129. Baking it Down - How You get Them is How You Keep Them

Baking it Down with Sugar Cookie Marketing 🍪

🍿 How Ya Get 'em is How Ya Keep 'em

Things we want when we market:

• 🤩 High engagement!
• 🤩 Exponential growth!
• 🤩 Reach as wide as the Atlantic - heck the Pacific!
• 🤩 Big Numbers!
• 🤩 Lots of Likes!
• 🤩 All the money in the WORLD!

But what don't we want? All the above if you went about getting it the wrong way. Such is the topic of this week's Baking it Down Podcast - how you get them is how you keep them.

🛒 Let me break it down for ya with a marketing case study as big as your local mall: JC Penney and the discount disaster.

JCPenney rose to fashion fame in the 70s when couponing was a common practice for 65% of US households. 🎫 Coupons are not like sales - because a sale is the equivalent to "no promo code required" versus a glorious coupon - this hard-to-find code or cut-out paper that grants the holder something ✨no one✨ else gets - a discount.

🧠 Talk about hittin' the centers of the brain that casinos take advantage of.

🛑 But in 2012, the JCP CEO Ron Johnson didn't follow the principle of "how you get them," and decided to move from couponing to a fair pricing model. No longer would customers have to hunt and peck through papers and internet deal sites to find the best discount - 📈 now the entire store would be just priced fairly - low prices throughout - no promo code necessary.

📉 JCP's sales tanked 25% that year. Ron was fired after 17 months, and the coupons were added back to the store's business model. Ron was quoted saying, "coupons were a drug." And their customers were addicts.

👏 How you get them is how you keep them.

JCP built a business bankin' on budget busters discounted with coupons. So it had to keep them by sticking with the coupon cutters. 🔥 Same with your business. If you drum up business by doin' fire sales - guess what your audience will be built on expecting? You guessed it - last-minute discounts.

Want to be a controversial baker? 🍿 Go post controversial topics on your page. Guess what your audience will be expecting? Popcorn-poppable drama dripping in butter and bad words. Sure - you'll get engagement, reach, comments, and reactions - but what good are they if they don't convert into sales. 🤑 Money. 🤑 Dollars. 🤑 Income.

👏 How you get them is how you keep them.

🏝 You can't pay your bills with gossip (trust me, I'd have a private island if you could).

🚂🚃🚃🚃 Same with follow trains - what good is an international audience of 1,000 bakers when you can only ship locally to people who don't like baking so much they'll pay you to do it for them? Choo-choo, followers boarding, profits gettin' off at the next stop!

Build the audience you want to keep - 👏 because how you get them is how you keep them.