Jon LaClare appeared as a guest on the Garlic Marketing Show recently, and the response was so positive that we wanted to share with our audience. Listen to Jon's interview with Ian Garlic, host of the Garlic Marketing Show.
From the Garlic Marketing Show podcast:
Do you have a new product, but aren’t sure how to begin launching and promoting it? Are you ready to give up after a failed launch? Ian Garlic talks to Jon LaClare, the Founder and CEO Of Harvest Growth, about his own successes with infomercials, most notably OxiClean. Jon discusses OxiClean’s secrets for success, the simple 2-minute infomercial structure that works, and how to build credibility fast. In this episode, discover the perfect launch process for your new products.
What You’ll Learn:
**Listen to other Garlic Marketing Show episodes at https://shows.acast.com/garlic or search for the show on your favorite podcast platform.
**Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!
Jon LaClare appeared as a guest on the Garlic Marketing Show recently, and the response was so positive that we wanted to share with our audience. Listen to Jon's interview with Ian Garlic, host of the Garlic Marketing Show.
From the Garlic Marketing Show podcast:
Do you have a new product, but aren’t sure how to begin launching and promoting it? Are you ready to give up after a failed launch? Ian Garlic talks to Jon LaClare, the Founder and CEO Of Harvest Growth, about his own successes with infomercials, most notably OxiClean. Jon discusses OxiClean’s secrets for success, the simple 2-minute infomercial structure that works, and how to build credibility fast. In this episode, discover the perfect launch process for your new products.
What You’ll Learn:
**Listen to other Garlic Marketing Show episodes at https://shows.acast.com/garlic or search for the show on your favorite podcast platform.
**Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!
Jon: In this week's Harvest Growth podcast, I share an episode of The Garlic Marketing Show, where I'm interviewed by my good friend, Ian Garlic. In 40 minutes, I discuss how to effectively use infomercial strategies in today's marketing world to make your video marketing more profitable.
Intro: Join Ian Garlic as we uncover the hidden marketing story.
Ian: Welcome back to The Garlic Marketing Show, Ian Garlic here. Today, we're going to talk about one of my absolute favorite topics, infomercials, and direct response marketing, how you can work in any business, the latest formula for working in 2022, and how to use infomercials in digital marketing with one of the legends, Jon LaClare. Jon, thank you so much for being on the show.
Jon: My pleasure, Ian. Thank you much for having me. It's great to see you again.
Ian: Jon's a great friend, an amazing marketer, and worked with a ton of amazing people. We're going to talk a little bit about that today, but before we get started, of course, this is brought to you by videocasestory.com, one of the best ways to improve your infomercials, improve all of your digital marketing, your sales, and even your team building is Video Case Stories. Go to videocasestory.com and learn how to collect, craft and deliver your video case stories.
Jon, we're going to talk today. I want to get into the formula because you've been doing infomercials for so long and done so many successful ones and also have translated that into digital marketing. Before we get into that magic formula that you have, tell me a little bit about how you got into infomercials and how it grew, and how you started Harvest Growth, your agency.
Jon: I'm one of the few people that still says I'm proud to be called an infomercial producer. [laughs] It's a career that's different today. Certainly, it was when I got into it 15, 20 years ago on this side of the business. It's a lot of fun. It's a great industry to be in, for sure, and we'll talk about why and the fun aspects of it. I came into it in a roundabout way. Long story short, I'm actually a public accountant by trade. That was my first job out of college. All I knew was I could not do that for 40 years. I didn't know what I was going to do.
A few years later after going to grad school, coming out in marketing, and getting a phone call from a head hunter about our job opportunity with OxiClean, that literally is the phone call, anyway, as it were, changed my life. I was in marketing at the time and brand management, but I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. We could talk about that story for days.
The short of it is though, what a great place to work, was a family-owned business at the time, where they were still successful but growing. I was able to join really at the sweet spot of the company to help them launch many other OxiClean products and Kaboom, as a brand. I was able to run that entire brand, did a lot of new product development work. The fun part of it though, this was back in Billy Mays' days. I got to interact a lot with Billy directly and really see what made, at the time, them so successful within the industry, within the infomercial industry.
Really, we'll talk about it as we get through this interview too, but I've been able to continue down that road. It's so different today than it was, the late '90s, early 2000s when I cut my teeth in this industry. In many ways, it's the same. That's what we can maybe talk about is that the science is really what stayed the same, even though the look and feel of a TV spot today is different than it was in the heyday of Billy Mays, of course. Most of them do look a little bit different, although Michael Lindell from My Pillow, Phil Swift from his product, et cetera, and others that are like that. They look similar.
Most of this world is different, but the science has really remained the same and continues to be very successful, luckily, and remains a lot of fun today.
Ian: It's amazing you name all those people. You were talking about Billy Mays, and I loved the idea. Essentially, he was a pitchman, and I think it's insane what they did. How important was Billy to the success of OxiClean?
Jon: It's a great question. A lot of people I get the question a lot, did Billy own the company? He was not the owner of OxiClean. The company was actually called Orange Glo International back in the day. It was owned by the Appel family. They're the ones that developed the product, brought it out, and actually found Billy Mays at a trade show and turned him into who he became as a pitchman. I shouldn't say that that way. He was definitely a master pitchman, but he became the face of OxiClean, really, because of the product that was developed.
They were in, married, I think the two of them, the company and the face of the company, but he was a source of the success. I will tell you, Billy, may he rest in peace. Everyone who knew him loved him and respected him, and they were grateful for his presence in the company and really realized that he helped create it, but he was also expensive. You start to realize when you've got a single face of your brand, A, it's risky because something could happen, and did. He passed away before his prime, I think by the age of 50, where he could have done many more years.
They were trying to prepare for that or who knows what? We always market-tested other talent or hosts to see if anyone else could move the needle. It was the funny thing in focus groups, we'd be behind the glass, we'd show a video of Billy, and in front of this audience, "What do you guys think?" "I hate that guy," or "He is too loud or yells. He bothers me," but I trust him. That was the response we always-- Some people loved him, of course. If you knew him, you loved him.
Even if you were bothered by him, his voice, his energy, et cetera, you trusted him, and that, I think, is the single part of the success that really made him stand out among the greatest pitchmen. Really, he won't be, I don't think tied ever. There have been other great ones. He's certainly the greatest of all time. In part, because man, you could tell that he loved whatever product he was pitching. You could tell he had that trust, not just the energy, but really credibility that was going to work.
Ian: That aspect of the pitchmen, how have you brought it over? How has it changed as we went digital, as things have changed and you bring infomercials now online?
Jon: That's a good question. I'll say, I think it's pretty similar between TV as well as online where, even in the heyday, probably 80% of TV spots did not have a pitchman. You didn't need a pitchman. Of course, Billy made the difference for a lot of products over the years because of who he was, but a lot of successes came out when they were truly product-focused as well. We call those voiceover spots.
Hosted spot, like Billy Mays, or voiceover spot when you just see demonstrations, see something being done in front of you, and talk about the product. We always say the biggest difference between the two, that when you want to, or I would say need a host or a pitchman, is if you want to prove and show the product works right before your eyes. OxiClean and other cleaning products, they're great with the pitchman, but other products, electronics, kitchen gadgets, if you can see that it works, you don't need that live interaction as much. It may not be necessary. That can save some money, for sure.
The other piece that's a little bit different is we use a lot of talent in the digital world now, but more of an influencer style, as opposed to an infomercial host. As it were, it doesn't need to be a celebrity. Now it's more about, is that person real? I'd almost rather would pitch with somebody who seems like your neighbor than seems like a celebrity on social media, be it Facebook, Instagram, or even other platforms like YouTube, et cetera. In the digital world, it's more about trust. Can I trust the story they're telling me?
If you are using a talent, we tend to use someone who looks more credible or realistic for most categories. There's a lot of ways to answer that, sometimes celebrities work, et cetera, but most of the time, it's more about credibility than anything else. The other piece to remember that one of the reasons hosts aren't used, maybe even as often in digital as they used to be in TV, is most as I and you know, when you see a video on Facebook or Instagram, and not as much on YouTube, but the volumes off. You're just scrolling through the Facebook feed, and you got to plan for that.
With a hosted spot talking at screen, you can have subtitles of course, but it's more about getting that visual demonstration, showing a product work. If it's a product or if it's a service, it might be big text on screen, et cetera, telling your story. That's one way it's the world is a little bit different today than it was back in the heyday of TV.
Ian: The way it's different, how has the success stayed the same with infomercials? Who's still succeeding with the infomercial formula now in digital as we've gone away from TV?
Jon: A lot of people say gone away from TV. It's a fair way to say it. I will tell you just for the audience's sake, we get a lot of questions about TV. We still do probably 30% of our business on national TV. TV still works as a medium, though it is very different today than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, et cetera. For most of the audience, TV is at least the right place to look first.
Even if your end goal is TV, you'll still typically going to start off in the digital world. The way that, I would call it the science, the learnings from 30 years or almost 40 years of TV infomercials and how that applies to direct or digital marketing today, there's a lot of ways in which they're similar. One format that we use, there's the standard two-minute-spot or two-minute infomercial if you watch it and you'll still see these on you'll think about Michael Lindell's spot, or obviously back in the day Billy Mays and many others, is starting off with the problem solution. This same science works very well in digital.
Starting out problem solution to present the problem. It might be funny, black and white over the top, like it was in the TV world. It might not, but show what problem are you facing? If you can capture the audience's attention and resonate with a problem that they're experiencing or feeling right now in their life, and then present them a solution, you've got them. You've sold them right away. That's why that approach still works extremely well today. That helps capture the attention. We then move into getting into features and benefits. Being very explicit about what are the top few, just a handful of core features and benefits about this product, or service it could be, that it's going to resonate with the audience and for us.
If we have time, I can go through our whole approach that we use to craft a script, et cetera, but in short, using market research to figure out some of these questions. I've got 30 different features and benefits about my product. They're all awesome because I invented this, but really, I've got to call that down to the top view. Using market research, talking to consumers and getting answers back from them can really help us to figure that out. What are the core elements getting to features and benefits?
I'll take a quick aside. One big difference between TV and digital is length of spot. Especially in Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera, it's all about shorter videos. The best performing videos typically, again, there's always the exception, but typically the best performing videos on Facebook and Instagram, for example, are 15 seconds. Sometimes they're even getting shorter than that, so you've to get through this problem, solution, feature, benefit very quickly.
The good news is now with digital tools, you can complete the story where we used to have two minutes to communicate the entire story on TV, and believe it or not you'd get people to sit and watch the whole thing. A good infomercial back in the day, you'd always get them to finish like in market research. They say, "That wasn't two minutes, was it?" If you can get through that story, keep them engaged, excited, it doesn't feel that long, but you had the luxury. We don't have that luxury always anymore, but we can now show it in chunks. I might have that full story in two minutes and break it into 6, 7, 8 different 15-second chunks.
Then through retargeting, making sure that they see different elements of the story. They may not buy on day one. On the third, fourth, fifth viewing, they come back and complete that story and now purchase from you. That's, like we keep going down that for, so problem solution into features and benefits and then credibility is a huge one. I joke because, in the infomercial days as seen on TV products, you had to build credibility only because nobody trusted the products work because a lot of them didn't.
If you it, that was one of the things that made OxiClean so great is people got it home. It worked, the promises were there. You may not have a black fish bowl of water. If you remember that demonstration that goes to pure white instantaneously? Maybe that's not realistic for you, but it did get rid of stains. Having that performance through experience, proving that it works is important, but we need to build the credibility to get it in your home first. There's a lot of ways to do it.
One of the most powerful is what you're so great at, Ian, is getting the story. The testimonial is getting that how do we get them to react? Ian, as you and I have talked, I think what I love about you and your expertise is you talk about how-- I should say, I talk about, after watching your videos and the work you've done how you make people cry. That's your great expertise both on camera, but also you get the emotion. You pull them out of the viewer. In a short soundbite, it's a little tougher to get as much emotion, but we at least need the credibility.
Where some of your stories that you put together might be, I think some are probably minutes long, but certainly longer than 5 seconds or so, I've got to call that down within a 15-second spot. I've maybe got at most 15 seconds. It might be three or four seconds to give a quick soundbite, "Hey, this works," but say it in such a way that's really credible. That's one great way to build that credibility. The last thing I'll mention is the CTA, or call to action. At the end of, again, we started this in infomercials, build up this emotional, get to the height of this sounds great. Get them over the edge with what we call an irresistible offer.
Again, it's a little different today than it used to be. On TV, this might be, "Hey, buy one ShamWow. I'll send you six more for free," or whatever. You've got this big offer. How did they afford to do that for just 19.99? It's a little different. It may not be the same big offer bill, "Buy now, you get this for free." It doesn't have to be the yell and sell approach, but it does mean I got to build value throughout the first part of this video process. At the end, it is a call to action, send them to the website. Now it's really easy, because you've got to say, "Just click on the button below," depending on where you're advertising, et cetera.
That call to action at the end you got to tell them where to go. You got to tell them what to do. It's not just about building connection. It's about truly selling. That last part of the video is a key component. Again, all this comes from the world of infomercials, but we've seen it work. It looks different. The video of today looks different than it did 10 years ago on TV. The science behind it is very similar and it delivers results. That's the ultimate key.
Ian: I've talked about it so many times because it's direct response marketing and direct response, great copywriting. These formulas work over and over for the history of advertising and just adjusting them, like you said, adjusting the content, adjusting that. I want to get into, because I think the idea of that yours is full offer and how you guys are figuring that out, and how you're testing it. Also those scripts, I want to talk about that, but when you're identifying a client that's perfect for this because obviously, you put a lot of work into it. You have a lot of success. You've got to turn away clients.
You've got to turn away products and you got to say, "This is the product that we want to work with because you can't work with everyone. Who are the perfect people that really, the perfect companies that should be working with you building these infomercials?
Jon: Great question. Really, the perfect type of product to achieve quick success in a digital marketing world, there's a couple of things if I could call it down and make it really simple. Part of it's the soft skill of just having, for us, we've launched hundreds of products and looked at thousands. Done market research for over a thousand products in-house just over the last 15 years. There's a soft side of it. It's subjective, but the easy and quick way to answer your question is it's really about it's about uniqueness and solving problems.
We look for products that are truly unique and different. If there's something that as I look at it, I'm like, "I swear I've seen that. There's something like it." Even if totally is unique, but there's something else that does the same benefit or solves the same problem, then it's just not going to sell well, because you got to realize it's a little different. It's harder to get the impulse now.
Even though through digital marketing, it's much easier to order a product today than it was five years ago or even a year ago, it often can be one click through Apple Pay, Shop Pay, et cetera. Amazon, of course, makes it really relatively easy, but it's still more of a process than grabbing off a shelf putting into your cart as you're walking by. Part of it is it's got to be unique and then solving a problem. This is something that when we do market research, we test, I think, probably relatively uniquely. A lot of the market research surveys that we do, they're really built off of what I used to do at Kraft foods as a brand manager years and years ago and use that same approach.
Most of it's the tried and true concept test style market research. We're testing for purchase intent, for those that are familiar with market research, uniqueness, all that stuff. The question that we add that's a little different is, does this product solve a problem for you, and getting that scaled answer back on the question. Sometimes, we'll get really excited as we run through market research. There's the gut side of it, but I also want to test with a hundred, 200 consumers and get their thoughts too because they don't have skin in the game like I do there.
They're not jaded like you and I. We're in the marketing world, we just look at things differently. We get the response back. Super unique. Awesome. There's great value for the money. Great. Are you interested in purchasing? "Yes." Awesome. If it doesn't solve a problem, they're not going through the even three clicks to purchase. They'll think they want to buy it. They'll have the intent to purchase, but they won't.
They'll say, "Oh, that's really cool. I'm going to remember that next time I go to my web browser," or whatever, and then they forget they don't buy. Solving a problem is definitely a key interaction. Part of that is based on the product, part of it's based on the story. A lot of this can be fixed with messaging. Sometimes, how you position your product can make all the difference. The marketing speak, really, or the messaging you use behind it, is what's going to drive the success.
Ian: Now, tell me about some of these successes that you've had because obviously, you've done. What successes can you tell me about? You've done a ton, obviously.
Jon: For sure. My favorite story is always OxiClean, which is my first one that I worked on in the TV space or direct-to-consumer world. Of course, I didn't invent the brand but was able to launch a few of their big products. One was called Kaboom bowl blaster, which was this foaming toilet cleaner you pour in and super visual. It worked well, still does, but it was super visual and captured your attention. That was a really fun one.
Back before that, I was able to work with Nabisco a hundred calorie packs and help bring that business out, which is still around today more than almost 20 years later after the initial launch. Since starting Harvest Growth, we've had a lot of fun with some successful launches over the years as well. A couple I'll mention are, one was a product called Sonic scrubber. It was one of the first products we worked on, ended up selling 10 million units.
If you're not familiar with it, it's essentially like a Sonic care style toothbrush, but for household cleaning, so cleaning out grout lines, et cetera, super powerful, but small, bike chains, all this. Any small, intense cleaning, it was great for, and did extremely well. We were able to be part of that one essentially from launch until they got to the point of selling, like I said, 10 million units. There's a couple of other ones that were two of my favorite stories were two that were a hundred-year-old brands. They did really well before we met them, but we shifted their story and catapulted their growth.
One was a company called Bona, if you have Bona?
Ian: Yes, a hardwood floor--
Jon: Hardwood floor cleaners, if you have hardwood floors, you probably know the brand. We launched them onto TV and it really catapulted their retailer and consumer side of their business and grew to tens of millions of dollars. A similar story was GUND teddy bears. Those in the audience that have small kids again, a hundred-year-old brand, but we got them on TV for the first time with an animatronic stuffed animal called the peek-a-boo line. Peek a boo puppy was one of them, for example, and helped grow that business that had been doing well, but not hyper-growth kind of thing until we got him on TV that really catapulted them. Took them from TV to digital as well and really furthered their growth.
They actually sold off their company for $70 million. It's all public knowledge from press releases, that kind of stuff so we're able to share that and have done really well. It's those are a couple, a few of the fun ones that are brands a lot of people recognize.
Ian: That brings up a great, I want to get into the irresistible offer, but you talked about problem solution. When you look into those nice-to-haves, like the peek-a-boo puppy, I get the hardwood floors and I get OxiClean, because it's like, we want to have clean everything. You get peek-a-boo puppy, when you go with that type of nice-to-have, where does the problem come in?
Jon: Great question. That comes in creating a problem essentially for grandparents. This one is, "I've got to find a unique gift for my grandkids and I don't want to buy another stuffed animal, we've got a ton of them. It seems like as a grandparent, I buy those all the time," whatever. Not that I'm a grandparent, but that's the way they think. This was something very different that they could get excited about. Visually, just in showing the reactions of the kids in the spot and in such a way that grandparents especially could now look at their grandkids and see, "I want my grandkids-- My problem is I want to make sure I have my grandkids smile like that kid's smiling."
It's the emotional connection. That's a great point. It's not your typical gadget that is truly solving a traditional problem other than really gift-giving. Some of those may not be as a year-round success as much, it might be big in Q4 when they're really focused around gifts, et cetera. Luckily that period of time is big enough to still drive a massive success like that.
Ian: It's really cool. It made me think of too, that's what Disney does. If you watch Disney Channel at all, they're not selling the features of the rides. They're not saying, "We've got the fastest rollercoaster or the coolest rollercoaster or 27 rides. It's like just videos of kids going around being super happy and thanking their parents, which, by the way, if you ever actually go to Disney World,does not happen. [laughs]
Jon: Good point. The parents are crying the whole day, and the kids.
Ian: You see, if you go to Disney World at like 4:00 PM and start walking in the park and you're like, this is the least happy place on earth, but that's a whole another story. How do you create and test irresistible offers on something, especially like a hundred-year-old brand. Irresistible offer, I think, is one of the most important things and companies come to us and if they don't have an offer, I'm like, "If you don't have an offer, it's really hard for us to help you." Obviously, you're helping people with offers. How do you go about that now in the digital age?
Jon: Great question. Let me talk first. There's two types of offers, again, whether this is on TV or in a digital world. There's what we call a hard offer and a soft offer. Hard offer means you show the price, soft offer means it's not shown until you get to the website or whatever, so you're the offer offering, right? You're talking about the product, but you're not talking about the price. I will say most of our digital offers are soft offers. We want to get them leaning forward.
One of the big reasons for that is they may only ingest three seconds of content and think, "Hey, that's a really cool stuffed animal or Boogie Board's another big client of ours that we love that's those little electronic tablet devices you write on, hit a button and eraces it. Lots of kids have or you may love that brand. I click over to go to my boogieboard.com for example. I may not be ready to purchase, but now I'm pixeled, so now I can be followed within the digital platform. I see more and more ads because I've clicked on the first one. I'm going to the website, maybe didn't purchase yet.
The story, maybe not, may not be done, the sales cycle doesn't always take place just in the video. That, what we call irresistible offer, may be moved from where it always used to be at the end of a TV spot. Now it may be moved to the website only. You have to realize the science behind that, where this is might be the first time they see the price where on the TV world, they were more warmed to it, like, "Oh, I can't believe I get all that for 19.99, I'm ready to buy. I get to the site and I place an order." Well, now I get into the site. They don't even know what this costs. They have no idea, no frame of reference.
Part of the story becomes, "How do I get them to go digest even more content on the site before maybe even seeing the price?" Treat this as, they saw, let's say, 15 seconds or whatever your average view time is. They get to the site. I want to essentially get them to get through the rest of "two minutes of content." It's not about the time, it's about the story. Get them through the rest of the story before they're introduced to the price point. Now sometimes the irresistible offer becomes irresistible because I'm so sold on the solution that you provided as opposed to just the price.
It's not always just about the price anymore. It's not just about being amazed. How do you do that? Now we know because it's like they source this crap from China in a small factory. That's why they got it so cheap before and it didn't work, but today, I want a better value product. I want better value for my money. I want something that's going to work. I'm willing to pay more for it. It's not just about getting a low price. It's about, "Now I can't believe I get all this value. I can't believe you're solving all these problems. I can't believe you're answering all my questions. The more you speak to the audience in their own language, the more that their offer becomes irresistible at the end.
Ian: Love it. Love it. How are you going about-- You do the market research, but do you go then and test each piece of that offer or do you test different offers?
Jon: Yes. Let me dive into it real quickly, what we call our perfect launch process. There's a process we follow that helps us get into figure out what the offer should be in the first plac, and then it includes the testing. We rewind a little bit and talk about that. Our perfect launch process, and really, what we focus on is launching products, where that's the focus of our agency and really what we've done for hundreds of products over the last 15 years. From that, we've come up with this process that, "Hey, what really works as a flow of a process to make sure that we've got the best chance of success, to get there in the fastest way possible, i.e, the least expensive way.
Any product can be successful if you've got an unlimited budget and unlimited time to make it work. We want to call that down to make it, "Now how do we do it in the reasonable budget and in the fastest time possible?" This process is what gets us there. It's in simple ways, it's basically we plan, optimize and profit. Planning, that's where the market research comes in play. This is all before launch preparation. It's about market research, it's that concept test I talked about where it's essentially explaining a product. Maybe it's a simple video. Oftentimes, it's just a picture or drawing and a couple of paragraphs written about core features and benefits.
Then we ask, "Hey, how likely are they to purchase? How unique is this? Does it solve problems? "We ask about concerns. Going over these, asking questions in a specific way, now, all of a sudden we have an understanding of, really, three things. It's the stool, or legs of the stool as it were, for the launch. It's the audience, the offer, and the messaging. The audience, this market research helps us figure out, who is your target audience? Who do you focus on first? Even if your products for everybody, which is the part of your audience that's most profitable? You can start there. Is it females age 35 to 55, whatever. Figure out your core section of your audience.
The offer as well, you talked about irresistible offer, so we always test. When you do market research, I'll tell you how you can do these surveys on your own if you'd like. A couple of ways to do it is, ask, open-ended pricing first. Don't ever give a frame of reference in the concept of how much your product costs, because they're not going see that in marketing either. What does this product do? How does it solve your problems? What are the features and benefits? Ask a bunch of questions, then ask, "What do you expect to pay for this?" Open-ended? "What do you think this is worth?"
Now we get interaction from potential customers, what they're willing to pay or what they expect to pay for this. Then we reveal the price that we think it should be, or is at least going to start at. We ask them the purchase intent question again, and we see, does it go up, does it go down based on what we ask them, unpriced and now priced? Then a unique, and that's I would say fairly standard way of doing that type of market research. A unique thing that we do is, at the end of all of our surveys, we ask an additional question that feels less market research.
It's essentially, I've gone through this. I spent, I don't know, five or 10 minutes with us answering questions. The last question is, "Hey, thanks so much for taking the survey. How'd you like to buy this product for 20% off this price rather than what we quartered to before?" It's written, "We're not actually selling it. It's just written, it feels that way, so it doesn't feel like purchase intent. Now it's like, you're really going to get out your wallet and now we've seen like, it does a double check in the pricing. Are we in the right value space? Are there any other issues we should be dealing with?
They said high purchase intent, but now when it actually comes to purchasing, it's really low, we got a problem to deal with. It's those three different buckets of the way that we figure out general pricing, but as I mentioned, the offer is so much more than pricing. The last leg of the stool, so it's audience, offer, and the last leg is messaging. Messaging is all about what's going to drive our script. It's about core features and benefits that work for this audience. Making sure that story works and resonates for them and to make this offer irresistible, are you hitting the key features and benefits that your audience cares about?
That's where that part of the process comes in. Then I'll go really quickly through the rest of it. As part of this preparation planning phase of market research I talked about in detail, competitive analysis, where always looking at competition, what are they doing right, wrong? What can we learn, et cetera? Then we go into, now we launch. It's about optimization. When you, and when anyone launches, whether it's us with-- Luckily, we've done hundreds of these over the years, we've figured this out or whether it's your first launching doing on your own, that optimization part of the process is so key.
Don't assume it's going to, if it doesn't work on day one, don't worry about it. There's so many home runs that were, they looked like failures for a couple of weeks or maybe even months as you worked through these. It's just about optimization. It might be, as you mentioned before, Ian, price testing. Maybe it's a price point issue. Maybe it's the way we talk about messaging. Maybe it's the audience we're going after. It's just going back and forth and retesting, now not in market research but in a live environments. Now let's use Facebook, for example, we're doing an ad campaign on Facebook, and we'll be able to test again, different audiences, different offers, change the messaging.
All of these things are constantly testing and optimizing that's that optimization part. Then as soon as you hit the point where, "I've got whatever my level needs to be." Let's say it's $2 in revenue for every $1 you spend, whatever it is for your math, for your business, once you hit that, now it's all about that third phase, which is profit. Now let's scale this up. In simple terms, there's a whole process we put behind that, but in simple terms, it's about reinvesting. Again, it all comes back to learning and optimizing, and growing once you get through that cycle.
Ian: What I love about this is it's been a theme for the show and what I've been talking about. It sounds simple but it's not easy. I'm sure there's so much nuance to each part. Just like that question, how you ask that last, that question about the pricing. I think that's an amazing question because most people will tell you they'll buy things for one price but then actually when it comes time to buy it, they'll have a different mindset, won't they?
Jon: Yes, absolutely. Seeing how they respond to that last question, there could be a hundred different reasons that the response rate either goes really low or really high. It's just having done so many of these, it's knowing how to read the data of market research to be able to see what drove it. If you're doing this, again, on your own, you can always do your best, so not having done a thousand of these or whatever, it's okay.
You can still get some learnings, and then just make sure you focus on the optimization part. When you do launch, just be sure that you're using learnings. If it doesn't work, make it one tweak at a time, and then watch the results. Does it go up? Does it go down, et cetera? Continually optimize, and really, that continues on forever. Even when you're really profitable in week one, which sometimes happens, you still want to optimize because, can you be twice as profitable? Great. How much more can you improve these results?
Ian: Those are the keys to success. What are the biggest mistakes you see in people trying to do infomercials?
Jon: Good question. I think, to be honest, the biggest one is giving up too early. Because we deal with a lot of inventors and entrepreneurs, a common phrase I get when a first phone call, somebody calls me up, "I've spent $100,000 or $150,000 on a patent and my one sample and I've got no money left over, what do I do next?" Well, you got to save some money for marketing, but even the ones that start and go down this path, you got to make sure you've got the funding in place to have enough of what we call runway for testing.
The biggest mistake, to be honest is, thinking that I'm going to spend all this money, launch it on TV or launch it online on digital. If it's not a home run in week one, I give up and move on. It's just not about that. There is a process to this. As long as you go into it, thinking you don't-- The nice thing is you don't need millions of dollars like you used to launch a product. TV really brought down those costs, and now digital brought down the costs even more, so TV was the point where it was a ballpark figure, let's say 100 grand all in. To be able to do a solid test on national TV, et cetera. Now digitally, you could do a fraction of that.
You can do a lot less money for your testing and start to get some results back. Still, don't go into it, think, "I've enough for just one week, and then I'm done." If that's the case, then either raise some money or save up some more, whatever it takes but just make sure you give yourself enough runway to be able to test and optimize and make some mistakes along the way. I call them mistakes, but every campaign is a little bit different. Whether you're experienced or not, it's still a learning process because every product's a little different. Giving yourself that runway to be able to figure out your path.
Ian: Love it. It's so important because there's so many products that, yes, there's the occasional that hit home runs but there's so many that I know to get out there and test and test and test and it takes a long time to get it to work. You just never know because it could be the wrong platform, it could be wrong messaging. It could be the right messaging on the wrong platform. It's so much out there. Awesome, Jon, so tell me a little bit about working with Harvest Growth. How does someone work with you? We heard about your process but how do they figure out if you're the right match for them?
Jon: Yes, thanks for asking. If anyone is interested in reaching out to us, the best way is to check out our website, harvestgrowth, G-R-O-W-T-H, .com, and a lot of information about who we are, what we do. Actually, the ability to set up a meeting directly with me is on our website. If you'd like to just have some specific questions, so learn about our process, we've got a blog on there that explains a lot more detail than I did today. All that stuff, but if you really want to, if you have specific questions, you want to jump on the phone and just ask some, let's chat for a few minutes if you'd like. Connect with me on LinkedIn as well is a good way to get a hold of me, but the website's probably best. harvestgrowth.com, and find out some information and feel free to reach out.
Ian: Awesome. Yes, if you're thinking about an infomercial, you're not going to find many people. There are probably like three other people to have as much success and as much experience as Jon LaClair. Definitely give him a call. I can vouch for him, he's a pretty nice guy too. [laughs] Jon, this has been awesome. You've seen a lot of craziness and a lot, I'm sure, in the marketing world. We talked about some marketing stories. What's one of the craziest things that happened or the biggest successes or biggest things that you are going to think, going to be successes that ended up not working or vice versa in your long illustrious marketing career?
Jon: Great question. In this industry, you learn very early on not to trust your gut entirely. As much as I mentioned before, having launched so many products, there's some that you can make a judgment call, et cetera, but, man, there are some surprises that come across your desk that you never would've expected. There's a long long list but a couple of funny stories I'll share funny products, I guess I'll share that were along those lines.
One is a product where years ago I got a phone call from a woman who had this brand new product, had zero sales at the time. It was a wooden stool that you put in front of your toilet to put your legs up on top of, to squat, to go to the bathroom better, basically, and as I bring this up, most of the audience probably now knows exactly what that product is, the Squatty Potty.
I happen to talk to Judy who's one of the inventors in this product. It was family-owned and still is, business. I remember talking with her on, very early now she sent me this big, heavy wooden version of it and I was thinking like, "Who's going to buy this thing?" You quickly learn we had to consult with her early on and help with some of her early ideation, et cetera, luckily, great family and amazing product, frankly, that I didn't personally get early on, but obviously America did.
It took a little while but that thing turned a corner and now they're doing tens of millions of dollars a year in sales on the Squatty Potty, on multiple different marketing channels, and again, you get surprised sometimes. Another one that's along those lines that I almost didn't call back but I'm so glad I did because we love the client. It's been a super fun project, and frankly, surprised us with the results and I've told them this many times, so I'm not sharing anything I wouldn't share with the client either but man, I did not expect it to work. It's called Pony Up Daddy.
If you've seen that one, it's been all over Today show, Good Morning America, Ellen show, of course, National TV. It's done really well but it's essentially a saddle that dads or moms can wear and their kids ride around the house. Kids can hold on and it's funny because your question before, "Who needs this?" I mean, the Squatty Potty is solving a problem, for sure. There's a medical reason for it. The Pony Up Daddy is not solving a problem. It may be creating problems but it was a lot of fun and it resonated, that one also with grandmas, where, once we figured out who the audience was, we started with parents. It was lack lustred success, but we hit those grandmas.
Man, that thing has taken off, and it's been one of our bigger successes. It's been around for years, and it's done really well, but again, you learn quickly, you can only trust your gut so far, especially if there's a little bit of quirkiness. The other piece I look for in products that I think I didn't mention before is personality. If your product can have some personality inherently, whether it's the name of it like the Squatty Potty or whether it's the visual side of it, and what it does, like the Pony Up Daddy, then that's an element of the product. Sometimes, a personality is given to a product. It may not be innate, but if you can get it through branding, or something else that you do, maybe it's a jingle connection, but having that personality can really resonate with an audience.
Ian: Love it. Jon, this has been fantastic. Definitely have to have you on again, talking more about scripts, about what's working now. Thank you so much for being on the Garlic Marketing Show.
Jon: Thanks so much. I really enjoyed it.
Ian: Thank you all for taking Jon and I on your journey. Make sure to check out harvestgrowth.com Make sure to tell Jon you've been on. If you're thinking about an infomercial, definitely reach out to him. Thank you, for taking Jon and I on your journey. This has been Ian Garlic and the Garlic Marketing Show.
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Jon: That's it for the Garlic Marketing Show. If you want to get the inside scoop on the latest techniques, make sure to follow Ian Garlic on Facebook.
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