The Art of Creativity

Service providers and retailers outside the beauty industry have had to compete with the increasing growth of Internet sales. This has resulted in a number of retailers led by Apple, implementing a radical business model that required creative thinking. The same consumers that shop at Apple visit our salons. Today’s salon owner will have to […]

How to Think Like a Genius

What is common to the thinking style that produced the theory of relativity and Mona Lisa? How do geniuses come up with ideas? What characterizes the thinking strategies of people, such as Einstein, Mozart and Steve Jobs? What can we learn from them? If we can understand the commonality, we can apply it to become […]

A Window into the Future

Don’t predict the future, control it. What music comes to mind when you try on a pair of jeans? “Does the music in your head” somehow change when you try on a different brand? The next time you try on a piece of jewelry, pay very close attention to the emotional experiences that run through […]

The Future is Embedded in the Present

Our progress in the technical and creative side of our industry today, is because Vidal Sassoon didn’t conform to the mindset of legacy hairdressing and saw a vision of women with natural geometrically cut creations. Vidal was an unreasonable man! “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts […]

The Total Retail Experience

At Ron King Salon in Austin, Texas, a light box draws the consumer to the brand or domain (shampoo, conditioner or styling products) creating the law of selection!   In the beauty industry we are in a strong position to create opportunities for our consumers to listen, see, touch, smell and take ownership of the […]

Women Shop in Venus, Men Shop at Mars

If your ambition were to open a pet shop, one would hope you would know a little about the animals you are dealing with. As a hairdresser, you spend years studying your craft and ongoing education is fundamental. The same principal should apply to both retailing and service. As salon owners and service providers, we […]

The Consumer of the Future

If your kids ran your salon, what would they do differently? The heart of that question is what is going on with the next generation. Anyone born after 1994 has essentially grown up in a world only knowing the web, so their world is different to you and me. The way they see brands, the […]

Thinking to a Higher Order

Education is a companion that no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy and no enemy can alienate. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, and at once lends grace and government to genius. The beauty industry has excellent technical education for hairdressers and good business education for salon owners. If we aspire to elevate the […]

Marketing to Our Minds

More businesses, marketers, advertisers and retailers have gotten far craftier, savvier and even more sinister. Today, thanks to all the sophisticated technologies they have at their disposal and the new research in the fields of consumer behavior, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, companies know much more about what makes us tick. In my previous blog on […]

How Your Customers Think

Have you ever walked into a hotel room and tossed your room key or card somewhere, and a few seconds later forgotten where you put it? The data just vanishes from the brain’s hard drive. Why? Because our brains are simultaneously processing all kinds of information-what city or time zone I’m in, how long until […]