eat. So yeah, you’re right, we’re giving data away. Google has been collecting our data for 20 odd years. Back in 2009, there’s a thing that Google came up with called Zima. It was called the zero moment of truth. The zero moment of truth was based on the data of when somebody actually puts their credit card into an online page, and actually presses the button. The moment of truth is when the purchase was made. Back in 2009, we needed five frames of reference for the moment of truth. We looked at a website, maybe watched one review, we talked to a friend, got a referral or whatever, then we bought the product. Five frames of reference. Here we are in 2021. Right now, the zero moment of truth is 36 frames of reference. We need to watch the same video six or seven times to make sure we’re watching the right product. We need to look at reviews, we need to go to Yelp, we need to go to all these platforms to make sure to see. We’re also looking for where we can get the best deal. How can we get the right price? How can we save money on shipping? We’ve got different predictors, but the funny thing is, we almost always end up buying the first thing we saw, but we just took 36 touches to get there. What you’re saying is absolutely right, the data is mission critical to the lifeblood of your business. Amazon, you know, all these all these services like Zappo. Just look at Shopify. How much data do they carry? Like every e-com store on their platform can see exactly every transaction, what the trends are, they can see the seasons, they see everything, whether it’s hot or cold, etc. Anybody that owns a platform that you are using as a third party provider, that you have to input information into, they own the lifeblood of the market.
Chris Carr: Yeah, they do. They do. You’ve been doing this game for 36 years. I’ve been doing it for 20. Ironically, I’m considered an old man in the business. And so what does that make you?
John Logar: I look at some of my friends who are my age. They still don’t know how to send an email. We were at the early stage of this game where we’re seeing, you know, because we’re part of this world and part of this industry, I feel fortunate and blessed that I actually know and have that tenure and have that experience of what’s going on. Am I a dinosaur? Absolutely. But I’m a dinosaur who loves tech.
Chris Carr: Yeah. And there’s a lot of wisdom in inexperience too. But like, think about this. You have, let’s just say, I’m gonna start maybe even in around 2012. You woke up one day, and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, Penguin two is here, and if you had a backlinking method, there’s a very good chance that all your results are gone.” And you’re not talking about just the mom and pops, you’re talking about JC Penney’s and other major brands. You didn’t own Google, you don’t own it. I’m writing an article right now for Forbes and it’s called “Building your house on sand” and it’s literally the idea of we don’t own any of this stuff. You know what I mean? People say “that was years ago, businesses don’t do that anymore.” I’m like, well, Apple one day says, “Oh, we’re going to protect people with privacy and so all of your retargeting ads for mobile devices, you’re going to just figure it out from here.” We don’t own any of the stuff. We’re giving all of our power to the technology companies. You just need to know what you’re getting invested in, because you don’t entirely own the data, unless you do. In my opinion, my number one advice is to have a strong email database.
John Logar: Or build it, like actually build it. So many businesses won’t build it. Like, I still see this today with the people I’m working with in the agency space. When we’re dealing with brick and mortar businesses, one of the first questions we’re asking is how big is your database. I’m amazed at even sizable companies. Some of their databases are not even more than 800 customers, right? Like big big companies don’t even have 800 clients. They don’t have 800 emails for 800 clients. The average business has got less than 1000 emails. For that platform there, being able to communicate even for retargeting purposes, owning that email is critical. The next level is how do we engage? How actively are people engaging through the methods of communication in our database? Emails are still powerful, but the fastest thing that’s growing right now is messaging. If you look at Facebook Messenger, Facebook Messenger is like the new text, right? Look at WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the new text. Right? Look at TikTok. Tiktok has become the fastest growing communication platform on the planet. It’s never going to surpass YouTube. But it’s gaining, it’s gaining momentum. It’s not gained momentum, it’s got momentum. We can now direct message in TikTok. We can direct message on Instagram. We can direct message on LinkedIn. We can direct message on Facebook. Messaging has blown up. A few years back, we were talking about chatbots, but chatbots only work to a certain degree. You can automate them and manipulate conversation to a level, but what people want is they still want a human connection. This is the number one computer on the planet right now, this device (Cell Phone). If I’ve got my phone on, and I get pinged, my natural instinct is to look at this phone. I’ve sat in restaurants with friends, or I’ve said to my friend, “turn the phone off, turn it upside down, so we can’t see the screen. I’m here to see you, right?” Because how often do we sit there with our friends, and we’ve seen it, you go outside, and two people sitting in a cafe or a restaurant, and they’re both looking at their mobile devices and not looking at each other. They’re checking in messengers, they’re responding to messages. Here’s an observation. I’m sitting in a restaurant and I’m seeing a young couple that look like they’re on a date, right? It looks like a first date, and they’re sitting on their mobile device and one person is talking, and the other person’s phone is pinging. And so all they’re doing is this. There was no connected conversation because messages are distracting. We’ll respond to a message or we will look at a notification and we’re gonna make a decision on whether or not we’re going to engage or interact with that information. Not only is email important, but social media platforms are as well. I will talk about one of the most important things coming out of it. I don’t know if we want it to be a pandemic episode, but it’s here, right? It’s impacting our world. But if you think about it, one of the things that occurred is our behavior on how we interact with products and services changed drastically because of mobile devices, right? This is 24/7. Like if I walked out and left my mobile phone or my cell phone behind, and thought about “Damn, I’ve left it behind. Do I go back? Do I literally drive back five minutes and pick it up? Or do I let it go?” Now in that moment, I go “forget it, let it go.” The world’s not going to implode because I don’t have a phone, but we’re sleeping with this thing 24/7. It’s our alarm. It’s our health checker. It’s our fricking life tracker. It is our purchasing device. I keep saying to people: How do you make it easy for people to buy? How do you, if you can, how do you make it easy for people to buy your stuff on this device? Because that’s the question that every single person has to answer: how do you make it easy for somebody to get access to what you have? Do it on the device they’re living with, right? I’ve sat down with major corporations in boardrooms and we’re having this conversation, you know, we’re talking about dinosaurs or something. I’m sitting there saying, dude, we’ve been sitting in this room for how many minutes and you’ve been checking your phones while it’s in this room? And then yet, I say what’s your message? What’s your marketing strategy and messaging strategy on that phone? Do you have one? And I’m looking at the marketing director of the company in the boardroom: “What’s your strategy right now as a company to interact on that mobile phone with your customers?” He says, “Oh, I hadn’t even thought of that. We don’t have one, we don’t need one.” But yet, here you are, you’re communicating on this mobile device, using the very thing you should be connecting with your customers. So not only do we need to build an email database, we need to be building a database where we have multiple touchpoints with our clients. One of the things that we do in our strategy to engage clients is we’re not just looking for an email. When looking for a LinkedIn connection, we’re looking for a Facebook Messenger connection, we’re looking for an Instagram messenger, or Twitter DM, Tiktok DM, we’re looking at five places. If we really want to build a relationship with our customer, we’re going to send the same message to all five platforms because I don’t know if I’m gonna get you on LinkedIn. I don’t know if you’re on Tik Tok, or Instagram messaging or messenger, but I’m gonna get you somewhere. And the other piece of data that I’m looking for is I’m looking for your mobile phone number. If I have those pieces of communication, I can communicate to you at your level of modality. That’s power, and technology allows us to do that very inexpensively, right? We’ve never had this capability before and all these platforms that are blowing up right now are giving us leverage, right? Like that was our tip. I hope the TikTok gods aren’t hearing me, but I don’t like the platform. One of the things that’s infuriating about the platform is that it’s addictive, right? It’s the swipe up and watch the next person. But here’s the thing, people are building hundreds of 1000s of people, millions of people for their audience, posting entertaining, odd clips, right? There’s a lot of people doing commerce on Tik There are right now a quarter of the planet is on that platform. Two and a half billion people are on TikTok. Like it took Facebook 15 years to get to two and a half billion people. TikTok had only been around for five years. So my question to companies is what is your communication and branding strategy on TikTok. Now there are major corporations and companies that are starting to advertise on that platform and started to gain traction on that device. But that’s the thing. You’ve hit the nail on the head, you’re only as good as the size of your list. I actually would take that one step further. You’re only as good as the site. There’s a level of engagement that you have with that list. I taught how many companies? Like if I was to ask you, Chris, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but right now, do you have an active offer in front of a customer or a prospect base in your business? Is there an active offer that you’ve got out there that people can interact with right now? Yes or no?
Chris Carr: I do because we’re in the same space.
John Logar: But here’s the thing, 75% of the companies that I’ve talked to don’t have an active offer in the marketplace. How do you do business if you’re not offering anything to anybody? I should be able to walk into any business and say, “Hey, tell me what the offer is today that you’ve got in front of prospects. And how many people are seeing this offer right now?” And if you can’t tell me that, we’ve got a problem. So the number one thing is if you don’t have an offer, and you don’t have a place for people to interact with that offer, then you’re not in business. You’re out. The lifeblood of your business is how do you acquire customers’ technology? Sales copy has changed. The way that we communicate has changed. One of the things that keeps coming up in conversations that I’m talking about is that.… we’ve got artificial intelligence and algorithms, and we’ve got software and apps and all this sort of stuff that is making our lives faster, better, stronger, like we’re the $6 million dollar man in terms of what’s coming. But the thing that keeps popping up, and even the big gurus are saying it: How are we being human? People are interacting at a human level. How can we make sure that we’re interacting at a human level? At a messenger level, we can respond in real time with a human body. If you’re running leads through Facebook, or AdWords, or any platform, and you require somebody to ask questions, you will make the sale if you have a human body on that inquiry. The sale is made faster and quicker with a human. The human aspect has not gone away. You can’t gain chatbots. You can’t because people are going to very quickly, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I’m getting messages 20 times a day when people are trying to start conversations with me. I would say 70% of the time, there’s a human on the other line. 30% of the time, I’m falling into the trap. These are some of my friends who are really big marketers running some really big companies who are using automated chatbots. I’m ignoring that conversation because it’s not a real conversation. It’s like a decision tree, right? If you have this answer, you’re gonna get this response. If you answer this answer, you’re gonna get this response. That’s not a human interaction. That’s not going to get you to a sale, right? What is gonna get you to a sale is how are you helping?
Chris Carr: I mean, when you think about it, Zappos don’t have their own shoes, do they? Does Zappos have their own shoes? Their own brand of shoes?
John Logar: No, I don’t think they do. I’m looking at the top companies right now and Zappos is not in the top 20.
Chris Carr: The buzz of Zappos is, literally, like someone can order you a pizza while you’re ordering shoes. People on the phone. And so what they did is they invested in humanization.
John Logar: Yeah, absolutely. You have to.
Chris Carr: Yeah, now I do believe as technology increases, the level of hybrid human technology adoption is always gonna get better, but I don’t think anybody’s ever going to be fooled enough to think “You know what, I’m getting the real answer from a real human.” You know what I mean?
John Logar: If we look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we’re talking about psychology here, right? You know, before the pandemic, we were all trying to become self actualized and our self esteem at the top of the tree became really important. Pandemic hits and the game changed. So if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the number one hierarchy of needs is security and safety. That’s the number one, right? Number two is connection. We want to be connected. Number three is financial security. Looking at the aspect of how we can actually live life with our resources, the connection piece is probably one of the most important pieces in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What do we do? We were told to self isolate. We were bumping people with elbows. There was no human connection and touch. We were separating families. So what are we craving? What are we drifting towards? We’re drifting towards where we can connect. Where can we connect socially, on social media, on platforms like this, that’s where we’re connecting. So the human element I don’t believe is going to be replaced by AI in terms of technology. There are going to be some functional things that AI will improve and will change, but we want to be able to trust, we want to be able to touch somebody. If we can touch somebody electronically in a human way, they’re going to respond, right? They’re going to connect, but if we don’t have that element, if we aren’t human in our marketing and the way that we communicate, people are not silly, they’re not stupid. They’re not falling for the old tricks of marketing anymore. You know, they’re wanting more.They want you to be real. Right? So my thing is that question I asked you, how many people right now actively engaged or can see your offer right now is mission critical if you want to stay in business and survive. If you don’t have an offer, you’re not in business. Nobody can buy you.
Chris Carr: So, you have this documentary called “The Social Dilemma”. You start talking about the downfalls of social media. Then you’re starting to talk about, I don’t know how to describe it, but you’re talking about certain levels of society that’s eroding and they keep blaming it on social media. I don’t doubt that for a second that social media has an impact. We’re gonna go back to something you said, right? Let’s pretend that this (Cellphone) was a magazine. Every time you talked to me, I’m like, “Yeah….,” and I just keep reading my magazine. Five words into your phrase, I’m just looking at my magazine. We’ve developed this very weird thing about being rude to one another. One of the things that we as marketers do is we say, successful marketers know how to empathize and to empathize, you have to listen. So it’s a very weird world in the fact that marketers are trying to get you to listen better, adapt better, create marketing materials and offer solutions, right?
John Logar: I look at my nieces and nephews and they’re living on screens. Now they’re homeschooling because they’re in lockdown, so I’ve got a lot to do from home. They’re being taught through a computer through a tablet, right? They’ve got the teachers on the tablet, in a zoom class somewhere, and they’re going to school from home. So everybody in Australia, two thirds of the country is in lockdown, we’re homeschooling them. In fact, we’re going to be homeschooling for the next two, three months before kids can go back to school, right? So they’re into these devices. Their behavior has changed. They’re attached to these devices. We’re playing games, and we’re watching content, and we’re searching for stuff. My number one go to website right now is Google Maps. If I need a business, I just search for it on Google Maps. If it’s open, or if I can call them, I’ll call them. If it’s open, it’s open. I’m gonna go and get it. Or, if I take the next step and click on their product on their website, I can buy their product on my phone online. So Google Maps is becoming my go to if I want a local service. So I’ve changed my behavior from Yellow Pages, or from searching on the interwebs. For Google search, I’m just using location. Well, where are these people? I need a pizza restaurant in my location, or I need a hardware store in my location, or I need a chiropractor in my location, right? So what I am doing is using a device to make it easy to communicate. The distraction that you’re talking about is real. We’re in the world of trying to grab people’s attention. We want their eyeballs. We’re trying to grab people by the eyeballs, but at the same time, there are five other senses that we’re having to deal with. The eyeballs are probably the most, or one of the one of the most critical senses because we’re processing 2 billion bits of information every two seconds through those eyeballs. So you’re right, the dichotomy of how you connect using technology and how you empathize, or how you be human on the other side of it in the way that you communicate and engage. My thing is to know who you’re dealing with. You want it like you say, you hit the nail on the head. You need to be talking to your customers, listening to them, and adapting to what they’re saying to you. The first thing if you’re on a marketing campaign, you don’t just come up with an offer. You think about who’s going to buy this offer? Why would they buy this offer? How would they buy this offer? What decision would they make to actually buy it? So what’s the logical step that they would take to buy this product? Then you would craft an offer around those inputs of that information. So okay, well, this is how we make it easy to buy, this is what we’re solving. Now, we’re going to incentivize it to give them an incentive to actually make a decision. We’re going to perhaps make it time sensitive or quantity sensitive. We need to now give them the same message, at least, you know, we’re going to send the same message 20 or 30 times. Then we’re going to see what happens. The cool thing about us right now in marketing is that we can adjust mid campaign to improve our outcomes. We can change our offer or our ad in relation to how people are interacting and behaving right in the middle of our campaign. We’ve never been able to do that before. If you did a TV commercial and did the production, you spent two or $300,000 in production and you spent $100,000 on a TV slot. If the ad doesn’t work, you’re not gonna find out until a week in or two weeks in. You’ve already spent the money so you’re not gonna go and reshoot that campaign. That’s not going to take a second to change the ad. Whereas online, I can change the ad within minutes. I can empathize and adjust within minutes. So yeah, you’re right. Like you say, we’ve got to empathize and we’re going to get connected.
Chris Carr: When I met you, it was very serendipitous. I watched one of the videos, you were on stage presenting like you always do, but then one of the things I remember, like, I didn’t know who you were, but I watched your entire video on the aspect of buyer personas. But the other cool thing is that we don’t have to create a marketing program that takes you from zero to 100 because the technology tells us where people live right now. What I mean by that is not a physical location, but if I want to reach doctors, those doctors are already part of an association, and rather than hoping they leave and find your website, you can basically log in into that association, and you can find these people and where they live and start the journey midway through the journey. I’m shocked at how many people want to build a program and think if I build it, they will come. I was like, no, they won’t.
John Logar: Go to where the market is, you know? I see people who are serving niches. My first question is great, have you joined that niches Association as a member, and they go,” No.” That’s where they’re talking. That’s where they get licensing. That’s where they get the communication of feedback. That’s where they’re lobbying for their industry. If you aren’t visible in their ecosystem, it’s going to cost you way more money to build that education, to build that relationship individually than it will when you can just literally go to where they hang out as a group right under it, because they want to hang out with each other. This is their identifiable identity that was the plumbers association, right? There’s probably 20 Different plumbers associations online right now and the membership cost is anywhere from 300 bucks to a couple of $1,000 a year. It’s not a very expensive proposition. Every industry association that I know of has a preferred partner program where you as a supplier to that industry can become a member as well. You have a membership fee, and then you have access to that entire database. You can brand the events, you can market directly to the industry, you can give the industry incentives that are industry centric because you’re a member of the association. We want to help you and support you. So we’ve incentivized you being part of this organization so that you can build your capability of marketing in verticals. Where people hang out from a business point of view is incredible. I talked about a Trade Show, CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s one of the largest trade shows on the planet, and everything from software to robotics to products to engineering, like there’s all the innovation in terms of consumer products are at that show, and then some. There are four and a half thousand exhibitors at that show. 280,000 People visit that show in four days in Las Vegas. 67% of the audience that visit that show are C level executive decision makers. So more than 150,000 people at that show, for four days, make decisions. They spend trillions of dollars. Not billions, trillions of dollars. They all go to one place. All I have to do is hop on CES website, go to their exhibitor list and I can literally download that entire list because every company that exhibits at CES, the minimum for spending for that four days is 30 grand, let alone all the expenses of flights, accommodations, teams, distribution, and how much they’ve paid for getting their products to the trade show. There were companies there with stands. We’re talking about a six by nine store stand. A six by nine stand is not a very big stand, but there were companies that were spending $600,000 just on the booth. 600 grand! LG, the TV company, spent $6 million on their stand. Samsung, they spent four and a half million dollars. Nikon, three and a half million on the stand. We’re talking about four days here. So all these companies have got money to market, and the reason why they go to a trade show is basically to connect with humans. You know, we’re all chomping at the bit to get back into, not virtual, but get back to connection. Tradeshow marketing is going to be coming back very, very shortly. It’s going to be huge. I think it’s gonna be bigger and better than ever before because we’ve been disconnected for over a year. We want to go and meet our customers and meet our people and touch our products. So associations, or where vertical markets are hanging out together, are massive opportunities. If you want a consumer base at a trade show, look at big trade shows where they got hundreds of 1000s of people, build a partnership with a company there and you will have access to hundreds of 1000s of people. Like, that’s all you got to do.
Chris Carr: Do you know my advice to people when they do find them? Don’t talk about your product. I know that sounds very funny because they’re like, okay, I join a forum, I go to a convention, but like, “What do I do?” I’m like, “Don’t vomit on them.” My point is, solve any problem that they have, other than your product, and then build enough rapport that you can call them about anything. There’s a level of karma where people will literally ask, “Oh, what do you do?” If you help them, they will literally ask you.
John Logar: If what you do is interesting enough, they’re gonna say, “How can you do that for me?” If what you’ve got is relevant and of interest to them, you’re hitting the nail on the head. Stephen Covey, in his famous business book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, the fourth habit is seek to understand first, and then seek to be understood. It means to listen. It means help. It means to empathize. I have a friend of mine and he used to say this all the time, “To have a friend, you’ve got to be a friend first.” So my question I’ve always asked is, “How can I be a friend first?” What would a friend do? A friend would listen, a friend would say, maybe I can figure this out for you. A friend would say, you know, take an interest in what you do. Ultimately, what happens is they switch tables. Because you’ve empathetic, because you’ve listened, because you’ve wanted to be of service, they’re gonna go, “How can I help you? Tell me what you do?” They literally flip the tables in that communication. That one little thing there Chris is probably the crux of it all. The more you take an interest in the people you want to serve, the more they’re going to take an interest in you.
Chris Carr: It’s like, there’s eternal truths in marketing. You’ve been doing this 36 years, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. The same tactics realtors have been doing for generations is literally finding ways to meet people that could use your services. Develop genuine rapport, communicate your offer to them in a way that does not make them feel trapped. The person who helps the most people wins.
John Logar: We talked about Amazon before, right? So Amazon is a behemoth online platform, but what did Amazon do three years ago? They opened up retail stores right across America. They’re opening up retail stores in Australia and retail stores in the United Kingdom. Amazon, the online behemoth, is opening brick and mortar retail stores and then modeling the retail stores on the Apple Store. Apple doesn’t need to have a store. Apple could have sold and distributed their products online. The reason why Apple has a store is because they want people to interact with the product, they want people to hang out. It’s probably one of the best retail examples and most successful brick and mortar retail examples in the history of retail. When everybody’s going online, what does Apple do? They open up Apple stores everywhere. What happened when they launched the product? 10,000 people would sleep at night waiting to get their first iPhone. They created buzz. If you want to learn marketing, look at the marketing that Apple did in terms of launching their products. We talked about Jeff Walker, who for those people who don’t know, who was kind of the godfather of the product launch formula on the internet. Jeff Walker’s model is Apple’s launch model. Jeff didn’t invent that model. Jeff adapted a fantastic model and created an incredible channel marketing strategy that works. Apple has been doing that since day dot. Full circle, right? Here we’ve got Amazon being the electronic behemoth, opening up brick and mortar stores so they can touch and see what their customers do and behave. The only books that they sell in the Amazon stores are the best selling books, right? They pick the top five, and that’s all you can buy. They pick their best selling products there at the Amazon store. Anything that sells really well online that they’re branded or got a handle on, they’re putting it in a retail store because they know people are gonna walk past. They know that people go, “Oh, this is an inviting environment”, and they’re gonna walk in and they’re gonna buy. You don’t even need a credit card. You just need an Amazon account in a retail store, right? I buy lots of books on the Kindle, but physical books are still what I love. So what does Amazon do? They’re selling physical books. They’re not just selling electronic books. So I go and buy a book. How did I buy the book? I didn’t have a credit card. I didn’t tap my phone. I just put in my email address and they immediately took the purchase. I didn’t even need to do that. There was a person on the other side, a human being, who said, “Great, what’s your email address?” They tested it and I didn’t have to touch anything. I’ve got the book, then I’m walking out with a book. So you know, full circle on a lot of these online companies. They’re opening these brick and mortar businesses because they want to connect with their audiences.
Chris Carr: John, time flies. I have 20 other things I still want to talk about.
John Logar: We can do another episode whenever you like man, but I just love talking about these things. This sort of stuff is what we live and breathe for. So it’s a good opportunity to sort of talk about the real stuff when it comes to marketing and human behavior.
Chris Carr: Yeah, I think that so many people live at this “grassroots” level. I know it sounds weird, but like, good marketers, smart marketers, people like yourself that I talked to, we see the game behind the game. There’s macro pieces that are moving. It’s so cool. Disney’s gonna put out Disney+ and they’re gonna get into that content game. I’m like, don’t you see how all the pieces are aligning from developing new characters, characters into figures, figures turned into parks, parks turn into…. You know what I mean? I’m telling you, everything is happening in synergy with one another. You just keep looking at the smallest piece of it. Then I get around to talking to people like you and I’m like, “You are seeing the bigger thing, right?”
John Logar: We’re in the bigger thing, Chris. We’re in it. Whether they like it or not, they’re in it. So the thing that if I was to think about, I guess the important things, you know, from a life point of view, the important things are the things that matter to you. Your family, your friends, the connection you have, how you add value to those relationships, that’s what is important for your life. At a business level, same thing. What’s important about the business? Are we making it easy for people to transact? Are we delivering a product or service that people want to engage or buy with? What are we doing to improve that message and model? How are we making it? How do we make it easier? How do we make it better? What are the extending opportunities that come? A friend of mine, Dane Maxwell, uses this word “green glasses”. Green glasses are the glasses of “opportunity is everywhere.” If you look at the world through green glasses, you will see more. The picture is much bigger because you’ll see more opportunities. So from those little things, this is where we make little incremental adjustments and improvements so that we can do better. I spoke to Robert Herjavec. Herjavec from Shark Tank. I remember being lucky enough to have a conversation with him. I asked him the city slicker movie moment, that one question, what’s the one most important thing in your life? So I’ve got to ask Robert Herjavec. “You know, in business Rob, what is the number one thing? What’s the number one thing I should know?” and he said to me, “John, when times are bad, sales above all else. When times are good, sales above all else.” Everything is driven by sales. If you look at the most successful companies in business on the planet, they are sales driven organizations. If you can name a brand, that brand that is in your head is a sales driven organization. That’s why they’re in your head. Sales driven organizations always win. My big thing is right now, how are you actively making it easy for people to buy? How are you actively engaging customers right now? How can they buy from you right now? You need to dial it in. Number two is you want to maximize the revenue per buy. That’s the most important thing. You need to maximize the wallet share. What does Amazon do when you buy a product? They suggest another product. When you buy a product, what do they do? “Hey, you bought this product. There’s some more products that you need to pay attention to that you might be interested in. Here’s more products.” Or “Hey, by the way, you bought this thing. Well, let’s give you a 20% bump incentive and show you all the deals you can get on the similar products you already bought.” So they’re constantly asking you to buy. They’re constantly increasing your wallet share. So number one, you’ve got to acquire. Number two, you’ve got to maximize the wallet share per customer. Number three is you want to make sure you have frequency. Frequency is the longevity, the lifetime of the relationship we have with customers. So what we’re trying to do is we want those customers to stay with us for years. Like if I was a realtor people say, “Oh, people buy a house once every five years.” That’s exactly right. Every five years, somebody buys a house. If you’ve sold that person a house, you can circle around for three to five years and list and sell them another house. You have a lifetime value. If you’re in the real estate business for 20 years, you’ve got four cycles. 20 years is your lifetime value per customer. That one customer could be worth hundreds of 1000s of dollars in commissions to you over the course of their life. If you string 100 of those customers together, that’s millions of dollars worth of commissions right to you. So understand how you acquire and what you’re doing in the acquisition. How do you maximize revenue per customer and how do you actually make sure you keep those people coming back? Or how do you help those people to spread the message and invite and introduce others that can benefit from the service you deliver to the market? These are the basic fundamentals of commerce. We do it on E-commerce and we do it offline. This is what it’s all about. There are two or three hundred different channels that people use to communicate with. 300! We know four or five that we regularly use. You want to find that channel and that’s where you want to live. So number one, how are you acquiring? Number two, how are you maximizing revenue per client? Number three, how do you make sure they stay for as long as possible? That’s the building blocks of a business. That’s what it boils down to, and technology’s only made it easier. During the pandemic, it was terrible for the restaurant industry. Everybody started doing takeout. There was a bakery here, here on the coast in Australia. All the restaurants are closed. This Bakery had a half a mile long line. Every morning, people were waiting up to an hour to buy baked goods from this bakery. Now, every other bakery didn’t have a line half a mile long. In fact, they’re not even open when this bakery is open, but his bakery and how they market is on Instagram. They get a baked good item like a donut or a cake or whatever and there’s a guy who all you can see is his hands holding this item. All they do is they just crush the baked good and they open it up and all the jam oozes out and all the chocolate spews everywhere. You just watch these freaking Instagram posts and you’re salivating, right? These baked goods are artistic creations. They’re doing Instagram ads. They’re punching out content every day. They punch out 10 pieces of content every single day. They put it on YouTube, they put it on Tik Tok, they put it on Instagram, they put it on Facebook, they tweet. So they’ve got somebody who’s syndicating their content on social media, and I asked the owner of the company and say, “How much are you paying for all that marketing communication? Like what are you actually spending?” and he says, “Well, we’re spending about three grand a month, it’s costing us three grand. So we’ve got a person who’s doing social media, we pay her $500 a month just to do the posting. Then we sit there and we allocate time.” So they’ll do things like they’ll get a sledge hammer and smash a doughnut with it or they’ll get a chainsaw and they’ll chainsaw a cake. Stupid crazy stuff like that. But, there’s a half a mile long line of customers lining up every single day. The cool thing is they invite their customers into the back of the bake shop to participate. Now the customers are smashing up the doughnuts in there. So they’re using a three grand budget on marketing that’s generating a multimillion dollar bakery business in the middle of a pandemic, and every other baked good place is shut down. They’re closed. Well, these guys are religiously rocking it out of the park. They cut down a wall between the bakery part and the retail part. They cut that wall down and then they put this piece of glass so everybody could see inside, seeing all the pastry chefs making all the stuff that you can buy. Technologies allowed them to thrive. How are you putting yourself out there? How are you making yourself visible? Then how do you make it easy for people to buy? What are you doing to make it easy for people to say, “Yeah, I want that.”
Chris Carr: John, you are a legend, man! So Consulting Unleashed, obviously the domain name is consultingunleashed.com. If they did want to get a hold of you, is that the number one place to go is to? Your website?
John Logar: I’ll give you a URL. Anybody can get this. It’s called calljohnlogar.com. Anybody can reach out to me and say hi. I talk to people from all over the world. I help people build their digital marketing businesses in the market. But if you want to talk to me, it’s just called calljohnlogar.com.
Chris Carr: It’s always a pleasure. I really appreciate it. It’s awesome, John. Thanks again.
