Right now I'm in Las Vegas.
I'm filming from a hotel room and I was recently in
the Caesar's Palace, which is a casino and mall.
Basically an open mall and they have this gallery there called
the Martin Lawrence Gallery which is one of the most successful,
if not the most successful gallery in Las Vegas.
And I walked in to do a research project.
I wanted to know "How do they sell this art?"
In this video I want to go through their sales strategy.
How does the Martin Lawrence Gallery sell high ticket art at a high volume?
My assumption going into this gallery was - Their main sale were these big pieces of "Original Art".
The gallery is known for having a lot of Picasso prints, a lot of prints by Andy Warhol, and Marc Chagall.
Martin Lawrence Gallery is also one of a few, they have a couple out in LA as well .
This is the Vegas branch of the gallery.
So I assumed, people come in, every once in a while a Big Shot will come in and say
"Hey, give me that Andy Warhol" and spend 40 grand on a painting.
But that was disproven during this experiment.
So I walked into the gallery and immediately,
Immediately at the front of the Martin Lawrence gallery there were three Andy Warhol's
Huge Andy Warhol screen prints, originals worth well over $10,000 each and those
were there to grab your eye and pull you into the gallery.
Because as soon as I walked into the Martin Lawrence gallery and past those Warhol's,
there was an entire wall of 'Cheaper' art "Cheaper" still $2000 - $3000.
These were six hand-signed "Salvador Dali Etchings on Heliograph", they called it.
For $3,975 each.
So those are there as soon as you walk in
and what I thought was interesting about that is
The Andy Warhol paintings do not have pricing on the middle.
Their placards or their information cards looked like this-
There were also some Mark Kostabis so I'll actually use that example.
He's another artist that didn't have the pricing on it, which I assume means they're much higher priced.
It just said - The name of the gallery: Martin Lawrence gallery, Mark Kostabi, the name of the painting:
Inner harmony, and then the type of painting it was - oil-on-canvas.
-Martin Lawrence Gallery -Mark Kostabi -Inner harmony -Oil on canvas
You turn to the corner, you see the ones they actually want to sell - the Salvador Dali's and they look different. They say
-Martin Lawrence gallery -Salvador Dali -Busca la trufa
-Hand-signed etching on heliograph and then they have the pricing.
$3,975
Farther in the back they had another section of Dalis that were $1,975
And I noticed a few of those were off the wall. They were sold.
But that was way out of the way of the other paintings.
That's the sales strategy that they use.
So they get you in with these high-value paintings that don't have pricing. I want to say their typical customer sales process is
Somebody sees the painting, they walk into the gallery, they're like
"Oh my god! How much is an Andy Warhol?" They look, they don't see a price they don't want
to talk to anybody or they think, "Oh, the price is so high they're not even gonna tell me!"
They look to the left and they see - Salvador Dali for 3,000 bucks and
they buy it just like that.
This is a strategy known as Anchoring and they're using it really well because
they're anchoring without listing the prices which I haven't seen before.
It would be like if you walked into a Ferrari dealership and they didn't say the price of the car but they did sell Honda's for $25,000
Yes you walk in, you see the Ferrari, you assume the Ferrari is gonna be a hundred fifty thousand or half a million.
I don't know how much of a Ferrari is.
So I see that I'm like, "Oh I can't afford that car!" but I got in here.
Now I look over "Oh, the Honda Accord is only twenty grands" I'm gonna buy the Honda
That's exactly what they're doing here.
The other thing that I thought was interesting about this gallery is
There are artists that aren't in museums or are barely in museums that are super popular in the
private collecting world only and anyone that's into art here I might be
revealing my ignorance a little bit but for instance Marc Chagall,
Huge at the Martin Lawrence gallery! They're all over the website.
I've never seen a Marc Chagall in a museum. I could probably look it up and go find some
But they're not a name-brand artist and yet the art is selling for top dollar in the private world.
There's a bunch of these artists that you don't hear about.
You know and in the lay world we hear about the huge artist Andy Warhol & his soup cans.
Picasso and his abstract painting, Rembrandt, you know like
Leonardo da Vinci, like there's five or six artists
But in the private collecting world there's so many other artists that become these celebrities
and their paintings are worth so much more that we don't hear about and then
it's up to these galleries like Martin Lawrence gallery to put these painters
next to the big name painters so you'll see a Marc Chagall next to an Andy Warhol
You'll see Picasso, and then you'll see Takashi Murakami, there's another artist.
And they use Association to get you to value the Murakami more
because it's next to and displayed like a Picasso without the pricing on it.
Those are the two main psychological principles I think Martin Lawrence
gallery is using: Anchoring and Association. Somebody else will know what
that psychological principle is. -I don't want to google it, I'm trying to go just
from the brain. Hopefully you found this interesting as well.
Leave a comment below if you have any other businesses you're into and want me to go explore.
Leave a comment below if you have any other questions about art galleries, I've
been a big fan of walking into these galleries recently and going to contract
phase just to see their entire selling process. I don't know what's drawing me
there but I'm following that intuition. And it's been fun so far a lot of
information on these type of businesses. If there's any sort of business that
you're curious about - whether it's high-end fashion or retail food sales or
anything, leave it down in the comments I would possibly love to go and explore further.
If you want the proposal that we use to sell high-end video production services,
that is over at experiment27.com/proposal
If you want the questions that we use on call number one to qualify and sell new clients that's
experiment27.com/discovery and if you want more enterprise clients for
your digital agency, you want to meet with billion-dollar brands, go over to
experiment27.com, that is the service we provide we do that all day every day
for these top agencies helping them meet with billion dollar brands and building
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I am Alex Berman. Thanks for watching