The Product – Infomercial 101
A successful infomercial (or direct response) campaign always begins with a viable product. There have been many examples over the years of inventors and companies spending many years and millions of dollars developing a product. Then many more months and dollars are spent creating a campaign, only to discover that very few people really want or need their product.
How can that happen? Well, often it boils down to emotion and/or lack of objective and accurate research. Inventors ask friends and family their opinions, and since the friends don’t want to disappoint the inventor, they usually tell the inventor what they think the inventor wants to hear – “ . . . oh, it’s great! I want to buy one.” and etc. This “friends and family” focus group research often leads to false conclusions.
We have had many new products come our way over the years that we have advised against spending the time and effort to market. Because we see so many, we developed our proprietary Comprehensive Product Analysis (CPE)© to help take some of the guesswork out of introducing a new product, and also to help define preliminary marketing directions for products that should move forward.
The primary elements for a successful product include quality manufacturing, attention-getting packaging, and mass (or very strong niche) marketability. The marketability of a product leads to several additional questions: What problem (or problems) does it solve? Are the problems obvious to the target market? What are the primary and secondary target markets? And . . . can the ability to solve the problems be effectively demonstrated?
Even with all of these elements in place, a great product can still struggle with generating enough sales volume to justify an ongoing direct response television campaign. In such cases, more often than not, the problem is with the pricing, which we will cover in our next discussion – Pricing and The Offer.
