How To Present An Ordinary Product As Extraordinary

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen to an icon. Imagine being able to break apart the mind that put together the George Foreman Grill, OxiClean, Sonicare, and more. How do these giant infomercial brands work? What are the keys that make all this possible? Today's guest is Rick Cesare, and he is going to explain everything. He is the expert behind the infomercials and direct response marketing in these worlds and under these brands. Now, what does he do when he first starts? What are the elements that are absolutely critical in order for him to launch? How does he get celebrity endorsements? This is the reveal-all episode. So definitely lean in, take out a pen and paper in order to grab some notes and hear how Rick Cesare takes an ordinary product and turns it into something extraordinary.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really less They're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Welcome to the Diamond Members call. I have, as promised, with me today Rick Cesare from the infomercial and direct response marketing world, a world he and I share. I have recommended his book to you. If you have not already obtained it, I'm sure by the end of this call you will make the decision to do so. And it is, as they say, available at all fine booksellers this very moment. The title of which is Buy Now: Creative Marketing That Gets Customers to Respond to You and to Your Product. I've given you in print a more elaborate introduction, but I will remind you that Rick is the brain or half of the brain or in some cases integrally involved with some of the biggest brands built by direct response of our time. The Juice Man, the George Foreman Grill, Oxyfresh, Sonic Toothbrush, etc. We'll be talking about some of those. I do want to quickly make the point before we get started that I fully recognize that the majority of you on the call may not be about taking some idea, invention, product, some part of your business and making it a national or global direct response item. But I would remind you that direct response is direct response is direct response. And whether you're running a local brick-and-mortar business, retail business, service business, professional practice, or— operating on a broader scale, the same principles apply. In many cases, you're selling to the exact same consumers, and in many cases, you are or should be making the same kind of message and creative cases that somebody like Rick would make on a global scale for a giant marketing campaign for a product such as the George Foreman Grill. Many of you, of course, by the way, met George when he was at the InfoSec Summit. Summit, so, and probably, I think it's now, Rick might know, it's either 1 out of 5 or 1 out of 4 households in America have one of those puppies, so the odds are you probably see that thing when you walk into your kitchen. So anyway, Rick, welcome, and appreciate you being on the call and taking the time with us, and I'll start right out with, I have a handful of questions before we let them ask you questions.

Sure.

First, I want to say thank you very much, Dan, for the opportunity to do this. I really appreciate it, and I've been a big fan of yours. There aren't too many people that go back as far as we have in this industry and have always been a big fan of yours and your books and your work. And I have to be honest, I've used a lot of your ideas and techniques and some of the things I did, and In the introduction you gave, it is very important while some of these products have become very big global brands, almost all of them started as an idea with very little sales and it was being able to sell to just a few people and then take the techniques of the infomercial to really magnify that and, and help them grow. But at the end of the day, the selling techniques and the direct response techniques, if they don't work on a one-on-one or a small business level, they won't work on a large level either.

Yeah, and that, and that's a great point. And I do, uh, I'll sort of jump then to, to what would have been my second question. Uh, so a point in case to all that, um, is what you did with, with Jay and the Juice Man. And, and, and so I want to ask you about that so people really get a handle on, on how these things start. And as you point out, the most intelligent among us don't start them by blowing $500,000 on a TV campaign or a radio campaign, or for that matter, a print campaign. We sort of prove that we have something we can sell in some other venue. So Give folks a sense of where the Juiceman wound up, and then if you will, talk a little bit about the beginnings on radio with Free Recipe and the beginnings in the seminar environment.

Sure. At the end of the time, when we started the Juiceman business in 1989, in 3.5 years we grew the sales from $0 to $75 million, and then we sold it to a company in Chicago called Salton, and Salton later was a company that did the George Perform and Grill, but we'll talk about that later. But the way I found out about Jay Kordich, I attended a home show in Seattle. And if you've ever been to a, you know, a small local trade show, there's a lot of booths, you know, 10x10 booths and people are selling products. Well, this one booth— all the booths had like 1 or 2 people around them and this one booth had 50 people around them. And Jay was there talking about juice extractors And he really had captivated the audience, and so I asked if I could speak with him after the show, and he agreed. And we started talking about what he was doing, and he was going around the country at these state fairs, home shows, selling anywhere from 1 to 20 juicers at a time based on his, you know, appearances at these venues. And so I thought that I had been in the direct response field at the time and thought that we could take this and take what he was doing on a small level and then build it into something bigger. But it was interesting the way we started. We didn't go out and make an infomercial right away. To what your comment earlier, basically the first thing we did was Jay is a captivating personality and he's a good pitchman. He's good at selling his products. So what we did was we called different television and TV stations around the country. We couldn't afford when we started this to actually hire a PR firm yet. And there was a company, a television station we got lucky with in New York. At the time it was WOR. And again, this goes back to 1989, and to kind of give you an idea, Matt Lauer was the local host at the time, who's now obviously well-known on Good Morning America. But anyway, Jay appeared on that WOR show on— it's funny because it's almost the anniversary of it coming up. It was June 30th, and he was on a 20-minute segment and basically told people that they could— if they sent us an envelope with a dollar, that he would send them a list of recipes. And so this was right before the July 4th holiday, and we didn't hear anything for a while. And, you know, I heard from the TV station that their switchboard was lit up, a lot of response. But it was, you know, before the internet, so everything happened through the mail. And on July 6th, the post truck pulls up to our office and the postman gets out and he's got a big— I don't know if you've ever seen the big canvas mail sacks. He has one of those over his shoulder and he comes in and brings it in, and I go, wow, what's all that? And he goes, I don't know, you got a lot of mail today. He goes back out to the truck and he ends up bringing in 3 more sacks of envelopes. We ended up getting over 12,000 responses from that one media appearance that Jay did. And basically what we did is take all the names and addresses of the people that wrote in, and we basically sent them back out a hastily printed up flyer to sell the juicers, and that's what launched the business, that one appearance. And— but it was still quite a while before we actually made an infomercial. We used that technique of putting Jay on radio and TV appearances and having people send us an envelope for free recipes, and that's how we kind of built the base of the business before we actually started doing direct response television. And it's still something that I use to this day. PR is a very powerful way if you have a good person and it's even more effective today because you use the PR to drive people to a website and then sell your product. So if you have a good product service spokesperson and a way to get on radio and TV, that's a really, really effective way to either start a business or supplement other types of marketing that you're doing, and it works on both local level and national level.

You also, if I remember correctly, you also used media and filled seminar rooms, right? Right, for the Juicy Juice Man.

Yeah, that—

because that was my background before getting— that's why I kind of learned the direct response industry. The first people to— and I don't know if it was the first, but among the first people to use infomercials were all the real estate guys, you know, Robert Allen, Albert Lowery, How to Buy Real Estate with No Money Down. This was the mid-'80s, and that was my background. I was in real estate before getting into the direct marketing and had successfully promoted real estate seminars through direct mail and then through television. And so before actually selling direct-to-consumer with the infomercial, we basically made a 30-minute TV show, and we would go to a city and we would run the half-hour infomercial and ask people to show up at different ballrooms of local hotels. And we supplemented that with the PR. So if we went to Houston, for example, we would run local television time, ask people to show up for free seminars. They'd be a 90-minute lecture about the program. At the end of the time, the people could order juice machines, which we would then ship out of our office in Seattle. And all those seminars were supplemented with local PR as well. And the PR acts as a— adds— people are skeptical sometimes, or most of the times, when they see just advertising, and it's always, you know, a challenge to get people to respond to your ads. When you layer in the PR and the media is talking about it, it adds a level of credibility then that works synergistically with the advertising, and the two work together very well.

And I would point out to people that, you know, we went all the way back to kind of the oldest of your case histories, and we're talking '80s and '90s, And yet really nothing in terms of the architecture of all this has really changed much. And there's no reason not to use any and all of these methods in today's world. Just now the internet media gives us some additional weapons to integrate with them. But we might very well take somebody to market this very same way today.

Absolutely. It—

the model itself and still works and the The only thing that all the additional, whether it's social media, whether it's the internet, all those things just give you more marketing tools, but the same basic principles and methods are the same whether it goes back over 25 years with the original Juiceman to our most current project, which is absolutely internet-based. I don't know how many people listening are familiar with the GoPro cameras.

They're the little cameras that you see the skiers and snowboarders wear on their helmets. That's a company that has used kind of the latest techniques, but it's to grow. They were on the COVID of Inc.

magazine a couple of months ago.

They grew from $0 to $250 million in under 3 years, and basically the same marketing model we used 25 years ago, just adapted to the new technology, was responsible for part of that success.

The, the second question that I have for you is one— so you probably, most of the time, people who come to you think they have, um, the next best thing to sliced bread and that they have something really cool. And in some cases, as with the camera, they do. What I hear more often, which is what I want to ask you about, is from people who think that that, you know, what their business is about is really very ordinary. And they will struggle mightily trying to find their way to a unique selling proposition and sometimes insist that there's nothing unique about what they do. They grumble about being commoditized and price suppressed as a result of being commoditized as well.. And I consistently put examples in front of them of things that couldn't be more mundane and ordinary that then are made into something more than that. Your business is of course largely about that. The camera is almost an exception to the rule. I mean, when you think about a countertop grill or essentially a blender, or a toothbrush, it's hard to be more commoditized in many ways than that, and yet you're able to take them to TV, you're able to take them to other media, and you're able to build multimillion-dollar brands out of them. So I wonder if you would just talk a little bit about the approach to an ordinary product, a toothbrush for example, and finding a way to present it as something extraordinary.

Yeah, that's a really important point. You talked about the unique selling proposition. We'll get to talk more about the camera later because this camera had—

there's nothing special about this camera except the mount.

And meanwhile, this company is growing dramatically and Kodak is going out of business, so going bankrupt.

But go back to answer your question, you always have to kind of look at products a different way. And I'll start with the juicer, then we'll get into the toothbrush, and then the grill because They are— at the time, there were lots of juicers being sold in the country when we started this in 1989, but the companies that were selling them were appliance manufacturers and the products were being marketed as appliances, as a kitchen appliance.

When—

what the twist we put on with Jay with the juicer initially was that it wasn't a kitchen appliance, it was a health device. It was something that would enable you to live longer, to live healthier. And so this little product that you see that's making the fresh juice juice basically has amazing health benefits. And we never talk about the size of the motor. You know, you always talk about features versus benefits. We never talked about the blade or the size of the motor or the type of plastic or how much juice it would make. It would be— we included information booklets, the immune strengthening diet, the weight loss juice diet, the anti-aging juice diet. These are all huge benefits. That come out of this little machine. Meanwhile, Krups and Braun and the other juicer manufacturers were marketing as a kitchen appliance. And so that's a good example of finding a unique selling proposition on the juicer. The toothbrush— the Sonicare wasn't the first electric toothbrush on the market. I think there was a product out there called Interplaq. And at the time, all of the products out in the marketplace. You know, the most expensive toothbrush aside from the Interplaq, you know, toothbrushes were, I don't know what they cost, $1 or $2. Sonicare was $150. So the challenge was how are we going to sell a $150 toothbrush when really nobody understood sonic technology and what it did. So what we did is really make a message that was centered around one, understanding what gum disease was and then how this product could help— actually help reverse gum disease. So again, we're not talking a lot about the technological advance as much as we're talking about the benefit to the consumer that they, that they couldn't find somewhere else. And that's a good example. With the grill, grills have been around forever, all sorts of different types of grills. And there's a funny story about the George Foreman grill. Salton, the company that bought our juicer business, basically it was a product that they had on the shelf and it was originally a taco maker. And the reason The reason it was slanted the way it was, was that they would put ground beef in it, put a taco shell underneath, and then they had a little paddle that they would sweep the ground beef into the taco shell. What we did— it's funny, and it didn't have any sales, not surprisingly.

I didn't know that. I knew the product had been around, but I didn't know the taco thing.

Oh yeah, that's what it was originally. And the key to that was twofold. Was one, attaching it to George at the time, because George is a very likable fellow.. But to be honest, you know, revealing some behind-the-scenes secrets, George hadn't even used the grill when we made the first infomercial with him. The first time he walked on the set was the first time he had actually used it. But the key to that was a very simple thing, was very close-up photos of the grease and fat running off of whatever you were cooking so that we came up with the slogan, "Knock out the fat." And again, it had a health benefit and the grill— and the other part that we did was the speed and convenience. And that was one of the biggest things was that you you could cook fish or burgers or, you know, whatever it was, meal you were cooking in about half the time because of the two-sided cooking. So it's always— and there's always— to answer your question, Dan, there's always a unique way of looking at a product that features a specific benefit and that's really what you need to do is look at it from a consumer's viewpoint and what is the benefit or what is the unique benefit that your product or service can provide to them and then and then really go out and find ways of testing that and getting some consumer response. And then once you do and you hit on it, then you can grow something from a small to very, very large.

All right, and so now let's talk about the camera a little bit. Since you went there and you got me with there's no difference in the camera, just the mounts, and obviously apparently a target market.

Yeah, well, the GoPro camera is probably even at this point, I'd say it's probably going to surpass as far as a success the George Foreman grill. As big as the grill was, is, and still is, I think there's over 30 million units sold because the camera—

and it's interesting because if you take this camera, anybody can go and make the camera. The technology is there. What the founder of the company did, a guy named Nick Woodman, was basically figure out how to mount it with a wristband first initially, and then a chest strap, and then a helmet mount, and then eventually a surfboard mount so that it tied into all of the extreme action sports that are out there. And that's how he started marketing it at trade shows. The other part that tied into this was, was the— you know, the current technology in social media, which is Facebook. Our nickname for the GoPro camera is the Narsacam because people like to take pictures of themselves and post it on Facebook. And so what we did with the GoPro camera and what they do very well as a company is use user-generated footage, make zillions of YouTube videos, and offer an award, you know, for the best video. And it has just taken off through the social media channels amazingly. What we've helped do is bring to the table the television, and this isn't a classic direct response ad where you see the camera and then there's an 800 number and you can order it. Basically everything that these ads do is user-generated footage of people jumping off of cliffs or motorcycles or scuba diving or surfing, and there's a tag on the beginning that just announces it's a GoPro user-generated footage, and at the end there's a contest that if you go to their website, somebody wins one of every everything they make every single day. So it drives huge amounts of traffic to their website. Now, this is a concept that can be used at any level and at any small level, and whether it's with TV or other— or radio or whatever, as a way of driving traffic to the website and having a giveaway at the end of it is just a very simple direct response or, you know, marketing concept. They've just put a little twist on it and have had amazing success.

You're also— many people on the call will be familiar with the, the, like, we will— this exercise regimen is so difficult it will kill you product, P90X, right?

That's like, that's like a huge hit. Yeah, I wasn't involved in the actual— we place— my company, Cesare Direct, we do— it's a marketing agency agency and we make the commercials and we also buy media time. We place media for the P90X commercial, but we didn't actually make any of the spots for it. But to answer your question, yes, that's a huge, huge success out in the marketplace.

And of all of these, when you think about the entire range of everything you've been involved with, What do you think are like the critical elements for a direct response success? What do you— when it walks in the door, almost regardless of whether you're going to buy media for it, you're going to produce for it, you're going to work on it, what piques your interest or what causes you to shake your head and say no hope?

[Speaker] There's a couple things. I always look for a product, and we get, just like you do I'm sure, get lots and lots of products that, and people that come to us with inventions and things. And the very first thing I look for is any amount of sales or consumer response to the product because that means the idea is already validated. It's much easier to market a product, and you had mentioned one earlier, Dan, I think you called it OxiFresh, but it's OxiClean. And everyone remembers Billy Mays and the fantastic pitch guy on TV. But we started working with OxiClean when they were doing less than $1 million in sales. This was 1996, and it was the Apple family out of Denver, Colorado. And the only way they were making sales was Billy was on home shopping and having some success selling the product there.— and then we were able to take what he was doing on home shopping, obviously, and turn it into a very large direct response marketing success. But it goes back to, I don't care if somebody has had success with a product selling on a local, through, like we talked earlier, trade shows, state fairs. If there's some consumer response and actual sales, that's the first thing that gets my interest. The second is different categories, and, you know, to name a cleaning Cleaning products, any— like housewares, anything that helps. Different kitchen appliances, if it's something new and unique. Exercise and fitness, beauty and skincare, you know, the area— you can call it get rich quick or motivation, you know, courses that teach people how to make money. We've worked in all these categories, and so a couple things is, one, I look for a category that has had some traditional success. Over the years in either direct mail, direct response, on the internet. And then secondly, I look for a product that actually has that validation or consumer feedback. And those are kind of general parameters. You know, there's a lot more and there's always exceptions to the rules, but those are two of the biggest things that we look for.

Well, let's go to the specific promise of the book.— getting people to buy now. Now when we build a direct response pitch, what are the key elements people ought to keep in mind about immediate and direct response?

Well, there's a few things. One, we like to create something that they can't get anywhere else.. It's either a bigger offer, better offer, more enticing offer so that it— they can't go like if you have a product at retail, you can compare it to all the other products on the shelf. So we like to have a unique offer. We like to build perceived value, a lot of perceived value into the product offering. You know, we talked about the juicer. We included a lot of information, booklets that are very inexpensive to make., but they have big promises like I was talking about the weight loss juice diet, the anti-aging juice diet. So we build a package that has a lot of perceived value, and, and then, really just from a pricing standpoint, believe it or not, we always like to try and test and go out at the highest price possible, which as your business grows enables you to, effectively market through different channels. So when we're building that offer, we're basically creating a lot of perceived value and then building it in a way where it's almost like you keep adding on and you get this and you get this. And I know that's kind of a sometimes, but wait, there's more kind of mentality. But we found over the years that if done correctly, you know, it entices the consumer to actually pick up the phone. And we don't— and Dan, you know, being in the business we're in, we don't have a business and why I love this type of advertising versus what we call conventional or traditional advertising because we can measure how effectively our ads work because if nobody picks up the phone and nobody goes online, you haven't done a good job. But on the other hand, you can take that feedback and make changes to the commercial to actually get people to respond. And that's the key to everything we do is getting that response. What does it take to get a celebrity endorsement, whether it's for a product or service, or a foreword for a book that's being written?

How do you approach that, and what type of—

is there profit sharing going on? What are the details of that arrangement? Yeah, it's a great question, and I do a lot of this on every different level. And you know, the George Foreman, I think until recently, there was a good answer to a trivia question: what was the largest sports endorsement ever? And it was really what George paid— got paid when they bought out— bought him out of the George Foreman Grill, or bought his royalty stream out, or profit sharing out, and he got paid $130 million for that. But when they did the deal, basically they didn't pay George anything. It was a situation where where George had, you know, after he lost that fight in Zaire to Muhammad Ali, he had been through like a 10-year stretch where he just got fat and out of shape, and he was making a comeback, and he didn't have very many endorsements because his reputation in the old days, and he says this in his own book, he was kind of a thug, and nobody really wanted to do endorsements, so he was an easy guy to approach.

To make a deal, and there was no money up front that changed hands.

So, so they signed George Foreman for literally nothing, but they did a profit-sharing deal, and obviously it worked out very well for George. So that's one thing to keep on your radar. When we look for people to represent certain infomercials or be hosts and things like that, I always look for people that had had a lot of fame at one time but maybe are on the downward side of their career. But people still have fond memories of them and things like that. Those are people that can be signed a little bit cheaper, and there's all sorts of ways of doing it. And, you know, a profit-sharing way is one where it doesn't cost a lot of money upfront, but you could be paying a lot of money if your product is real successful. But it's better to have that success and pay that big fee than not have any success at all. Then there's other ways with celebrities that just won't talk to you unless there's cash upfront, and a lot of it is a combination of cash and royalties from sales. You know, the other thing, when a lot of the times we make these shows, we get a lot of experts that whether they're medical doctors or different book authors, and we just approach them. And I just, you know, you ask, you know, how you get these people. I just always pick up the phone and, you know, try and track them down and put in a phone call because any exposure, if they're involved in your project and it's a good product, they're going to get exposure and that helps everybody. If somebody is a book author, they want to be in our infomercials. Deals for free. We never pay anybody to be in those, any of the experts we use, because they want the exposure. So, there's all sorts of different ways of structuring the deals. It's just limited to the creativity, and don't assume that all these people want a lot of money. They might, but there's ways of structuring it whether you have to pay very little money up front, and it's based on the success of the project that they can make it big..

So like for a client some years ago, I got Art Linkletter, and I got Art at a lower price than we should have, but the client marketed to seniors. Art had a new book out with Mark Victor Hanson aimed at that market, and so our giving away books in all the outlets, promoting the book in all the ads, was the same as currency, and it allowed us to get a much lower fee arrangement with Art. So, I mean, Rick's point about creativity, a point I always make to people is when you set out to go down this path, you, you should never set out with locked in on a person, but more a category that will be useful to you. View. So it might be an athlete, might be a sitcom mom, might be— because on any one given day, two of them that are almost interchangeable, one will have just come out of a good-paying gig and will be quoting some astronomical fee and won't want to talk to you, and the other one hasn't had a good-paying gig in 5 years and has a kid's college tuition payment due, and they're a lot more malleable. The highest rate of unemployment in any occupation in America is in entertainment. And so generally there is somebody for every need and every budget who can be found and had and been and be used. And also, in many cases, a client will start with, let's say, somebody from the D-list and have enough success that 2 years later they can move up to somebody on the B-list. At GoviRanker, we launched ProActive.

ProActive today, there's Justin Bieber and Katy Perry and the youngest Kardashian, whatever her name is. And yeah, that's a great point.

They didn't start there though. We started with Judith Light. Yeah, who's that? The sitcom mom from Who's the Boss, right after Who's the Boss had been off the air for 5 years.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, there's almost always somebody, and in many cases you have— you may have other value to offer besides money. Now, the mechanics of getting to them— the first best way is always the back door. Door. And so I tell people all the time to really think about the Kevin Bacon game. You are usually no more than 3 to 5 connections away from somebody who would be useful to you. So you got to rack your brain about who you know and who they might know and who they might know because a direct phone call saying, hey, Kennedy's a good guy and he'll shoot straight with you and he wants to talk to you about X.

Is infinitely better than the front door. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever, designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time.

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