2 years ago, I bought myself a pair of trainers for £25.
It was the autumn after lockdown 1 and we were heading into lockdown 2 and I didn’t feel like I had £25 to spend on a pair of trainers.
But in the end Simon Sinek taught us ‘people don’t buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it’.
And so, I’d received an email from On, the trainer company who had just developed the most extraordinary piece of marketing that I’d ever seen.
Firstly, and before the explanation of the marketing genius, it’s interesting to understand the persona (that would be me).
I feel like I try to do the right thing by the way of the climate and hyper-consumerism and all that stuff but I know that I get it wrong pretty much all the time.
As a family though, as a household we’ve tried to reduce our consumption dramatically.
Alison is the driving force behind all of this and so we’ve moved massively towards vegetarianism (not completely because Callum, Louis and I can’t face it completely) but into massive amounts of recycling and composting and reduction of buying things that we just don’t need.
Please don’t get me wrong I already live in a house that’s far too big and have much, much more stuff than I’ll ever need and continue to buy stuff that really, I don’t need or don’t want. But I do try to think hard over every purchase and refuse (where at all possible) to shop in places like McDonalds or Costa or Starbucks but for the very odd occasion when I’m lured into that or can’t avoid it.
And so, when I went to buy a car 18 months ago it took me the longest possible time to buy it and, in the end, I got the right one (for me) and will probably be the last car that I ever buy.
It will still be my car 5 years from now and by that time I’ll probably just rent a car when I need it.
And so, back to On because I am their market.
The email was asking if I was interested in a subscription-based trainer system where I would pay £25 a month for a new pair of trainers every six months.
That in itself is not so revolutionary and you can already start to pick holes in that but when you understand that the trainers that you buy are made entirely of castor beans and everything associated with them is entirely recycled and recyclable and they’re delivered in a recycled bag which you send back after six months and receive another pair of trainers while the ones you sent back are entirely recycled. You realise something different is happening here.
And so, if we understand that marketing and sales are entirely connected and in fact are the same thing and cannot be separated then the marketing team identifies the personas and goes to the sales team and says “build us a product” and the sales team build a product around the sales process which reverts back to the marketing team who then tell the story of the product which then markets itself and then people become champions and tell other people (like what’s happening right now).
And so, I started to explain this to people (including Alison who thinks this might be a con) but what you have here is an enormously disruptive model based around the reduction in consumption and a massive leveraging of reduction and recycling.
If I were Nike, I would be sh*t scared of this model because it could blow the trainer market into pieces and in fact, that’s what On were invented for about 8 years ago.
On arrived on the scene about 8 years ago into the world of triathlon (I got my first On trainers about 6 years ago and the Cyclons will be my sixth pair in 6 years).
They decided what they were going to do, and they told people how they were going to do it and they’ve done it and they’re continuing to do it.
And so, to take you through the photographs associated with this blog. The first one is how the bag arrives at your house, velcroed together with the trainers inside.
Photo 2 is the other side of the bag with the Cyclon logo.
As soon as you rip the Velcro apart (no tape) it tells you that you’re in the loop. That’s marketing.
And then you lift the trainers out of the bag from their individual housings and there are recycled cardboard messages on each of the trainers for you with QR codes for more information.
You keep the bag.
When you’re done you put them in the bag and inside the bag is a label to send them back to On.
In 6 months, I’ll get another pair.
These trainers are high end running shoes designed for you to be able to run a marathon (and train for a marathon) but for me they’re my ‘in clinic’ shoes at the moment because I’ve already got white On’s for in clinic which are wrecked and torn and splattered but are likely to become dog walking or gardening trainers but I also now have the opportunity to tell a message to my patients about why I’m wearing the trainers and who I am and ask them if they want to be part of our club too and that’s how modern marketing works.
Imagine you did this in your own business.
Imagine you did this in your own practice.
As I explained it to the guys at work last week, Beatriz said to me that she didn’t understand the model because what happens if you didn’t need a new pair of trainers in 6 months and you were paying the subscription.
Beatriz is a member of a gym and swims once a week, or twice a week or as much as she can but sometimes her work or her family life gets in the way.
And so, I said to her would she give up her membership at the gym if she missed a week and then I think she understood a little bit better.
If I don’t need a pair of trainers in six months, I’ll leave it seven. If I need them in 3 months, I’ll need 2 subscriptions.
Because I was one of the first sign ups, I paid £25 two years ago and then I get the next 3 months for free.
If it’s rubbish, I’ll stop and write a blog about how cr@p it was but I think that’s unlikely.
You’d never be able to do this in dentistry because dentistry is all the same. Oh wait, but hang on a minute, aren’t trainers all the same?
You’d never be able to do this in dentistry because the market is saturated and there are loads of dental providers but hang on a minute, aren’t there loads of trainer providers?
People don’t buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it.
If you’d like to know how to do this in dentistry, then maybe it’s time you have a look at what we do on our business course to talk to you about how marketing and sales are exactly the same and the only thing that separates them from anybody else is why.
Blog Post Number - 3230
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