Ron Popeil has been in your living room and you probably remember what he had to say.
“It slices! It dices!”
“You’d probably expect to pay …”
“But wait, there’s more …”
Who among us has not heard that chant or something like it? Who among us has not bought a product after hearing an infomercial pitch? Here are the actual numbers.
Every month 300,000 infomercials appear on America’s television screens, plumping the virtues of over one thousand products. About two-thirds of us have seen an infomercial. About a quarter of us have told pollsters that we’ve bought something after seeing one. We spend a lot of money that way.
In most years we spend about $14 billion on the products we see on infomercials. That’s more than Americans spend on movie tickets. A fellow who has gotten far more than his share of that money is Ron Popiel.
If there is a “Mr. Infomercial,” it would be Ron. He’s the guy who probably made the pitch that got me to buy that Veg-O-Matic, not to mention the Buttoneer and the Pocket Fisherman that I bought as a present. He’s the guy who almost made me think I needed Mr. Microphone, a food dehydrator and a pasta maker.
Not only has he sold boatloads of those products, Ron or someone in his family also invented all of them, along with the GLH hair system, the Smokeless Ashtray, the Trim-Comb and, most recently the Showtime Rotisserie Oven. That’s enough to make the spirit of Thomas Edison take notice.
To some extent Ron came by his talent naturally. He is part of the great Morris clan of pitchmen and inventors who spent their days demonstrating and selling products at five-and-ten-cent stores, flea markets, state and county fairs and on the boardwalk. Ron is the son of the one who invented the Veg-O-matic, an enigmatic fellow named Samuel Popiel, but whom everyone called “SJ.”
SJ was not exactly the warm-hearted father figure who spends time introducing his son to the tricks of his trade. Quite the opposite.
SJ and Ron’s mother divorced when Ron was three years old. His mother disappeared. SJ went to Chicago to start a company. Ron went elsewhere and ultimately to boarding school. Neither parent ever visited. Not once. When he was seven his grandparents showed up and took him to their home.
This turned out to be not much better than boarding school. Ron’s grandfather, Isidore was cold and abusive. In 1951, Ron moved in with his father. There were no long father-son chats, no intimate moments. Years later Ron cannot remember a single time that his father said, “I love you.”
Despite all the family tradition, Ron learned to pitch and sell on his own. He talked his dad into letting him take some of SJ’s products down to Maxwell Street in Chicago. Maxwell Street then was a giant bazaar and flea market.
Ron watched and learned, tried his pitch and modified it. Maybe it was something in the genes, but soon he was making more in a couple of days than the average family made in a month.
He went on the road to the state and county fairs, pitching his products. He cut a deal with the most successful Woolworth in that company’s entire chain, and pitched his products there, setting up near the cosmetics counter where the traffic was the heaviest. He mastered the tricks of the pitchman’s trade.
Watch a Ron Popeil infomercial today and you can see those tricks. There’s the “turn,” that’s the part where the pitchman moves from variations on the same pitch to asking for the order. In Ron’s infomercials that happens twice. The first time is about two-thirds of the way through. The second time is at the end of the infomercial.
It’s vital not to ask for the money too early. Folks have to hear the pitch. They have to be ready to buy, but even more they need to be clamoring to buy. At the fairs or on the street Ron would do this by not allowing the last four or five folks from the crowd who were trying to buy his product do it right away.
He’d say, “Let me show you one more thing.” Then he’d launch into his pitch again, with a little variation. The folks who where waiting to buy would then become the nucleus of the next crowd. Today you’ll see that same technique in the famous phrase, “but wait, there’s more.”
There can be lots of ways to deliver more. More can be another product, like the famous Ginsu knives added to the package for an absurdly low price. How low? That’s where you hear another pitchman’s staple. It’s called the “countdown.”
“You’d probably expect to spend three hundred dollars or more for an appliance of this quality. But you’re not going to spend three hundred dollars. You’re not going to spend two hundred dollars. Not one hundred and eighty dollars…” Down comes the price. Up goes the perception of value. It’s amazing!
It really is amazing and it really does work. This is very effective selling. The techniques you see on the best infomercials are the techniques developed originally in live demonstrations when the pitchman had to stop people who were walking buy with nothing more than his pitch.
“After all,” Ron Popeil says about pitching in Woolworth, “those people were here for something else. They didn’t come to buy what I was selling.” Once they stopped, they had to be pitched so that they would buy. Otherwise the pitchman made nothing.
If the techniques are so good why don’t we pay more attention to them and adapt them for other kinds of businesses and sales situations? It’s an issue of elitism and perception mostly.
In a couple of ways the infomercial business has a lot in common with professional wrestling. Both have an image problem. It’s hard to find an article about either one without coming upon words like “tacky” and “fake” and “crude.” When 20/20 does a story on pro wrestling they seek out the most awful situations. When Good Housekeeping writes an article about infomercials they only mention the most awful products and pitches.
Both infomercials and professional wrestling have tried to deal with this by changing the language. Officially, infomercials are “direct response television” in the same way that professional wrestling is “sports entertainment.” Nice try.
The fact is that you can learn a lot about why and how people buy if you’re willing to set aside your prejudice for a couple of half hours and watch someone like Ron Popeil at work. Here’s what you’ll see.
You’ll see that we like to buy “magic stuff.” Magic here isn’t supernatural. Magic stuff lets us do things that we never thought possible. Make your product a magic one that solves problems for people and they’ll buy it.
According to Response, cosmetics and personal care items are the most popular infomercial products. Then comes housewares and appliances (like the Showtime Rotisserie Oven) and health and fitness products. We buy things we imagine will give us a benefit and the bigger the benefit, the more powerful the promise.
Ron Popeil and the infomercials will also teach you that you have to tell folks about the product more than once. For the message to sink in you have to tell them enough before you sell them.
Ron Popeil and the infomercials will show you that information and demonstration sell. Watch as he tells you about the Showtime Rotisserie Oven. Watch as he hits it with a hammer and drops it. Listen and watch as he shows you how to use it and tells you why it works and how it will make your life easier and your food taste better.
Then there are lessons to learn from Ron’s own success. The first one is that product development and selling shouldn’t be separated. According to Ron, “Developing and marketing a product are like left and right feet. They both have to work for the product to succeed.”
Learn from Ron that you develop your pitch by talking to real, live people. You test the product. And you test your pitch. That’s one reason infomercials work so well. They’re the next best thing to a live audience right in front of you.
85 percent of the people who purchase a product sold on an infomercial do so within ten minutes of the end of the program. If your pitch doesn’t work you can change it quickly and try again.
Learn from Ron that quality and reputation matter. “It’s all I have,” he says.
In his early days, Ron was selling a product called Instant Shine in Chicago. He figured the folks who most needed a great shoeshine were the folks in the National Guard. So he set up a demonstration and was soon selling a lot of Instant Shine to Guardsmen in different units.
Then he thought, “Why not go for the whole Illinois National Guard?” He got an appointment with the commanding General. He applied Instant Shine to the General’s already shiny boots. The boots turned white. About that moment, so did Ron.
Despite the white boots, Ron got permission to sell to the entire Guard. But he declined the opportunity. “The product failed me,” he said. If it wasn’t a quality product, he wasn’t going to sell it, even if he could make a lot of money.
Ron wouldn’t sell a shoddy product because he loves his customers too much. Sure he gets a kick out of inventing. He sees it as his major talent. And he loves pitching and doing it well. But ultimately he loves his audience the most.
When Ron Popiel describes his first experience of selling, here is what he says. “I’d lived in homes for sixteen years without love and now, finally, I’d found a form of affection and human connection through sales.”
There’s a strong message there. You can make an awful lot of money if you love your customers and do something you love.
