Cesari Rick - Buy Now: Creative Marketing That Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product

Contents

Brand

Praise for Buy Now

Allan Gourlie

Owner, Quick N Brite

Jay Kordich

Father of Juicing and New York Times best-selling Author of The Juicemans Power of Juicing

Anthony Sullivan

Star of Discovery TVs Pitchman and DRTV Producer

Copyright 2011 by Rick Cesari. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Cesari, Rick, 1956

Buy now : creative marketing that gets customers to respond to you and your product / Rick Cesari, Ron Lynch ; with Tom Kelly.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-470-88801-8 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-118-00787-7 (ebk)

ISBN 978-1-118-00788-4 (ebk)

ISBN 978-1-118-00789-1 (ebk)

1. Direct marketing. 2. Customer relations. I. Lynch, Ron, 1966- II. Kelly, Tom, 1950 Oct. 8- III. Title.

HF5415.126.C44 2011

658.8'72--dc22

2010037971

PROLOGUE

The Secret to Our Success

Entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 companies and small companies thinking big come to us every day and say, Hey, what you did for OxiClean: I want that! What you did for the Juiceman Juicer, for the George Foreman Grill, for the Sonicare toothbrush.... We want a brand. We want that !

The next thing they usually say is, But I dont want a yell-and-sell pitchman like Billy Mays!

Its funny that everybody who walks through our door makes some pretty universal assumptions about what goes on here. We dontassume, that is. Thats our first rule. Dont assume. Dont assume you know everything about anything. Thats the first sign of arrogance and the last sign of learning. Want to stop creativity? Tell people you know everything, and act like its the absolute fact. Our job is to walk into every situation with innocence, newness, and freshness, and that starts with ignorance. The same ignorance your next unassuming customer has when he or she finds you in the marketplace for the first time.

Together we have sold somewhere north of $2 billion worth of product and launched about 30 brands. We are proven to be some of the worlds best salesmen, but it is not because of what we say. It is because we know what to listen to .

Ever had a really good doctor? A really good coach? Or meet a really good salesperson? I bet they all had the same common thread. They ask questionslots of questions. They listen. They observe. They observe even more. They ask other people what their experience has been around you. They align their observations and their learning with years of proven experience. They strategize. They plan. They communicate. They get your commitment and buy in to the result that will benefit you the most.

Then, the very last thing they do is... start.

That is what we do every day. It is the secret to our success.

Yes, we have had unparalleled success and good fortune. Often we have been in the right place at the right time. We have also had failures youve never heard about. Well share some here. Yet the truth is, we wouldnt be a leader in the direct response (DR) marketing space based on just a good 25-year run of pure luck. Our expertise is not machismo, or a flag we plant for attention. It is, rather, time-tested, results-oriented, and statistically proven. Our kind of success is one that transfers from boardroom dialogue to actual spreadsheet success, real product sales, increased brand equity, and return on shareholder dividends. Like everything we seek to do, we keep a scorecard and count our successnot with gold trophies, New York gala dinners, or personality features in Adweek , but with units sold, customers satisfied, and dollars in the bankfor us and our clients. Were not involved in advertising art. We are in the modern digital, multichannel, marketing business. We sell. We sell more for our clients around the clock, around the world.

While you were sleeping last night, we were busy selling.

Some of the greatest American companies today have walked through our doors. Our identity and reputation is based on a relatively simple set of principles and understandings that drive sales. In any company, sales is the healer of everything that ails you.

In the following pages, we will share the insights and knowledge we have developed over the years. This is not a book of relative philosophies on how to sell, how to manipulate the consumer, or how to get inside the head of the American housewife to sell another food processor. This is a book specifically on how we have charted a course to successfully create transactions through television, and how the radical shift of media channel explosion and the Internet threw that model on its ear. Its also a down-and-dirty expos of how we nearly lost it all and came back with new learning and an innovative arsenal of direct marketing techniques that not only has put us back on the map, but realistically pushed us many years ahead of both traditional DR marketers and conventional advertising agencies. Weve been successfully working this new model for our clients for the past five years. We have proven it works by growing revenues for our clients and expanding specific markets and individual demographic verticals. Competitive media companies routinely bring their clients to us with confidence. How many companies in the world have had their competitors comeand pay a premiumto add your secret sauce to their recipe? It happens in our world all of the time. Why in the world would we let them? We learned the hard way the first three rules of partnerships: