Mike Salguero is the founder of ButcherBox, an organic meat 🥩 delivery subscription service that does about $500 million in annual revenue.
Mike talks about his entrepreneurial journey on a recent episode of How I Built This.
At about the 60-minute mark, he mentions the “trojan horse” marketing strategy ButcherBox used to get food and diet influencers to promote them 😎
Instead of asking an influencer straight up if they would promote ButcherBox, they reached out and asked if they could include a recipe from the influencer’s website in the boxes they sent out to customers. Each recipe card would feature the influencer’s headshot and website…
These influencers were like, “Yeah that sounds awesome, of course you can use my recipe, make sure you have my website on there. And by the way, what do you guys do?” And we’re like, this is what we do, and by the way we’re launching a referral program so if you want to become an influencer for us, we’d love to have you.
In essence, ButcherBox was giving the influencers something – free publicity – before asking for anything in return.
This is a classic persuasion tactic, covered in-depth in the Reciprocation chapter of the book Influence by Robert Cialdini 📖
Related…
Written by 
