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Are you selling urgency?
Hi I’m Brian Pombo welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live coming to you live from Grants Pass Oregon.
Tonight we’re going to be talking about the concept of urgency and first I’m going to be discussing DreamBizChat.com go to DreamBizChat.com if you’re looking to get from where you are to reach your dream business potential DreamBizChat.com.
You can go and check out the link in the description.
It’s completely free, no heavy sales pitch or anything. Just a chance for me to possibly be able to interview you. Learn a little bit about who you are. That’s DreamBizChat.com.
So today we’re going to talk about this book.
This is one from a couple of years back. This is By Now by Rick Cesari and Ron Lynch with Tom Kelly. And Rick Cesari, I’m not sure if he still runs, Cesari Direct, but that was his company at least at the time.
I know he still does a lot of work online that you can go and do a search and find out about him.
This is a fellow that the whole concept is Buy Now.
So it’s creative marketing that gets customers to respond to you and your product. And what he’s doing is he’s going through and telling stories of all of the infomercials that he’s worked on because he did a whole lot of infomercial work on television, especially when it was really hot in the 90’s and 2000’s and talks about a lot of great examples.
The one main example I wanted to bring up with you tonight is the fact is the one for the George Foreman Grill and who doesn’t remember the George Foreman Grill.
You could still find them being sold in the stores, but at one time they were sold via infomercial and it was all about George Foreman.
George Foreman was this former boxer.
He had just recently done well at that time, but he was older, for a champion for a heavyweight champion. He definitely was older in age and a lot of people remembered him from his past because when he was younger he was the Olympic champion.
He had this whole long past and so he had a real connection.
There was a celebrity into that.
We’re going to talk about that tomorrow about how celebrity can affect your advertising and even if you’re a smaller advertiser, even if you think you can’t afford celebrities using the elements of celebrity in your advertising can make a big difference or your marketing.
So George Foreman Grill, it was named after him.
Where did it come from?
Well, he makes reference to this in here where he discusses the different types of items that were brought to them by this company.
Salton is the ones that came up with the George Foreman Grill. It had existed for a long time. It was not a new concept. It was basically a waffle iron that was on a little bit of a slant and it wasn’t sold as any type of healthy grill or anything of that sort.
It was sold as a taco maker, so you put like ground beef in it and prepare all the inside of your taco in this thing and it would allowed you to be able to drain the grease out easily. But that was kind of a secondary feature just because it’s a typical thing that you do when making ground beef tacos is you have to drain out the grease before you, before you put it into the tortilla. So that’s what it was. It was a taco maker of all things and they had a very tough time.
They had it at trade shows, they had a tough time selling it and he said, this is very similar to another one of their items, which was a bagel maker.
He said, the problem is is that nobody wanted a bagel maker.
Really, there wasn’t a huge urgency for a bagel maker. Most people either buy their bagels at the store, especially nowadays, a lot of people, you’d just buy them at the store or the grocery store. They’ve got ones from major companies or sometimes the grocery store bake some themselves.
You’d get bagels there or people pick up a bagel or a donut or whatever on their way to work as part of their normal habit, all that sort.
So why would they need a bagel maker?
And he put his finger on, he said, the problem is is that there wasn’t a question of urgency for these people.
So he says it right here. He says, these are some of the first questions entrepreneurs and new inventors need to ask themselves, is my product solving a problem?
Will I be able to instill a sense of urgency in a consumer’s purchasing decision?
That’s the question.
Can you put that out there?
Can you instill a sense of urgency?
It doesn’t mean you have to, it doesn’t mean this is a necessity, but it was. It is something to be able to communicate a message to people. If it has urgency tied to it, people are more likely to pay attention.
They’re more likely to take that first step in purchasing at least your initial product. If you have a line of products. Having that initial product being something that has urgency tied to it is a big, big deal.
Now, how did they do that?
With the George Foreman Grill, they mainly had to take out the concept of this being a taco maker and they made it into a health product.
And so you have this, this very jovial person in George Foreman has a great personality.
He was very easygoing, very likable, talking about how he needed to get more healthy. It was funny because it was already part of his persona in the fact that he had to get healthy, a lot more healthier than he was.
He had gained a whole bunch of weight in between, in and out of boxing and then coming back into it. So as he got back into boxing and he had to get back into shape and do all these things.
He had already presented this to the public. He had done McDonald’s commercials and other things where it showed him getting into shape.
And so that was already part of his persona. And then he just pushed that onto this.
He says, Hey, I’m no longer no longer a professional boxer. I’m going into my 50’s here.
I’m at that age where I need to watch this stuff. And so he made that all about the grill.
This grill was about grilling anything, any type of made and where you can drain the fat out immediately. And so it became a health product.
It was the exact same grill. They put his name on it, they had his persona there.
There was a whole bunch of other things that he brought to the table that was very new, but it created urgency because it’s like, Hey, you’re not getting anything or you’re not getting any healthier if you’re wanting to do this.
Let’s do it. Get this, get this grill.
It’s inexpensive, call for it and you can, you can be on the same track I man. And so that it changed the whole persona, exact same product, different story behind it, different process, a slight amount of urgency being placed on it.
Especially within the terms of if you understand how an infomercial works. It’s like if you call right now, you’ll get this, this, this, and this.
That’s how the infomercial works.
It works off of a little bit of urgency to get people to act.
So that’s the concept. That’s a very subtle concept of urgency.
Tomorrow we’re going to talk about same story, same product, same book by now, which is definitely a good one.
Going go out and check out this book. This is one of my favorites, I love going back because he goes through very specific stories to teach principles and the principles never go away.
They’re very straight-forward principles, for marketing, sales, and just communicating.
Tomorrow we’re going to be talking about, like I said, celebrity and how it affects your marketing on all levels and using the George Foreman grill as an example.
So have a great night. Get out there and let the magic happen.