Transcription
This bottle of hand soap sells for $55, and the brand behind it recently sold for $3.7 billion.
In this video, I'll be breaking down the tactics that ASOP uses to convince an entire generation that paying 30 times more for soap is somehow normal. But the more I investigated, the more I realized this wasn't just clever marketing. I feel like the more things grew up on me, the more money I spend. What I uncovered was the most precise sales system I have ever seen for charging 30 times more than the competition and making customers thank you for the privilege. Definitely works.
Most beauty brands, they play the exact same playbook. They go out there and get a huge famous celebrity to endorse their product. They have a quarterly sale. They put all of their influences in the carousel and then they just slap a miracle claim on it about some proprietary patented ingredients or process that gives you this miracle outcome. But the thing is that ASOP literally refused to do this for over 38 years and are bigger than most of these beauty brands combined.
"Hi, how are we doing?"
"You're famous for the exfoliating hand."
"I would love to."
In 1987, a Melbourne hairdresser, Dennis Perittus, launches Asop out of a hair salon. Naturally, he could not outspend the likes of L'Oreal. You can't outspend these guys. So, you have to look at a different corner of the market to go for. So therefore, his only other option was to do the opposite of what all the other brands were doing. No discounts, no influences. And 38 years later, L'Oreal comes along and buys the brand for over $3.7 billion. And they did this specifically 'cause they didn't want to change a single thing. And that's exactly what I did to start my $250 million agency. And it also landed me as a shark on Shark Tank.
And so if you're looking in your business right now and you're looking at people that are on their chapter 10 and you're on chapter 1, you're thinking, "Man, I can't compete with these people." Instead of looking at all the things that you can't do, the thing that you can do when you're small is be very nimble and operate with speed. And that's tactic number one. Zig when everybody else zags.
So the Asop artisan walks me over to their infamous stainless steel sink and pumps a diabolical amount of hand soap into my hands.
"Wa, that's a liberal generous amount."
And this isn't some random hand soap. This is their most viral one. Resurrection.
"It's our resurrection hand wash."
"Resurrection aromatic hand wash."
"The resurrection hand wash. This thing costs $55."
People just on average wash their hands 10 times a day. That's 300 times per month. Most brands, they pick those rare moments in your life that people are going to indulge in a big ticket event. Instead, ASOP, they use the most commodity thing that you do every single day and they made it a premium product.
If you ever walk by an ASOP shop, you don't even have to go in there to get exposed to this stuff because they have it in dispensers that sit right out the shop. And what that means is instead of having to go into the store and basically converse with a salesperson, you can walk by and go, "Oh, what's that? I've seen that at like a fancy restaurant or I've seen that in a hotel before," and then you put some on your cream, you rub it. It's the whole sensory experience. And you get to smell it and feel it and see how premium that it is. And that is it's the perfect on-ramp to you entering into their world. And the reason that this is so powerful is that they basically use this $55 as their entry offer to enter into their value ladder. Then once you're in store, they will make you try everything one by one.
"Yeah, that's very nice."
"Yeah, that's very fresh."
"I mean, this guy had no intention of letting go of my hand."
And the reason that they do this is simple. They want to use something that you use every single day so you make this premium product a normality in your life to then on-ramp you into all the upsells and really juice the lifetime value of a customer.
"There you go."
And so what you want to do to apply this to your own business is have a look at what is something that people either do very, very often in your category. The 10 times per day hand wash for your industry or your category. And that is tactic number two. Ritual economics.
Most beauty brands have sales representatives that are trained on closing people that are walking through busy department stores. However, Asop, they have consultants that are trained on running a diagnosis. You'll find that especially after exploring fashion.
"Okay."
And the difference is subtle but very, very powerful because when you walk into an ASOP store, they're more trained on like the hospitality of being really curious. They're not here just to pressure you to get a sale. They want to basically find out what your skin type is, if you've ever bought anything from them in the past.
"Have you had a chance to use any of our skin care at all?"
"No. Can you put it on for 15 minutes?"
"Yeah. I was just drinking this for any sort of literally basically and then."
And that subtlety of wanting to basically serve people instead of sell people actually results in you selling to more people. Think about it like this. When you walk into a traditional retail store and the rep comes up to you, what do they typically say? "Is there anything that I can help you with?" And what do you say, nine out of 10 times? "No, thank you. I'm just looking." Because it's just a silly question. What ASOP does is they'll come up to you. They'll start with a little bit of small talk and then they'll say, "What brought you in?" and then they'll lead with something like, "Do you have dry or oily skin?" and then immediately they're categorizing you and then they know which kind of products to put you in and then the whole process begins.
Now the moment that you actually walk into an ASOP store, it looks completely different from anything that you've ever seen before and it's a complete sensory explosion because the fit-out's beautiful. It's usually like a full-on color immersion color palette. They've got their incense burning and then they give you tea on arrival.
"Put a bit of tea down the side."
"Thank you very much."
"Thank you. Beautiful."
And then when you walk around the store, like all of the bottles, they all look the same, but they have this signature ASOP packaging on them. And that's by design because instead of just being product sellers, what these guys are doing is trying to do a thorough diagnosis. And what you want to do is you want to sell like a doctor. And why this is so powerful is all of the emphasis is around doing a proper diagnosis and not on just selling you skin care or selling you some soap. It's about finding out what you actually need. And you can feel that when you're in a sales cycle is someone there is to serve you and actually help you do something or if they're just basically trying to just ram products down your throat.
Now you might be thinking, "Well, that's like I don't have time to do 15-minute consults on everybody that walks in the store." Well, guess what? 10 times more people will come to you to get educated than they will to get sold to. And that's how ASOP has been able to literally go out there and build a billion-dollar business without spending hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars per year on advertising like all of the brands in their space. And that is tactic number three. Sell like a doctor.
But look, a great consultation is something that will get you the first sale. But what ASOP do between sale number one and sale number two is literally absolutely genius. And this is where most businesses will leave 70% of the overall revenue that they could be doing on the table. Most businesses completely obsess over the first sale. This is literally playing business on nightmare mode. The first sale that you get is always the least profitable. The number one thing that separates the conversations that they're having in closed rooms versus small businesses is that they're thinking about the entire lifetime value of a customer. And ASOP does this absolutely beautifully because they use this as the starting line, not the finish line. They're going to sell you all the hand serum, the face serums, the exfoliating body wash. They have got a fat and juicy LTV because they have engineered it that way. It doesn't happen by mistake because when you walk in to their store to try their hand soap and you buy it for $55, what you're actually then doing is you're walking out and they're going to give you six free samplers.
"Look at this, come early."
"I've given you both a cleanser, another exfoliant, and eye serum and then a treatment."
"Amazing. You didn't even buy anything. You're getting a sample."
"I know."
And then before you go, they're going to put your products into a nice cotton bag and they're going to spray it with some of their signature perfume.
"Stop it."
And then you're going to say, "Ooh, what is that?" I really like the smell of that. And they're going to be like, "Why? Come over here, Sabry." And then they're going to show you all their colognes. And then they're going to ask you to put out your hand and they're going to spray your wrist. I want to show you this. We've introduced this last year.
"Beautiful."
"Now they're going to know you can straight from."
Then you're going to be smelling it all day and you're going to go home and your partner's going to be like, "What's that smell? I really like it." You have entered into their funnel. And now when you leave the store, you are a walking billboard because you have the cotton bag with the Asop logo smacked on it and you're smelling like you've just been in there as well. People are going to be asking you. They're going to say, "What's in the bag?" It is an entire sales engine built by itself.
This is what you want to make sure that you do in your business. You want to make it so that your first sale, it sets up the second sale. The first sale in itself should create a problem or a need that automatically opens up the question in your customer's mind of, "Hey, what's next?" You need to stop optimizing for the transaction and start optimizing for the relationship. Because when all is said and done, the only metric that really matters is your lifetime value. And that is tactic number four. Engineering the second sale.
When it comes to making physical products, most people, they look at the packaging of their business and they try to come up with the most cost-efficient, economical way to package their product so it doesn't erode their margins. However, Asop, they do the opposite. Well, they did when they first began because they used to sell them in these brown glass bottles that are much more expensive than plastic. They knew, okay, look, we can't compete on buying eyeballs and advertising budgets. Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to spend more and get this beautiful packaging. And the design of the label is going to be so unique. It's going to be a statement in itself. And we want to have that packaging that even after you use that bottle, you want to keep it around 'cause it looks great. And it adds a little bit of pizzazz to your ordinary bathroom.
There is even a whole thing where people, they buy the $55 bottle of soap so that they can use it and then they refill it with cheaper soap because that bottle in itself is a status symbol and it markets the brand 365 days a year in other people's homes. And their product becomes the billboard. And that is the way that they were able to compete in a market that is over-advertised to. And it's exactly what I do with my book. I sell my book in a package. It comes in a mailer. Now, it costs me a lot more to send it in this branded packaging and I'm already giving the book away for free. However, what then people do is they get the book, they take a photo of it and then they share it on Instagram. And I can account that I have had hundreds of thousands of copies of my book sold because people want to share that photo. It's an experience that people run through.
So, what you want to make sure that you're doing is don't design your packaging as an afterthought to just be thrown away. Design it in a way that it's so good that people either want to share it online or they want to keep it and use it for other purposes. So, you want to look at your business and look at what are the touch points that I have with a customer, whether it's in onboarding, once you get them the result, once they achieve a certain milestone within your business. What is something that you can reward them with or create a moment that is an Instagrammable moment that they naturally either want to share or they want to keep and cherish? And that is tactic number five. Design as a differentiator.
And if you liked this video, you're going to absolutely love the entire video that I put together that walks you through step by step on how to craft a hero mechanism for your business. Like, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next one. What the hell?