A short conversation between Justin and Gabe explaining the law of reciprocity applied to customer acquisition and reviews. They distinguish genuine reciprocity (providing unsolicited, escalating value after purchase) from simple transactional incentives (rebates, coupons), illustrate with examples (inserts with QR codes and post-purchase offers; restaurant red‑napkin experience), and describe using value-first flows to request reviews.
Chapters
So actually, Gabe, do you want to kind of speak to the idea of the law of reciprocity? Yeah, this.
I love this part. I love this part. So the law of reciprocity is essentially, if you give someone something, if you're nice to someone, if you provide value to someone, they are more likely to provide value back. If you boil it all down, that's what it comes down to. Naturally, in our minds, we have an account balance with every person we interact with. So if Justin here goes and is like, hey, Gabe, he lives in Colorado, I live in Maine. If he ships me a pizza or ships me a coffee, does something crazy like that, right? Just out of the blue, I am more likely to do something nice for him. He's not asking me to do anything, but because he did something nice for me, I'm more likely to do something nice for him. Simple as that. So we've built our entire strategy off of that principle. And so when it comes to value, some people think, like, we run a lot of Facebook ads, a lot of rebates on our Facebook ads, and anywhere between 30 and 80% at one point, we were doing 100% rebates. We were losing a lot of money doing that. But all throughout that process, a lot of people think, oh, that's the value you're getting. Okay, if I just run rebates, then I'm giving my customers value. And the reality is that's actually not the value that you're giving. Because when you say, hey, this is what I'm going to do to you, if you do X, I will do Y for you. That's not necessarily value. That's just a transaction. So what we do is, is I'm going to get a little granular here. But we have very specific things that we will add value to for a customer once they've already bought. So we run the rebates to get as many customers as we can. And then once they've bought, we'll have very specific things we do. For example, on our inserts, all of our inserts have like a QR code. You scan it, you go to a page, and it just says, hey, thanks so much for buying this product. Join our list. We'll give you 50% off. A second one. They join the list. 20, 24 hours go by, we say, thank you so much for buying. That second One here is 30% off any of our products. Pick your product, we'll send you a coat. They do that. We'll have like three, four, sometimes five of those different processes, depending on the product, just giving an obscene amount of value at every single turn. And then at that point, that's when we ask, hey, if you want to join the list. Yeah, I saw. I saw you coming. I saw you coming there. We say, if you want to join our list, we would love to give you more of these offers. We'd love to invite you into our family. If you want to join the list, let us know. And then we get their phone, their email, and then we do the review, ask after that.
Thank you so much for. For referencing the fact that the rebate strategy is not reciprocity. It's just a transaction. Yeah. And it is only transactable if there is reciprocity baked into the system. There is a wonderful example of this where Gary Vaynerchuk did one of his episodes with somebody who advises restaurants, and he was saying, you want to know how to grow a restaurant? You remember this game?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
So he's like, every time somebody comes in, we ask the customer help, have you been here before? And if they say no, they give them a red napkin. Right. And. And the red napkin is like the special person of the day. The other waiters and waitresses come over and greet them, say, thank you for being here. They give them a great experience. At the end of the. Of the meal, they say, your meals on us today.
Then they.
And they walk out, Right. Oh, and here's. Here's a coupon for a free dessert. You got to come in for the free dessert. And as a result, there's like. Like, how do I not come back here? But if you put an ad outside, that was new. People eat free. There's no reciprocity now. It's a transaction.
100%.
That's the difference. That's why so many people don't get this. This is why the value part actually matters.
