Motivate Through Incentives With John Dwyer

In This Episode

• [02:07] – Stephan introduces John Dwyer, a specialist in incentive-based marketing. John begins by sharing his journey into the marketing and public speaking fields.
• [05:11] – John provides an example of a service business where he successfully implemented incentive offers, detailing his approach to selecting the right incentive for their target audience.
• [12:11] – Stephan asks John about creative, unconventional incentives a company could offer, and whether those offers should always be relevant to the company’s industry or audience.
• [19:51] – John discusses his book, The Wow Manifesto, and offers a special gift to listeners. 
• [30:36] – John recounts the story of how he secured Jerry Seinfeld as a spokesperson and explains why he aimed for him as a key target.
• [34:55] – John shares examples of client successes and how his strategies have delivered results.
• [47:24] – John explains how listeners can connect with him and gain more insights from his work.

Jump to Links and Resources

John, it’s so great to have you on the show.

My pleasure. Thank you, Stephan.

First of all, I’d love to hear your origin story and how you got into marketing and speaking. You speak at events, right? At conferences, keynote speeches and so forth.

Yep, I won’t give you the boring version of it. I’ll do a very quick version. I was reasonably good at artwork in my late teens and early twenties, so I used this sort of thing. Then, I realized there would not be a lot of money in artwork because the digital world was coming along. Of course, now with AI and Midjourney, of course, I’d hate to be an artist or copywriter these days. So I decided to get into the advertising game. I thought maybe if I got into advertising and marketing, then I could use the creative skills I thought I had. So, that’s what I did.

I got into the advertising world and worked for a couple of the bigger companies in Australia. The biggest supermarket chain in Australia, as you can tell from my accent, I’m down under, is a company supermarket chain called Woolworths. I worked for them for a few years, and Woolworths used many techniques outside of London. 

The Tesco business in London is very well known for its direct response marketing skills. So, we were doing stamp collection promotions where every time you spent $10, you got a stamp, licked it, and put it on a saver sheet to get cheap cookware and glassware and all that sort of stuff. Then, we moved on to do scratch games to give away millions of dollars in scratch bingos and all this. I thought I might leave and set up my own business. So that’s what I did.

I left, I guess, the employment game and decided to be the employer for better or for worse. We set up an agency, and that’s what we still do today. I mean, it’s a different agency now. I’ve sold the one that we first set up. It’s direct response marketing, which is all about advertising on Facebook today and getting results tomorrow. Whereas Stephan, branding is all about building your brand over a period of time.

Do you speak at many events, conferences and seminars? Is that part of your marketing?

Yeah. Look, being the shy little devil, I’m not; I quite enjoy giving presentations at conventions, expos, conferences, and things. Look, a lot of the bigger businesses, I came from the corporate world. As I just mentioned, many big businesses don’t understand direct response marketing, and I always highlight that it’s great to build a brand.

97% of businesses have never used direct response marketing, even though major brands like McDonald’s have been doing it successfully for 45-50 years.

Yeah. Look, being the shy little devil, I’m not; I quite enjoy giving presentations at conventions, expos, conferences, and things. Look, a lot of the bigger businesses, I came from the corporate world. 

As I just mentioned, many big businesses don’t understand direct response marketing, and I always highlight that it’s great to build a brand. We buy Toyota or Kellogg’s because of the brand, but smaller businesses that don’t have that sort of money to sponsor the Olympics and build their brand should be thinking about direct response marketing. When you think about it, McDonald’s has been doing it for about 45, 50 years with the toy in the Happy Meal box, Kellogg’s has been doing it for about the same time, and even Amazon does it. You get additional free shipping, movies, and music when you join an Amazon Prime membership. However, 97% of businesses have never used direct response marketing.

A big part of that is using incentives. Therefore, when I’m speaking on stage at conventions, I always ask the audience, “Can you put your hand up if you’ve ever had a Happy Meal toy for your business?” Nobody ever puts their hand up because hardly any business has used incentives to build trade.

So what would be an example of, let’s say, a service business that you helped set up incentive offers? Maybe it’s an accountancy, a law firm, or some sort of services company because that’s probably outside of the box for their thinking.

It is. Yeah. When discussing services businesses, many could be trades, such as plumbers, electricians, builders, concreters, accountants and lawyers. Yeah, they tend to sell their services on price. I keep telling them, well, if you’re selling your electrical or plumbing services on price, then the guy down the road can beat you in a heartbeat.

Whereas if you said, “look, use my services, and I will give you a free movie pass, or I’ll give you a free dining voucher, I’ll give you fuel discounts, gas discounts, or I’ll give you a free vacation if you do anything like that.” I’ve nicknamed it a Happy Meal toy. The guy down the road can’t match you; he might over time, but he certainly can’t match you like he can.

If you offer unique incentives, the guy down the road can’t match you as easily.

If you decided to drop your prices by 20%, he could be 25% less in five minutes. A good example would probably be when we had The Turf Farm recently. So they sell grass. Okay, so not the grass that some of your watchers or listeners might be thinking. We’re talking about turf for the front and back lawn. Their target audience was landscapers because Mom and Dad would only buy the front or back lawn worth of grass, but a landscaper would buy maybe three, four or five homes worth of grass. 

So I said to him, “well, look, what do you think their Happy Meal toy might be?” And the owner of this turf business said, “I don’t know, you tell me.” I said, “I think beer.” 99% of landscapers are beer and would love beer. Therefore, if your target audience is landscapers, why don’t we offer them a carton of premium beer, which is 24 bottles of beer, every time they buy a home’s worth of grass from you?

Now, his turf farm had about 3 miles worth of turf. It was a gigantic acreage. After we notified the landscapers that they got a carton of premium beer for every home they bought, he rang me four days afterward and said, “We’ve got a problem.” I said, “What’s your problem?” He said “We’ve run out of grass.” I said, “What? You just went through 3 miles with the grass?” He said, “Yeah. I can’t believe it.” He said, even the biggest pain in the butt that used to ring me and say, “Look, I can get grass for $5 a yard down the road, you’re $5.50. He used to always buy on price.  He rang me and said, I need 18 cartons of beer, and I’m ordering 18 homes with the grass. I don’t care when the grass gets here, but I need the beer by Friday. I’ve got a party.”

So that’s a classic case of taking the eyes off the price. That guy, this was a few years ago that we ran that campaign, and of course, he had to clear the grass because it was coming up to spring, and he wanted to replant again. So it was very important that he got rid of his 3 miles’ worth of grass. But he just does that every year now, so he has something he can rinse and repeat. 

That’s awesome. So, what’s your process for dreaming up these ideas for the Happy Meal inside?

Yeah, I guess when it comes down to it, it’s choosing a reward, choosing an incentive that suits the audience. So, if I were to go in and buy a shirt from a menswear store, it’d be silly if they gave me a skateboard at this age; I’m not going to use a skateboard. But if they gave me a movie pass for two people, that’s different. Or dining vouchers, petrol discounts, or fuel discounts.

What we try to do is come up with incentives that suit the target audience. And the one we’ve come up with in recent years is this thing here. It’s a vacation voucher. We provide business owners with the opportunity to give away a vacation for three to seven nights in Europe, America, Australia, Mexico, and Canada.

We came up with incentives that suit the target audience.

Essentially, what happened is that we bumped into a travel company that saw one of my promotions, and they said, “Look, we’ve got access to unsold hotel rooms around the world. Do you want to join forces and pay us a royalty? You put together a promotion whereby you provide businesses with a Happy Meal toy and a free vacation.” And I said, ”Yeah, absolutely. I’d be happy to do that.” And so that’s what we do. Now, this vacation voucher gives people three to seven-night accommodation at four-star hotels around the world, and it’s worth up to about $1,000. But they buy it from us for less than $50.

So what happens is that just like the reason McDonald’s toys work, the cost of producing that toy in China is $0.20. When you get it out of the Happy Meal box from McDonald’s, it looks like a four or five-dollar toy. So it’s a low cost but high per-seat value. That’s why the vacation thing works. Not only is it appealing to all ages, but it also costs them $50, and they’re giving away something worth $1,000. That’s why it works. The only reason I bring that up, Stephan, is because we’ve got clients with a large, wide demographic, and they want something that suits a 20-year-old and an 80-year-old. That’s why vacation, of course, comes in perfectly.

Do people think that there’s a catch when they get this voucher thinking that, “Oh, am I going to get sold like one of those timeshare things, high-pressure tactics?” And all that sort of uncomfortable stuff?

In fact, I thought the same thing. Some years back, I had a client in Australia, a bank-building society called the Greater Bank. What we did is that we actually stopped giving away the 1% honeymoon rate on home loans. We just gave that to a travel company. The travel company gave discounted travel. So what we did was we came on TV and said, get a home loan from us, and we’ll give you a free vacation. The thing went nuts. We got an extra $15 billion worth of home loans in the first couple of years.

And this idiot who you’re talking to charged a consultancy fee instead of a percent. I wish I had charged a percentage, but it went nuts. It went crazy. And four years into the campaign, I convinced Jerry Seinfeld to actually be the spokesperson.

So, therefore, I’m name-dropping. I apologize for that. But I flew to America over three years, and we had Jerry Seinfeld standing outside a mockup bank that we had back in Australia because we filmed the commercials not far from where he lived in New York. Jerry Seinfeld said, “Come and get a home loan through, or swap your home loan from another bank across to this bank, and you get a free vacation.”

When you’ve got Jerry Seinfeld doing your ads, keeping it a secret is pretty hard. So this travel company contacted me just before COVID, and they said, “We’ve seen your Seinfeld campaign. You obviously know how to market vacations as a Happy Meal toy. How about we join forces?” And when they told me about this, I said, “This is too good to be true. It can’t be true. There must be a catch. Do they lock people in a room and do the timeshare presentation?” They said, “No, no, none of that. All it is is that outside of school vacations, most of these resorts around the world are running at about 30% vacancy.”

So they’ve got about a third of their rooms vacant and outside of Christmas and Easter and secure vacation. So they’ve decided they might as well give it up for free and hope whoever stays there spends money on food and beverage. So that’s how it works. The hotels basically win because they fill empty rooms. The business wins because it’s got a Happy Meal toy from heaven. And, of course, their consumer wins because they’ve got a free vacation. So it’s one of those win-win things where the hotels fill empty rooms and make money out of food and beverage, and the business hands out these vouchers and hopefully sells more refrigerators or whatever they sell.

The core of direct response marketing is simple: Get noticed, be relevant, and push the right buttons. From TV and radio to social platforms, the principle remains the same. Share on X

Got it. Okay, so what would be an example of one of these sorts of incentives that’s really outside the box that you wouldn’t imagine that a company would offer? I can imagine a free vacation. I can imagine a movie voucher or maybe a shopping voucher or gift card, that sort of thing. But what would be something out there?

This was a joke. I’m about to tell you to answer. And I’ll answer it in a serious way in just a second. But I was doing a conference in Santa Monica, America, on the West Coast. And, you know, you’re probably familiar, I’ve been a member of Joe Polish‘s Genius Network and all the Russell Brunson stuff and Ryan Dyess. So I’ve been in that whole circle. 

On one occasion, when I went over for one of the Joe Polish things in Phoenix, I did an event in Santa Monica, where I did the usual song and dance about incentive-based marketing. An American guy asked me during the presentation, “Look, I’ve got a funeral parlor. How would this work for me?” Well, of course, the answer is really no. But I took the mickey out of him and said, “Well, listen, have you ever been to Australia?” And he said, “Yeah, a couple of times.” And I said, “The supermarkets have a reward program called Flybuys. They do basically, you get points, and you save them up to catch airlines. So that’s why it’s called Flybuys.” 

And he said, “Yeah, I’m familiar with that.” I said, “Okay, well, what we’ll do is we’ll actually set up an incentive program for your funeral parlor, and we’ll call it Diebuys.” I was joking, but I didn’t see his facial expression. 

Recognizing that it was a joke, he went, “What?” I said, “Diebuys. What it is is that we invite you to let us burn your relatives, and you get relatives, and you get points. And then, at the end, you can cash those points in for free gravestones, like headstones.” It was only then that he got it. There was a joke. I was treading a fine line. Look, in terms of weird incentives, the sort of things that I’ve seen that are silly in my mind are silly, are when somebody gives away points that you save up and then you get more of their product.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a sushi business here in Australia called Sushi Train. They might be in America, too; I’m not sure. And this Sushi Train, of course, you go in there, it’s a usual sushi restaurant whereby the little train of, you know, all the meals are going around, and you pick out which one you want. What they do is that, depending upon your expenditure, they give you points. They give you sushi, the Japanese sushi points, right? And when you save up your points, you can use those to have free meals.

There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s better than doing nothing. But if they transferred the free meals into something that hasn’t got anything to do with their business, so, therefore, it was fuel discounts at the gas station, or if it was a movie pass or dining voucher, or dare I say, a holiday voucher, that promotion would be 100% more successful.

I say that because I’m a member of an organization called ADMA, which stands for the Australian Direct Marketing Association.They have their little Academy awards every year. What they do is give an award for the most successful direct response marketing, not the most creative, but the most successful. Not once has a reward program won whereby they’re giving away more of their product. The ones that win are the most successful, whereby they give away something that has nothing to do with their product. For example, a toy and a hamburger at McDonald’s have nothing at all to do with food. All right? Therefore, I would suggest to anyone who might be watching or listening to this: if you’re thinking about an incentive for your product, think of one unrelated to giving them more of your product.

Okay? And does there need to be some sort of relevancy factor, like tangentially related to your product, your company, your target market, your industry, or something like that? Or can it be completely unrelated?

The ones that win are the most successful, whereby they give away something that has nothing to do with their product.

Then, Coca-Cola is giving away points and giving you more Coke. What I would suggest to Coca-Cola, and I’m making this up, by the way. They’re not doing that, but I’m making it up. But I would recommend that they obviously have proof of purchase through barcodes or whatever it might be. Instead of offering people more of their product, they should offer people half a dozen drinking glasses with the Coke logos. Maybe it might be the old logos from 1950 through to now, for example. Therefore, people collect a set of glasses. 

So when I was working for that supermarket chain in my early twenties, which was like a thousand years ago, we would say that for every $10 you spent, you got a stamp. And again, it was pre-digital, so you would lick the stamp and put it onto what we called a saver sheet, and you would have to save up ten of those stamps, meaning that you spent $100 to get a glassware or cookware.

It might be a frying pan, or it might be a glass, or it might be a dessert bowl or whatever it might have been. Therefore, we were encouraging them to shop at our supermarket chain, and whatever they spent, they could cash in on one of these cookware or glassware. And that’s what I would say to anyone watching or listening to this and thinking, okay, the incentive thing makes sense. What should I do? Yeah. Find something that would obviously be relevant to your target audience. But if it is relevant to your products, for example, in Coca-Cola’s instance, they collect glasses. I mean, you would have seen Stephan. And I’m sure McDonald’s jumps on the Olympics bandwagon over the years every time.

And when the Olympics come around, McDonald’s has a set of glasses you can collect. So you buy their product, get one of these glasses, and of course, there’s four, five, or six into the set. And we call that a continuity promotion. Once you’re on it, it’s like a drug habit. You have to get all six glasses you can’t get off.

Right? So, having a set they feel they need to complete is a powerful way to keep the purchases going.

It is. It won’t surprise you that part of my background is taking out the licensing for bubblegum trading cards. So in America, of course, boys more than girls, but, you know, many people grow up collecting baseball cards or basketball cards and so forth. Here in Australia, our major sport is rugby league. So, it’s our version of Gridiron. 

I had the license for that for several years. And of course, the beauty of that is that once the kids are buying the first packet of trading cards, and of course, they’re on, dare I say, a habit, and they’ve got to go to the drug store and pay $2 for the next packet of cards. And what we would do here makes me sound very evil, but what we would do is go to the Murdoch newspapers and give them millions and millions and millions of free trading cards.

Then, they would come on TV on Friday, Saturday, and they say, “Buy the Sunday paper, and you get two free trading cards of your favorite players.” And, of course, the evil sort of target was that the kids would get these, taste-test them and go, Mommy, Daddy, I want to buy more trading cards. And, of course, it would launch the whole program. I would also like to give you an idea of the success of sampling because that’s a big part of direct response marketing. 

We took that business from $2 million the year before turnover, which was a bubblegum company. When we got involved, which was a marketing company, we took it from two to 12 million in one year simply because we handed out samples. Very cool, by the way, Stephan, none of my friends at the time had children; I mean, I’ve got six children, and they’re all grown up and left home now; this was 20-something years ago. So, we all had young children at the time.

All of my friends hated me because they kept on saying, “Would you stop giving away those free cards in the newspaper?” Once little Jimmy got involved, it cost us $300 to complete the set. I said, “Oh, well, you’re paying for my annual vacation.”

Gotcha. Okay, so what are some other tactics and strategies you’ve got in your arsenal? I know you’ve got a whole book, The Wow Manifesto. You’ve got a whole set of tricks up your sleeves. So what are some other ones?

Well, I’m glad. For those who are watching or listening, this has not been set up. Stephan has asked me this question, and I just happened to have an exhibit here. But I was asked to write a book because when you do these seminars at conferences, you’ve got to write a book to showcase that you have half a clue. So I thought, if my business is called theinstituteofwow.com, I better write a book that actually embodies that. So it’s ridiculous. This is the size of a tabloid newspaper. So that’s the book that I wrote. And it’s called The Wow Manifesto.

I had a photo. These were a few years old now, so they didn’t have so many wrinkles, but that’s me on the front page. This is 300 pages of the most successful direct-response concepts I’ve run over the years. So, I’m a bit of a hoarder when keeping information about successful campaigns. So, this is a giant swipe file. I’m shutting off about it because I’m more than happy to give this for free to whoever’s watching or listening to it. If it’s okay with you, Stephan, I’ll give them a URL to download this.

It’ll be a digital copy. Printing this book costs $420. So, I can’t send out the book, but with your permission, I would just give anybody the URL if they wanted to get it. Is that all right?

Yeah, please.

If you said no, then that would be real. Damn it. Yeah. So just go to wowmanifesto.com/gift. So. So that’s that.

In that book, it was timely to bring that up because now, when you mentioned it and said, look what other tricks you’ve got up your sleeve, it’s all in that manual. That manual there. The manifesto has the most successful direct response campaigns across, you know, 20 years, and they’re all timeless. So therefore, whether something was marketed through TV or radio, maybe ten, twelve or 15 years ago, it may now be marketed through Facebook or Instagram. The concept is what you’re looking for as a business owner, but we have many things to do. The million-dollar giveaways.

I’m not sure whether you’re familiar with Stephan, but the fact that you know who wants to be a millionaire on TV? The network doesn’t give any of that money away. An insurance company is giving that away. Therefore, the network pays the insurance company based on the difficulty of the questions. We have a similar package providing businesses with 50,000, 100,000, or a million dollars to give away. So, a business can get a million-dollar giveaway for less than 20 grand. What happens is they say, buy my product or service, and you’ve got a ticket in the million-dollar drawer. They pay the insurance company, or they pay us. We’ve got a small margin for marketing, and we’re packaging it.

Essentially, the insurance company gives them the million dollars for less than 20 grand, and then they promote that for a month or two, whatever it might be. Buy my product or service, and you’ve got the chance to win a million. And that certainly expands their target audience. And then at the end of it, when someone’s drawn, they have to choose between maybe 100 or 200 envelopes on a boardroom table, or they go online, and there’s a chocolate wheel with 100 numbers on it, and they choose a number, and if that number comes up, they win the million dollars. If it doesn’t, then they win a consolation prize, which might be a vacation or a motorcycle car, or $1,000 in cash or whatever it might be. So there’s the insured promotions. We do fuel discounts, where we allow businesses to give their customers a fuel discount, such as at gas stations and a whole host of others. Stephan, you probably have found the same thing in what we found with small to medium-sized businesses.

It’s not about the complexity of the reward system but about simplicity and appeal. Sometimes, a movie pass or a dining voucher can do wonders compared to complicated, irrelevant rewards. Share on X

They don’t have a lot of time to learn, but what they want is done for you. So what we’ve done is that we’ve actually packaged, done for you promotions for them, be it the vacation program like that, or whether it’s the fuel discounts, or whether it’s the million-dollar giveaway. We package it for them and just give it to them. Because we found that they’re pretty good technicians, they don’t have much time to do their own marketing.

Gotcha. Okay. Why did you call your book a manifesto? What is it about? A manifesto that made it compelling.

It’s funny, you know, you should say that. I don’t know whether I can answer that because a buddy of mine a few years ago said to me, “look, if you’re going to write a book, why don’t you do a big one?” I wish I could claim it was my idea. His name is Glenn Walford. Great, mate. And I said, “Oh, what are you talking about?” He said, “Well, you’re the instituteofwow.com, so, you know, you want to make sure that whatever you do in a book will be different. Why don’t you do a big book?” And so it was actually his idea. And I said to him, “Okay.’ And he said “Do you want to know what you ought to call it?” And I said, “You tell me.”

I’m supposed to be the ideas guy. And this mate of mine was giving me the ideas. He said, “Call it The Wow Manifesto. To be honest with you, I haven’t googled the word manifesto lately, but I assume it means, I guess, recipe. Is that what it means? I mean, it’d be interesting to find out what it means. This is new to me.

A manifesto catalyzes a worldwide change or action.

Yeah. So a manifesto is something that’s kind of like a call to arms, a call to action. It sets up a movement, or it starts a movement, right? It catalyzes a worldwide change or action. And if you have something that you want to declare or you have strong values or principles or views that you want to convey in a book, that’s where a manifesto comes in. That’s my understanding of it.

I will wipe the sweat from my brow because I thought you would bring up a gurgle and say that it meant nothing to do with the new thing. And then I would have rung up my buddy Glenn and said, “Oh, thank you very much. I’ve just been embarrassed.” On a podcast, I have to tell any business owner or entrepreneur wanting to set up a business that they should forget. My mantra is part of their thinking. What I always say to my six millennial kids, and I don’t know whether they’re listening, they tend to listen when they get a mortgage. Dad had half a brain when they got a mortgage. And they say, “Dad, how do we have a side hustle to pay the bank back every month?” But up until then, I don’t think they knew what I did for a living.

But I always tell them to hang around people who are “why not” people, not “why”? Because you know what you’ll find is a lot of operational people when you give them an idea, and that would be accountants, or it would be lawyers, or it might be, you know, it might be even just operational people in your business; they tend to say, “Oh, but why would you do that?” And I found over the years that if I hang around with some crazy people who go, why not? I’m not saying that you have to sort of put the farm up with every silly idea, but I have found and tried to encourage my kids to hang around with people who say, why not? You’ve still got to put whatever that idea is under the microscope. But it is much more enjoyable to deal with positive-thinking people. Oh, yeah, why not give that a shot? And that doesn’t matter whether it’s Facebook advertising or a product or branding or, you know, it doesn’t matter what the actual subject matter is. It’s just nice to hang around people who are encouraging you and encouraging you to have a go.

So, are you using some of your techniques, incentives and other tactics in your marketing beyond this manifesto book and beyond speaking at conferences, trade shows and so on?

Yeah, it’s funny. I guess you’re asking, do I drink my own Kool-Aid, which is very, very good, or.

Eat your dog food, whichever analogy you prefer.

Hang around people who are ‘why not’ people, not ‘why’ people.

The thing is, is that I’m almost embarrassed to be in this seminar industry because I came into it a dozen years ago simply because I said to my wife, I mean, we had the greater building Society, which was the Seinfeld campaign, they were paying me thirty-five k a month. So that was a nice client to have. And I had a few casinos in Australia. We don’t call them casinos; they’re called league clubs, but they have poker machines and gambling. And they were paying ten or $12,000 a month. It wasn’t that difficult to earn a lot of money with the big corporates. But I told my wife, look, we’re not getting any younger, and why don’t we do this? Why don’t we swap from the corporates to smaller to medium-sized businesses and, you know, provide them with the intellectual property of this sort of marketing mantra? And she said, no, you don’t stick to your knitting, because I think we had two or three kids still at school at that stage. I won the argument, and we jumped into the small business world.

It was a real culture shock for me, a massive culture shock because I’ve been used to speaking in boardrooms, whereas if I brought up KPI in some of the seminars, they thought I was talking about a new chicken chain. So I was a bit worried for a while. I thought, “Oh, what have I done?” Because it took six to twelve months to recognize that small and medium-sized businesses want it done for them. They don’t want to necessarily go back to university or college; they want it done for them. And so, therefore, that’s what I’ve done. And what I do these days if I’m on stage is, I drink my own Kool-Aid. 

For example, one recently where I had was a car dealership. After ten test drives, I also asked the car dealership owners how many cars they sell. And they said, “Around about two. Some sold three or four, but, you know, two or three.” And I said, “Okay, so your aim should be to get people to come and take test drives because, you know, if you have 20 test drives, you’re probably going to sell six cars.” They said, “Yeah. I said, well, here’s your answer. Can you imagine if you get this office for a $50 vacation voucher and then you say, look, come and have a test drive, and I will give you a free vacation? Do you think that might encourage more people to take a test drive?” And he went, “Yep.”

And I said, “What we would do is discourage the tire kickers by making sure that when they actually see the Facebook ad and go through to a landing page, you prequalify them to ask them, are you in, are you in the market for a new car? How old is your car at the moment? What range?  It is to ensure that they have a driver’s license and will be prospects for buying a car. And then, when they come in and do the test drive, you give them their free vacation.”

You could see that everyone was very intrigued by this, but it was the same old story, too good to be true. So what I did, I said, “Look, I’ll show you how this works. Who wants to win one of these vacations?” And I get them to put their hat up, and the guy comes up on stage, I pick one, and I say, “Who’s the president of the United States at the moment. Is it Jim Carrey, or is it Joe Biden?” Make it an easy one. He goes, “Joe Biden.” I say, “Well, congratulations, here’s a free vacation for you.” And when he goes back to his seat, I ask all the other hundred car dealers in the room, who would like to be Jim, just want a vacation? And they all go, “yeah, of course we would.

I said, “Okay, well, you’ve got a vacation. You’ve got a vacation.” I do the Oprah motor car thing where she gave a motorcar to everyone. And I say, “Just look under your seat because you’ve got a vacation. You’ve got a vacation.” And you can see them dancing or jumping up and down. Wow, we’ve got to tell a hundred guys who got vacations. Guess what? At the end of that, when they’ve all settled down after 30 seconds, say, there’s proof that incentives work.

You guys have been convinced that incentives work because I got you to jump up and down for a free vacation. If you do that in front of people and highlight to them the adrenaline rush of getting something for free, everyone understands how powerful it is.

A great example. You mentioned Jerry Seinfeld earlier. How did you land him specifically, and why did you target him as the potential spokesman?

Good question. Excellent question. And Stephan, I’ve milked the daylights out of the Seinfeld thing for the last number of years, as you would not often get to work with a superstar like that. Yeah. So it came about that this bank, as I said in Australia, called The Greater Building Society, gets a home loan and a free vacation. And it went nuts.

Then, when we put Seinfeld involved in it, of course, it went to another level. In the first three or four years of running that campaign, you got a home loan and a free vacation, bringing in billions of dollars worth of extra home loans.

We figured that we’d sort of got the low-lying fruit. So, a building society tends to have a more working-class audience. A bank like Wells Fargo tends to have people wearing business suits or coats. Therefore, we realized that we’d scooped up many low-lying fruits, which are working-class people. The general manager, the CEO of the bank, told me, “John, can you think of something that would attract a higher level?” And I said, “Okay, well, let me think about it.” And a friend in the advertising world had just been using Billy Connolly to promote a product. And I said, “How do you get Billy Connolly, the Scottish comedian?” And he said, “Wherever he is in the world, we just fly to him. And then he gives us a day of his time. We shoot a dozen commercials, fly back to Australia, and hand them over to him. $2 million.” I said, “Okay, well, yeah, I’ll give that a shot.” 

So we put out a survey to all the members of the building society and others. We said if there was a personality that would promote this bank, who do you think would be suitable? And it was a good survey to run because, up until then, we’d been very cheeky.

We took on a Richard Branson’s Virgin sort of mentality in terms of branding. We would ask people why they would stay with the Wells Fargo-style bank. They treat you like a number when you come across our building society, and you can be treated like a person. So you’ll see imagery where the bank manager’s talking to someone in the bank and the usual thing.

Also, guess what? You don’t pay any of those bank fees; you get a free vacation. So it was a pretty compelling discussion about good versus evil if you like. And so therefore, what happened is that when we were going to look for a personality and put out the survey, then the results that came back said, “We think that the sort of person that would be ideal for promoting the building society would be someone like Jim Carrey, Robin Williams or Seinfeld.” And I thought, “Oh, what have I done? I’ve just created a nightmare for myself because I said, little did I know I was going to come back with names like that.” And I thought, “Okay, well, fair enough.” So anyway, as it turned out, I annoyed the daylights out of Jerry Seinfeld’s manager, a guy called George Shapiro. For months after months, I used every trick in the book. I’d leave messages and send emails, and I was a nuisance.

And eventually, George rang me, George Shapiro, his manager of 40 years, and said, “Listen, what do you want Jerry to do?” I said, “We’d just come wherever he is and build a fake building society inside an empire shop somewhere. He just stands outside and stands up.” And when he’s doing his stand-up, obviously, he’s promoting the free vacation. He said, “Leave it with me.” You wouldn’t believe it. Within 24 hours, he came back and said, “Jerry said it’s a good idea.” Now, the thing is, back at the time that we did this, no one knew what we paid Jerry, but we paid him 1.1 million a year for three years. So that’s 3.3 million. So, to him, it’s nothing because he’s got more money than God.

But it’s still a very cost-effective campaign if you think about it. But even here in Australia, we were paying at the time, not me, but other businesses were paying an equivalent amount of money just for a local cricketer or local baseball player. This is the biggest comedian in the world, and we got him for that price. But anyway, it turned out we pulled it off, and I went back and forth to New York and did the ads with Jerry. 

Persistence beats intelligence.

 I remember asking him once why he said yes to this. You’ve got more money than God. And despite that, for most of us, that’s a lot of money to be paid for. You don’t need it. Why did you say yes? And he said, “Well, one, because the scripts basically asked me to take the mickey out of the banks, and I take the mickey for a living.”

So he said, “You know, I thought that was funny. I like the Aussie sense of humor.” And he said, “The second and main reason was that I thought you’d never go away if I didn’t say yes.” So I said to him, “Well, persistence beats intelligence. Luckily for me, because I’m not that intelligent.”

That’s funny. Congratulations on that. I’m sure it set you up for a very successful career. I’m curious if you’ve had other successes with clients getting big celebrity spokespeople to represent their brands.

I think the best story I could give you, Stephan, is that I’m an entrepreneur, and like all entrepreneurs, I’m sure you experience the same. It’s a roller coaster. It’s not a merry-go-round because, you know, you make your money and you put it into the next project, and sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. When I was doing the bubble gum cards 20-something years ago, we would take out the licenses with Disney to do Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, or whatever it might have been. DreamWorks, the same thing. 

Being an entrepreneur is a roller coaster, not a merry-go-round; you make money and invest in the next project, winning or losing.

We would produce the bubblegum cards that kids go to in Australia as the news agencies, but they might go to drug stores in America and collect the cards. As I said to you before, the beauty of having those trading cards as a product is that once the kids have a certain number of cards, they keep buying the rest. Of course, I was over in Los Angeles visiting Disney to do another deal for trading cards, and my general manager at the time had about 20 staff.

He made a big printing mistake, and I forget what series it was. Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast. But anyway, the numbers were wrong, and the cards were printed upside down and all sorts of things while I was away. And we lost 2.2 million in a week. And so he greeted me at the airport when I returned with his bad news. And, you know, consequently, we basically lost everything, our house, and what you have. I remember calling the church one morning and just asking the big guy upstairs, “Is there any chance I could get back on my feet? I promised that I’d do something to inspire other people.” Well, you wouldn’t believe it.

Just as the bank was about to close us down, we scored the rugby league trading card license, which was our Gridiron, and I distributed the cards through the Sunday papers and all that stuff that I told you about before. We made the whole 2.2 million back in one season. So we paid off all of our debts, and I was back on top. Therefore, I thought I had better keep my promise to the big guy upstairs. So we produced a TV show that I sold to a network, and it was called Dreams Can Come True. And it was all about fulfilling needy people’s dreams. In other words, if they needed a house, we surprised them with a house if they hadn’t seen a relative for 20 years.

We set up a reunion, and we had an unbelievable response from the biggest people in the world because the TV network told us, “Look, we’ll give you the TV show to run on a Sunday night, up against 60 minutes.” Would you believe in another network? And we won the ratings. But you need to have some celebrities. We’re a TV network, and I love the idea of dreams coming true for needy people, but you have to have some celebrities. And, you know, we asked Michael Jordan, Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Meat Loaf, you name it, Crocodile Dundee. All of them said yes. And if I can just give you one of them, which was just a wonderful, wonderful story. Anyone can watch this if they go to the Institute of Wow and just click on the TV show.

But can I warn you, you should have a box of Kleenex with you? This little 15-year-old boy suffered from spina bifida, and his parish priest sent us a letter and just said, is there any chance at all you could get a Michael Jordan autograph? And the reason why was the little boy tried to commit suicide because spina bifida is not good. Not a good prognosis. Fortunately, he failed to kill himself. A friend of his encouraged him to take up wheelchair basketball. Guess what? He became a member of the Australian under-16 wheelchair basketball side. Within six months, he was just a whiz.

If they scored 50 points, he scored 40 of them. We surprised him at the end of one of his games with the news that he was not only flying to America to see Michael Jordan, but it was Michael Jordan’s last year to see Michael Jordan playing. But Michael Jordan would take him to lunch in the Michael Jordan restaurant in Chicago the next day. The entire stadium was in tears.

And how we pulled this off is that I put a fax through to Michael Jordan’s office and gave him the story he was in. I asked him how we pulled this off when we were there. He said you’re not going to believe it. I get a million requests a week. And he said, I only visit my office once every three weeks. And I happened to be visiting the day your fax came out of the machine. I pulled it out, read it, and told the secretary to make this one happen to this little Australian boy. And so he said, it’s a chance in a million. And so we took him over. He saw the game, and Michael Jordan came out of the kitchen of his restaurant with a birthday cake for this little boy’s 15th birthday.

Wow.

Yeah. And the restaurant was packed in tears. And, you know, everyone couldn’t believe it. The little boy was just a mess. It just tears everywhere. Michael Jordan sat down and had lunch with him. Michael Jordan said to him, “Well, it’s your birthday. Blow out the candles and make a wish.”

And if you. We’ve got it on tape. The little boy looks up at Michael Jordan and says, “Make a wish? I don’t need to. It’s already happened.”

Amazing.

That TV show, as I said, we asked for help from Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Crocodile Dundee, Meat Loaf, it just goes on. All the people with the stars, David Duchovny from The X-Files. I could go on and on and on. And, you know, the media sometimes paints these celebrities out as being. Just looking after themselves. I’ve got to say to you that everyone put their hand up and did whatever they could to make a needy person’s dream come true. And, yeah, as I said, if anybody watching this would like to just feel better about themselves for today if you go to the instituteofwow.com and look up the top of it, it says, wow, TV show. Yeah, but just make sure you have some Kleenex handy.

Awesome. So you said Michael Jordan told you that? Yeah. This was like a one-in-a-million chance that he would pull that. But to me, it feels like our life is a rigged game. Rigged in our favor. So, the guy upstairs is coordinating everything for us. What’s your philosophy on all these questions, mate?

I’m a Christian, and I have to say to you that throughout the roller coaster ride losthat we’ve had, where we’ve made it and lost it and made it and so forth, the mantra that I live with is one that Sir Winston Churchill. Sir Winston Churchill gave a famous speech when he was prime minister of England. He went back to the little school that he grew up in, and the students asked him what advice he would give them, and he gave a speech known as a never give up speech. He just said to them, whatever happens to you in life, just never, ever, ever give up. It’s just a wonderful speech. 

The mantra I live with is ‘never give up.’

I have to say that aside from having faith in the guy upstairs, I just had to. On more than one occasion, I gave you that one occasion, but there’s been a couple of other times that it’s been pretty dark. I just had to ensure that if I went to bed at two, I would set the alarm on for six minutes and never give up.

I had to feed six children, and I’m sure that for any parent, that’s their main concern. And I just had to keep getting up early, going to bed late, and never, ever, ever give up. And you know what? Every single time he comes through, you never think it. At the time, you think. And you know how, like, that saying is, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I have to tell you, I’ve looked at the ceiling a few times and said I’m strong enough. All right?

Right. With that TV show, dreams can come true. Did the Make a Wish Foundation inspire you? How did you come up with this idea?

Yeah. Yeah. We were very closely involved with Make a Wish and the Starlight Foundation, and so, therefore, they. When this show came on at seven thirty on a Sunday night, Stephan, I didn’t do it to make money because when I went to pitch the show to the network, Channel 10 was in Australia, and I will never forget it. I pitched the idea to them with a pilot. We had a famous rugby league player here in Australia called Mal Meninga who fulfilled a dream. I took the little boy to a football game, and he was like the Babe Ruth of Australian football.

So it was a big time to take this little boy to a football game. The little boy had a tough upbringing, which was a wonderful dream. I played that on the TV network, and a man made the decision, and he was crying. He just said to me, “Oh, my God, this is unbelievable.” And he said, “However, how much are you going to pay for it? Charge for it?” And I thought “I don’t know.” I’ve made many TV ads, but I’ve never made a TV program. I was winging it, right? And I said to him, “Oh, $142,000 an episode, right?” And he goes, “Wow, we get, at the time, 90210 for 25 grand. We get The Simpsons for 30. I was just about to say, “Oh, give me 30.”

It wasn’t about the money because it was all about fulfilling the promise I’d made to the guy upstairs. And he said, “Well, you got these superstars because you’re going to have to have celebrities for that sort of money.” And I said, “Oh, we’ve got Michael Jordan. Jordan. I pulled that out of my, you know, where?” And he goes, “How do you get Michael Jordan? That’s unbelievable. We’ve been trying to get Michael Jordan forever.” And I said, “Oh, I’m into trading cards.”

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

And so, therefore, basketball cards and rugby league cards. I mean, we just sort of know complete B’s. And as it turned out, they said you’ve got x number of episodes. And I remember walking out of the building thinking, I got to get Michael Jordan. And so that’s when we put out an all-points bulletin to all of the ministers and the Paris princess to anywhere around Sydney because that’s where I lived at the time. And I just said, do you have anyone who might be doing it tough and might be interested in Michael Jordan? And that’s when we got this letter from a parish priest to say this little boy tried to commit suicide, and this would be a wonderful dream. So, again, the way the guy works upstairs is wonderful. But I must say that throughout that period, only four or five of us were making this TV show.

And, you know, when the credits come up for the tv show, and sometimes you get blown away with the number of people that are behind the scenes, we had to put friends’ and relatives’ names in the credits because there were only five of us that put this damn thing together. We had to actually make up names. Do not make names; just use friends’ and relatives’ names because the credits had to run for a certain 45 seconds or whatever it might be. But I have to say, if I were to look back on the highlight of my life, that would be it. We charge $142,000 a show. I spent $175,000 on every show, so we certainly didn’t go in to make the money. We went in because, to be honest with you, I’m sure that’s the case. Even worse now. But I was sick and tired as a father of six children turning the tv on at night time, and it was all kill, rape, maim and destroy.

It was just all bad news. And I just figured it was about time that we had some good news when we had dinner at night and sat back in the lounge. And we had letters from women that said, “Listen, I’ve been married 42 years to my husband, and he’s a tough bugger. I’ve never seen him cry tears of joy like I had when he watched your TV show.” And it was just wonderful to get that sort of feedback.

That’s beautiful. Awesome. I know we’re about time, but I do have one more question. I’m curious. Did you actually end up losing your house when you lost that 2.2 million, or did you manage to keep it through that rugby deal?

That is a fantastic question. You must be psychic. I’ll tell you why. We lived in a little country town called Gloucester in the Hunter Valley. It won’t mean anything to overseas listeners, but it was about two and a half hours north of Sydney in Australia. And it was a lovely 14-acre property. We had all the kids, so we had the tennis court, the little guest cabin, and a couple of golf greens. And it was just a little house on the prairie.

If you’re thinking about an incentive for your product, think of one unrelated to giving them more of your product.

It was just lovely. And that’s the one that we lost. Right. And as it turned out, the bank said, “Well, you’ve got to put it on the market because we don’t have any guarantee that you’re going to get back on your feet. So, therefore, if you don’t, then at least we’ll get the money from the house.”  I gave it to a real estate agent in town because we had to move out of that house. Would you believe we left on Mother’s Day? I’ll never forget looking at my wife in the van; she was wiping away tears from her eyes.

We were losing our house or leaving on Mother’s Day of all days. Anyway, as it turned out, the bank said, “You’ve got to put it up for sale.” I thought I had a chance of a comeback, but at that time, I didn’t receive a notification from the rugby league that we had gotten the trading card license. So, anyway, I gave it to the real estate agent in town. I told him the truth. I said, “Look, this is what’s happened.” He said, “Okay, leave it with me.” I said, “But you’ve got to sell the house.”

He goes, “Yeah, yeah. Okay.” Well, as it turned out, the bank was always in contact with the real estate agent. Have you sold the house? Have you sold the house? Guess what? He told a few white buyers that they had little demand for the home. And he kept on pushing it back, saying that he’s got a few interested buyers, but they’re just looking for finance and this, that, and the other. Well, guess what? The football season came and went. I got the license. And so at the end of those six months when we made the huge comeback, he handed the keys to me and said, you’ve still got your house because he purposely didn’t sell it.

Not that the bank knew that. Wow, again, you have to look upstairs and say, “Well, that just doesn’t happen by accident.”

Small to medium-sized businesses want solutions, not theories. They’re looking for done-for-you options, whether it’s vacation programs or fuel discounts. Simplify, and they’ll flock to you. Share on X

Yeah, yeah. It’s all divinely orchestrated. Amazing. All right, well, that’s a great way to end this episode. So where should we send our listener to download that book, the free gift, learn more from you and perhaps even book you for an event they’re putting together, a conference or something like that?

Well, thank you very much for the invitation. Yeah. First, my business is theinstituteofwow.com, so it’s theinstituteofwow.com to my email address. My personal email address is [email protected]. And if you’d like to grab your free big Wow Manifesto, then just go to wowmanifesto.com/gift.

All right, John, thank you so much. And thank you, listener. I hope you are inspired to now go out there and make a difference in the world using your marketing and all the products and services that you sell. We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Use high-perceived value incentives like vacation vouchers to attract and retain customers. Offering something unrelated to my product can create a stronger impact.

Match my rewards to my target audience’s preferences. Effective incentives resonate well with my customer’s desires and lifestyles.

Avoid complex reward systems. Customers appreciate straightforward and appealing incentives over convoluted schemes.

Apply successful past marketing concepts to modern platforms. Techniques used for TV and radio can now thrive on social media networks.

Collaborate with industries to use unsold inventory, like hotel rooms, for promotional offers. This mutually benefits businesses and enhances customer value.

Innovate with unconventional incentives. Unique yet valuable rewards make my promotions stand out.

Implement continuity promotions with collectible items to encourage repeated purchases. This adds excitement and perceived value for customers.

Offer ready-made marketing solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. Packaged promotions tailored to their needs can drive better results than complex training.

Share authentic experiences to resonate with my audience. Demonstrating real-life applications of my strategies builds trust and engagement.

Connect with John Dwyer through his website, The Institute of Wow. For a more personalized approach, download and read his free digital book, The Wow Manifesto, from wowmanifesto.com/gift.

About John Dwyer

John Dwyer helps business owners understand how to attract new customers by using “incentive-based marketing offers” that can be targeted specifically to certain audiences.

One of his most successful INCENTIVE offers was a Free Vacation with a home loan for an Aussie Bank – & Jerry Seinfeld was the spokesman.