Awesomers.com welcome to the awesomers.com podcast if you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success you are in the right place customers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great zig ziglar quote where he said you can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get
what they want it doesn't matter where you came from it only matters where you're going my name is steve simonson and i hope you will join me on this awesomer journey if you're launching a new product manufactured in china you will need Professional high resolution amazon ready photographs because simo global has a team of professionals in china you will often times receive your listings photographs before your product even leaves the country this streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is
in stock and ready for sale visit simoglobal.com to learn more because a picture should Be worth 1000 keywords you are listening to the awesomers.com podcast episode number 55. and as the tradition has been well established now all you have to do is go over to osmers.com 55 to find all the relevant show notes details links and in this case a link to the very special book that is being released today by our special guest rick cesari now rick has helped major brands Including brands you've heard of gopro george foreman grill and others put together these
billion dollar brands all through response advertising direct response advertising as we like to call it his uh current book that he's just released and now available is called building billion dollar brands and it aims to put valuable knowledge of the big brands in the hands of inventors small business owners uh entrepreneurs Of any kind amazon sellers e-commerce guys and others to create innovative successful marketing campaigns now rick is a best-selling author speaker and consultant and he's a brand strategy guru for sure and we're lucky that rick today is bringing us his expertise to talk about
uh branding and video marketing and so much more today's a very special episode because we're gonna do a part one episode of a two-part series Uh with rick and these are both long-form interviews and we talk about rick's origin story mostly today and two of the brands which include a little discussion about the juice man which was one of rick's uh first brands as well as the sonicare toothbrush which he participated in building that brand and the george foreman grill these are powerhouse powerhouse brand names and then in our series tomorrow we're going to talk
further about even more so this Is the first in a two-part series buckle up it's going to be exciting tell a friend this is the this is prime time stuff let's giddy up hello awesomers it's steve simonson and today i'm joined by my very special guest rick cesari rick how are you buddy i'm doing great thanks for having me on i'm really looking forward to it good uh as a matter of just housekeeping we need to establish for the audience if i pronounce your name right or wrong Because my record's not great it's cesari dude
i got it wrong i said people do don't worry about it the fact is full disclosure for the audience rick just said his last name in the last 30 seconds probably to me and that's the lack of uh retention i have so my apologies uh but you're in good company because it's the majority of the time i get it wrong um so first of all rick i've already read in the bio the people Already kind of have a general big picture sense of you but in your own words kind of tell us um you know
where you are live today and what what takes up your time day to day right now okay so right now i live in seattle washington i ran a direct response marketing agency for over 25 years based in seattle here and we'll talk about that a little bit as we go on and some of the different uh projects and and brands to help build Sorry i have a cuckoo clock in the background no problem that's a new sound effect we've added in awesomers anytime rick says something that we uh want to question you'll hear that cuckoo
sound so keep your fingers open go ahead all right so it's it's worse right now just because it's the top of the hour but anyway so i um wound down the agency about a year ago and i'm more focused on uh doing writing consulting and helping Companies that are looking to launch a product or you know want to grow their business uh help them do uh strategy and mainly from the standpoint of doing direct to consumer marketing yeah and that is such an important part of the equation a lot of people they get confused about
different marketing techniques you know well i'm on the internet so i just do Internet marketing well at the end of the day direct response marketing whether you do it on tv or the internet when you're trying to get their audience to actually make an immediate action like a buy that's direct response marketing would you would you agree with that right absolutely and you know what i tell everybody i i like to talk to about omni channel marketing and multi-channel marketing but all of it is done just like you mentioned under the Umbrella of direct response
direct marketing i'm always trying to uh you know you've built some successful businesses i'm always trying if you spend a dollar on advertising you want to get two or three or four dollars in return and that's really how you can build a a big successful business uh by having that mentality and always thinking from a direct response standpoint without a doubt it's uh just as a Contrast to the awesomers out there listening another type of marketing that would be a contrast in my mind to this would be just general awareness marketing right when you see
the the big toothbrush company who's like hey we got the best toothbrush uh just know about us that's a different thing than go here and buy my toothbrush right now yeah and basically if you had to really break it down to the basic fundamentals of the Difference between when you call awareness that's also called brand marketing basically they try to entertain people they aren't trying to get the viewer to take a specific action whenever we do some type of direct response advertising we're always have some type of um offer or reason for people to either
go to the website call an 800 number uh download uh you know a lead gen piece of Information so there's always some type of offer involved in in direct response yeah and i think that's a very uh a good breakdown kind of the contrast between the two uh both can be important but for me as a small business guy and uh even my biggest stuff would only be modestly considered medium you know you even at 100 million bucks that's still a scooby snack compared to the big Brands uh i'm all about trying to figure out
the roi on my spend right i don't have the luxury of saying you know i'm just going to put this million bucks into branding and and uh you know i'm i'm hoping people will know my name more as a result of that million dollars no i put the whatever amount i want the money back yeah absolutely and and really that's the secret to a lot of the um brands and and products we're going to Talk about today is none of them started out with big budgets they all started out as small businesses and we were
able to find some type of advertising channel where they could get a return on their investment and then what they would do is take that money put it back into advertising and that's how they would grow grow the business and there's very few companies i mean if you're already have enough money to spend a million dollars a year or month whatever on Brand advertising um then you've already reached a level of success where you're kind of beyond you know they don't need your my help really so yeah i understand that well uh listen you have
such an amazing background that we're gonna dive into some of that origin story kind of right from the beginning and carry on through to some of the amazing accomplishments you had but we're going to do it right after this break Catalyst 88 was developed to help entrepreneurs achieve their short and long term goals in e-commerce markets by utilizing the power of shared entrepreneurial wisdom entrepreneurship is nothing if not lessons to be learned learn from others learn from us i guarantee that we will learn from you visit calluse88.com because your success is our success hey giddy
up okay guys we're back again steve simonson here uh rick cesari Rick suzeri i did it again cesari you know that hey i know everyone wants to medically yeah that would be uh easier on me rick cesari yes all right good lord i'm gonna have to go to the editing bay and get this one fixed uh thank you again rick for joining us um i really respect you know a lot of the accomplishments you had and i love just kind of your general nature of how you are trying to kind of Work with and help
entrepreneurs get better and that's something i really respect so thank you for doing that on behalf of all the entrepreneurs out there yeah no i it's really i feel like after all of the successes i've had over the last 25 years i really get a lot of gratification of working with uh people who are starting a business or have a business and they're just looking for some answers and any Knowledge i can share it it just feels good good it does feel good i have a similar feeling when i'm able to impart a little uh
lesson learned or maybe even wisdom uh and the the best part is it doesn't really require a lot of calories burnt on on my part right it's kind of like hey here's a story it happened to me i don't know if it's applicable to you but uh hopefully it helps and no no absolutely and usually what i find and You probably find the same thing and i don't do it for this reason but as you do that more and more i don't know it just creates a snowball effect and things come back to you on
in unexpected ways and and it's just a nice uh situation when you're able to do that so this is you know again i repeat this often it's always uh mentioned at the top of the show zig ziglar says you can have everything you want in your life if you help enough other people get what They want in their life and that's that's what a guy like rick does is he spends his time helping other people get what they want and then that little you know the magic law of reciprocity whatever just kind of does its
job and and opportunities show up so rick let's let's go back to the very beginning where were you born so i was born in um white plains new york which is about 30 miles north of new york city and um my Uh i grew up there until i was 15 years old kind of had an idyllic childhood we had an acre property with a little pond on it i had seven brothers and sisters and um every everything was just great but then when i was uh 12 years old my uh dad who was only 46
at the time passed away from a heart attack so you can imagine a single mom with eight kids and It all of a sudden life changed pretty dramatically overnight and um she tried we had a little grocery store that my dad ran and it's interesting because there's a lot of parallels some parallels with what amazon's doing today with grocery delivery you know you always hear there's no new ideas one of the things that we did at our grocery store was we would do free deliveries and that's one of the things i helped out with as
a Teenager is i would but people would call in their um order we would box up the groceries and we had a panel van and we would deliver it out to people's houses and so this is a concept that's been around for a long time just nobody was really able to take advantage of it like they do now and you know this morning my wife was just ordering from instacart it made me remember about how i used to do that when when i was a young teenager so i learned business my Father was always entrepreneurial
i learned i guess to be entrepreneurial but life really did change when i and when he passed away we stayed in new york for another couple years but then my family moved down to daytona beach florida we knew some people that were down there kind of a big change yeah um uh i i stayed there in high school and again you know when i was a senior uh i had a really good friend and he and I decided that we would become dentists and so when i went to college i went back up north to
a small school in pennsylvania called westminster college and studied biology so i actually have a bs degree in biology i never studied marketing uh traditionally in school and my friend went on to become a dentist and he's a dentist today in ormond beach florida and i kind of took after college i moved back to daytona beach and i was A little bit tired of school so i became a bum for a year and i was a bartender and a lifeguard but i was motivated to be successful and and and make money and i knew that
both of those things while fun when you're young really weren't long-term careers and i started reading a lot of books two types of books motivational books and also books on how people became successful or made money and one of the things that i Always kept stumbling across is a lot of people are wealth had been built through real estate and so i started uh reading a lot of books about that going to seminars and i went to a seminar and i'm just to give your listeners a time frame and also it'll show them kind of
how old i am this was 1985 and i went to a seminar did what the person told me went out bought a house sold it In two weeks and made about twelve thousand dollars and at the time that was like a million dollars lottery baby yeah i love it yeah you know i think a minimum wage back then was three dollars an hour or something so that was a huge amount and i was hooked and i wanted to just keep going out and doing that but the person who was running the seminars um i was
very grateful for what happened so on my own i just called up a local business magazine called florida Trend i don't even know if it's still around basically told him the story of this person they ran an article about him and that free pr helped him gain credibility but also helped him in the seminar business so he asked me if i wanted to help him with marketing and that's how my marketing career got launched and at the time again this is gonna you know sounds funny to some of Your listeners the main way we were
promoting the real estate seminars was using newspaper ads and we would go from city to city and basically um i call this category of marketing we're going to talk about lots of different products for lack of a better word get rich quick and it not it's not i don't take it the wrong way that's kind of not what we're doing it's just kind of a category i call you know there's lots you know lots of Information type seminars out there and so one of the things we did there was another real estate seminar based in
california called robert allen nothing down and he was one of the first people to start using television to drive people into these free seminars and we were seeing maybe 100 people at our seminars he was seeing five six seven hundred people at his so we said we're going to Make a half hour tv show and this is the very very cutting edge of infomercials direct response um the reason it came about not to go into too much detail is president reagan deregulated television before you could only have eight minutes of of advertising in every hour
he would deregulated it it opened up to the to the half hour advertising so it's really through the real estate business that i learned um how to do direct response Marketing direct to consumer marketing because it's a very you know if you do any type of direct marketing or run any type of business at the end of the day there's a set of numbers that that you follow that can run the business and when we were using newspaper ads we had a formula that if we could get 10 people in the room for ten dollars
per head we knew that when we spoke to them we could convert a certain number and then we knew it could be profitable Well tv took that metric and really turned it upside down because it was the early days of direct response tv just like the early days of the internet or early days of amazon it was a lot easier to make money before those areas matured a little bit and um we were seeing people in the room for uh you know five dollars ahead a dollar ahead and seeing literally thousands of people in one
week and we were able to build up the seminar Business to one of the largest in the country in about two and a half years and um let's just say i didn't agree with the guy who was running the seminars uh approach it was a little dishonest and so i left and actually that's when i moved out to seattle and i did a couple projects um uh i i was a partner and uh feel free to ask any questions along the way yeah i do have one uh Question so as you as i mean it's
a remarkable amount of um growth you know over the course of just two years to kind of take that that newspaper direct response by the way for those listed at home what rick described is just a simple funnel right you put an ad in there somebody comes in you know you try to convert them and get them to the seminar and buy the whatever the seminar selling this is a normal funnel this is nothing New i could actually imagine my daughter listening to this podcast and going dad what's a newspaper that's a that's a story
for another time so but it it is fun to reflect back on this idea of you know the very beginning days of infomercials when probably the leads were cheap and the air time was plentiful right is probably a lot easier is that how you found it to be at that time as uh yeah absolutely and um you know whenever there's uh a way That's easy for people to make money it attracts honest ethical people but it also attracts the opposite and so and that and usually that's what ends up um i guess killing the goose
that lays the golden egg there's a lot of people that would take advantage of being able it's you know they over promise under deliver and some are just outright crooks and so that that always happens in every industry uh when it's new and and before Things sort out but yeah this was a time that i would say was the golden age of um uh television direct response from uh and we'll talk about some of the projects that are our products that we helped launch that way um but i moved out after doing the real estate
seminars i moved out to seattle here and a friend was in the fishing business and we did a project together uh one of the things again this is a little thing People say well how do you find products or projects and things and again this is a little uh outdated but i used to always go in the library and uh look around in different sections and in this case it was i we looked in the you know how to make money section and i knew i had been successful doing real estate and i said well
why don't i try that in the stock market and i found a Book called how to make a million in the stock market called up the author and he and we basically made a half hour tv show but used to and this is important lesson uh because you'll see some lessons that i did way back in 1985 i used when we started marketing gopro in 2010 12 13 you know and and healthy because you said a funnel's a funnel and the distribution channels have changed Somewhat but the basic marketing principles have stayed the same and
that's really an important point that i try to convey to a lot of a lot of people um so let me just pop in there for a second rick because i think that is such a a a really relevant point you know it doesn't matter if this was the you know the the dawn of infomercials today you might consider facebook a very similar concept right facebook's still At the very early stages uh where relatively speaking the inventory's you know cheap now it was cheap five years ago it was less expensive five years ago but you
know it still has reasonable availability and as the big brands come in and as some of the the hucksters come in uh we we've recently there's a story about somebody selling you know kind of amazon seminars in kind of that instead of the business opportunity Space which is respectable there's a lot of good people doing stuff the the guys who are just scam artists and and uh slimy i just despise those people and and this this idea of there's a way to make money and this opportunity it does attract that that negative space for those
negative people so it really doesn't matter if it's infomercials or facebook it all the same stuff whether it's funnels Or scam artists they're as old as time and they'll continue on it's it's our mission to kind of uh figure out how we can tell the good guys from the bad guys so tell me tell me more about the seattle stuff i i sorry to interrupt you there no no i think that's a good uh a really good point and i think you know again to show um you know when i was learning marketing again i
learned it by doing it but also i read books um That uh i guess the people before me used to be successful and back then it was direct mail and and and how other people did it and so i think that for anybody wanting to know how to do marketing there's kind of two phases to that it's understanding the the fundamentals that have that are always work regardless of the distribution channel then understanding the technology that you're using today To distribute the message like you said facebook is a is an absolute parallel to tv direct
response the same type of thing and the important point to take away from that is the things that help make a tv infomercial successful would help make a facebook ad successful too and that's that's why i've been able to be successful in marketing you know for for over 30 years so anyway let's keep going with the story um Came out to seattle um we made this show uh just a a real quick aside my friend was in the commercial fishing business i like fishing he said hey let's go up to alaska and do some long
lining we did that at a kodiak the boat we were in uh you've seen you know the deadliest catch on tv we ran into a storm our boat sank we had to be rescued by the coast guard and we came back in i remember making a phone call when we got in we were at the coast Guard station in kodiak and um i called up and we were testing our stock show that weekend and i called up and we had spent like 4 000 on tv media on a national cable station it doesn't even exist
today and i remember calling into the telemarketing company and they had received 12 000 in order so it was kind of like one of the worst days coupled with one of the best days because one of the things if and you know from from being in business and running Advertising if you have an initial success you know then that you can take that and and ride it and and make it much bigger so so that was became the first um kind of success in in seattle and then this is where it ties together i'd done
a couple other little projects weight loss and things like that but i told you the story about my dad passing away from a heart attack so i was always interested in nutrition and you've heard People say it's important to follow your passion and so i was very passionate about how you could stay healthy prevent heart disease through what you ate and i actually got into juicing and this was in 1989 and my brother and i started a company uh called trillium health products but our main product was the juice man juicer and the bread man
bread machine and basically we were teaching people to Um eat a more of a plant-based diet as a way to good health not not telling to be vegetarians or anything and juicing was a way an easy way to get get people there so you talk about the success we were in the right time at the right place with the right product and that business grew from zero to 75 million in three and a half years and we sold it in 1993 to a company in Chicago called salton housewares and um i took a year off
uh just you know wanted to rest and recuperate because it was like riding a bucking bronco with that fast growth and at one time we had 160 employees and you you've owned businesses and you know everything that comes with a fast-growing business you're a delight i'm sure a pure delight believe me the year off was well earned i i've been there done that i i get it Yeah yeah so um i got a call uh from my former business partner in the juice business um and he said there's a small company here called optiva corporation
they have a consumer product and they want and they're interested in doing the type of marketing that you did and it turns out optiva corporation was the makers of the sonicare toothbrush and i went over and spoke with them and I ended up investing some money in the company and actually making a half hour infomercial and the problem with sonicare toothbrush was it was a 150 dollar product and nobody knew what sonic technology was and if they would have put this on the retail shelf nobody would buy it because the cheap most expensive toothbrush out
there were two three dollars maybe an inner plaque cost 29 or something so they had a really Educational um fence that they had to get over well let me just jump in there rick because i think that is a point that a lot of entrepreneurs especially those brand builders out there don't fully recognize just getting your product into big box or just getting it on a retail shelf or just putting it online doesn't mean it's going to sell especially when you have this this uh education issue right If your comparison item is three dollars and
your item is 150 you know and the person doesn't really have any uh clarity as to why what's the difference you got a problem and so from my standpoint i think it's a big point to say you know that that product that we all now know everybody knows sonicare now right it's super famous it's in every you know it's in costco it's in all these big boxes It's only because of the pioneering that you guys did at that time so i asked the listeners just to go back in time before anybody knew what sonicare was
and try to imagine that because that was a different time and uh go ahead and take us through that journey rick yeah and let me back up for one second and our because i wanna there's a a common another common thread between the juicer business and sonicare and things and one of the things i have for anybody Listening today if they go to my website rickcesary.com they can download something that i call the five keys to building a great brand and number one on there and this isn't going to be news to you steve is
you have to identify a unique selling proposition and what what it is about your product that makes it unique compared to every other product out there and in the case of the juicer now we we didn't invent juicing we didn't invent a juicer that there were Two giant companies called brawn and crops out there making juicers but they focused on the features of the product you know they had a half hour half horsepower motor stainless steel parts dishwasher safe um things like that and when what made us successful in the juicing business is that we
said what what can we do to make our juicer different so we focused on the benefits of drinking the juice and we said if you buy this machine and drink the juice um You'll have more energy your cholesterol will be lower and it was really just a uh you know differentiator between our product and what was out there and that message is what made all the difference now take that over into the sonicare toothbrush which we were talking about what did sonicare do different sonicare had something called sonic technology well what was the benefit of
that they could clean beyond the bristles so basically we had the ability to reach The nooks and crannies between the teeth that other toothbrushes and the market couldn't and so in our advertising we could talk about how that using this product uh could really help you reverse gum disease and that was the basis when we started doing our direct response advertising uh how we got people to respond to the message and so again um unique selling proposition and positioning are two of the first things You should always think about when you're trying to build a
brand now we're going to be sure we get those links onto your website uh in the show notes and so forth and and the you call this the five steps or five five keys to building a great brand and i'll go through them as we go through and talk about some of the products and and how they apply how did the the next step at sonic here once you got it introduced optiva and so Forth what was the steps yeah so what we did is i've always been a big believer here's another uh lesson your
listeners can take away i've always been a big believer in selling through education in other words not hard sell you have to buy this hit people over the head with with a with price i've always positioned my products in most cases as the top end of of from a pricing standpoint because just a mentality you can always go down in Price and then try to build the marketing story to support that that higher price so with the sonicare um uh toothbrush one of the things we did is we basically interviewed uh we went to the
dental show a dental show down in the moscone center in san francisco sonicare had a booth there this is a something that works to this day if you are at a trade show and you have a booth if you go down there and take a video camera and video people that come up to Your booth and just talk to them and ask questions you'll find out more about your product and what people like and what they don't like and we were um able to uh go down there and interview some of the top dentists and
periodontists in the world and we use that as the basis for um the the marketing message with sonicare and really it was really also about building up credibility that's another key thing um People want to believe you have a good product but you need to really establish the credibility so if you hear the dean of the harvard business harvard dental school saying i really like this product it's different it works there it that's a much more believable message than than you as the product owner saying hey this is a great product it really works so
um we went down there got a lot of great testimonials from uh third party experts consumers we turned it into a half hour Infomercial that was very educational it was basically talked about where gum disease came from how you could fix it and how sonicare could help you do that and again it was educating the consumer once they saw that um they basically called up and and bought the product and again just to put this in perspective of the time frame time frame we're talking about this was before any e-commerce and sonicare using the direct
response marketing um grew From zero to about 120 million in the first probably three or four years i was working with them it's a combination of two things a great product you can't you can't do this if your product doesn't live up to everything you say so it always helps to have a great product and and then we're had a success being able to use a successful marketing method well and it's get that that combination of the two but that it's just a great Reminder that you know different marketing methods can lead to substantial scale
so many people are in the the this mindset of well if it's not on the internet it has no value but still to this day you know internet as of about right now is still only around 10 percent of retail sales that's 90 of stuff is done in other marketing channels big box uh even still today people order stuff on the telephone everyone uh it happens and There's a variety of different techniques that the as you were talking one of the things that i reflected on is you know today's infomercial is just a webinar right
it's just there really is no difference between a well-produced and organized webinar assuming that you know is is put out there and and a and a really nice infomercial which obviously still exists today so i agree it's basically a sales a sales Presentation and if people want my magic formula for creating a successful infomercial and we can go into a lot more detail but i learned this at dale carnegie when i was a teenager uh i don't know if again you might have heard of dale carne you know how to represent and influence people and
um they had a formula for when you give a speech it's like tell them what you're going to say say it and tell them what you what you said and it's a simple Formula but i followed that and there's other things that that obviously make it successful but that's a basic format and you talk about a webinar um well let's just tie it back to something you mentioned before some of these brand tv spots you have no idea what the heck they're talking about and even when it's over it's like what was that an advertisement
for and if you look at Um the advertising we did for gopro we started every gopro out with a brand logo so we're telling them what we're going to say it's about gopro there was user generated footage in the middle and we ended it with um the gopro brand logo but also then an offer for the people to do some we'll get into that story in more detail in a few minutes yeah well and this is this is the great part you know each of these stories has a common thread and For those awesomers out
there listening and the really expert marketeers you should be paying close attention because you know rick is a guy um you know through his uh influence and kind of his systems and understanding he's been able to build significant brands brands we've all heard of sonicare george foreman grill gopro oxiclean these types of brands which are you know just the fact that you could say one of those And have pretty much everybody know what they are is extraordinary but the fact that it's happened again and again shows there's a systemic process that rick brings to the
table so i'm super excited so as as sonicare grew you know zero to 120 million it's just the first you know few years several years whatever it was what was that what was the tipping point for sonicare to kind of just completely blow up and become ubiquitous Actually that's kind of um uh a funny story and you can relate to this um they basically and again i'm a big believer in multi-channel marketing and again i want to basically build on something you said before i'm also a big believer in making a product available anywhere the
consumer wants to buy it And make it so you know we were selling things on tv um you know right now it needs to be on tv online amazon and if it makes sense in retail and again we can talk about that in a minute you know you want you want to basically let consumers buy a product where they're comfortable but really the tipping point believe it or not Sometimes sometimes things happen um unexpectedly and oprah basically had a sonicare she had somehow got one from a friend or purchased it she actually brought it out
on her show and she said this will make your gums hum and it basically something as simple as that it wasn't planned basically it's kind of exploded into kind of mainstream america and then you know the the the conclusion To the uh sonicare story is that they continued to have high growth and phillips electric bought the company for 500 million dollars uh about eight or nine years after they started up so yeah from startup to sale that that that quickly well if you can't make a half a billion inside of 10 years you're just not
doing the job right that's my opinion uh well done so i love that Story and uh and we've got a couple other stories we're going to stack into here for the awesomers out there listen uh but we're going to take another quick break and we'll be right back after this empowering the name says it all connecting e-commerce entrepreneurs with great people ideas systems and the services needed to stay business dynamic and to grow empowery is a network a cooperative venture of tools and resources to make you better at what you Do because we love what
you do we are you visit empowry.com to learn more okay gang guys steve simpson we're back again on awesomers.com and today we are getting schooled by a brand expert rick cesari you're playing good lord bye third time's a charm and i have to tell you it was it was a 50 50 run there it was my uh my name recognition is is getting Worse uh maybe it has to do with my age i don't know but uh rick you've just you know i i think shared an extraordinary story about the sonicare you know kind of
zero to eight or nine years 500 million dollar exit and extraordinary success along with some serendipity along the way right if if oprah was a tipping point cool a lot of people go oh well they got lucky uh but luck is a matter of the Preparation right it's it's all the preparation it's all the energy it's all the the fact that however oprah got our hands on that thing it was a great product like you said the beginning and it did in fact get to her whatever method obviously it was related to some of the
other sales channels you were doing and she loved it enough on her own so it wasn't a paid campaign to just endorse it and kind of make that Pronouncement on on aaron and boom from there is history i i love that story and i'm hoping you'll share now a little bit about the george foreman uh uh grill because that is one of my favorites i've owned at least one of those probably more than one over in my time and and to me it's another fascinating example of how these brands kind of uh come to life
yeah so so that's a great story and actually the timing's perfect because Uh the company that bought our juicer business trillium healthcare was called sultan housewares and sultan uh one of the reasons they bought our business was that they had retail distribution that was their main business and they dealt with all the brick and mortar stores and um and but they also wanted to know how we did the marketing for the juice man and they brought me two products one was uh a slanted grill and the other One was a homemade bagel maker and um
i said winners so the story behind the george foreman grill is is really interesting because when it was first developed it was designed as a taco maker and the reason that it was slanted was that the idea was you cook hamburger meat on it it was at the edge of the table they had a little spatula you put your taco shell down below the lip of the machine and you put the taco meat in there and That's how it was being marketed before we started working with salton and obviously they weren't doing very good sales-wise
it just was a non-starter uh yeah so none of us have ever heard of the slanted grill taco maker so that that's a pretty good indicator yes so it's interesting at the time we so we started working with them and we said and there was also a really good marketing person in place at sultan named barb westfield and and um she's a Co-author of my uh new book which we'll talk about called building billion dollar brands um she's been the cmo at sultan at hometics at wolfgang puck and she knows more about brick and mortar
distribution than just about anybody i i've ever met anyway she she was a cmo there her and i put her heads together and and um george foreman had just won the the heavyweight championship and He was the oldest person to to regain the championship i think he was 46 years old he knocked out michael moore and his agent was looking for a product for george doing doors and barb had mentioned this to me and i said well i think that would be good with the grill and because george was cut was was very big he
and was famous for eating hamburgers so we made the connection came up with um changed the name for whatever it was for the taco maker to Um people know it as a george foreman grill but it was the lean mean fat reducing grilling machine which you talked about a mouthful for a name um that that that was the name of the product and that's why people started referring it to it as a george foreman grill i wonder if that domain of it is still available the the lean mean grill and fat making it mean grilling
machine and then we also came up with a tagline knocks out the fat you Know to tie in with george foreman and really that was a unique selling proposition of that product we mentioned unique selling property before you could grill your favorite foods hamburgers bacon and you could see the grease and fat channel away from the food and so people thought or believed that they could eat their favorite foods and it was a little bit healthier than if it was to sit in a pan With all the fat and we basically visually you know showed
that we showed the fat channeling away we showed cooking hamburgers in a frying pan and then sitting in the fat and and really just making that comparison and george was um you know just an awesome i love first of all i love the name of your podcast or i think you've mentioned awesome awesomers yeah customers and awesome i use awesome All the time george was just an awesome spokesperson and um and basically the combination of really showing what this product could do uh not only removing the fat it was the first grill that grilled on
both sides at the same time so you could cook a hamburger in twice the speed and so when we made our half hour tv show which could be a half hour webinar or you know an ad on facebook the two things we showed were Removing the fat and cooking more quickly and those were the differences in our product versus the other grills out there at time and then george was a way to basically um open doors and uh kind of tying a spokesperson to a product um but then it's a it's it's not a a
direct logical um association right it's not like uh that there's very few people i think today that would say hey i'm uh thinking of a Grilling item and i'm gonna go find a you know the heavyweight champion or the mixed martial arts champion it's that's just not a logical thing that's a genius and and extraordinary kind of reach to put those two things together yeah and and um you know george turned out to be just an a an amazing spokesperson uh people really loved him because when he regained you know you see um heavyweight boxing
champions or whatever And they had these giant you know entourages and our mixed martial arts champion george used to travel around with one person and he you know his backstory was really interesting when he lost um part of his fame came because he lost a famous fight to muhammad ali in zaire africa and he basically went into retirement for 10 years and then when he came out and and won again that that got him quite a bit of notoriety but in that time he really He became a um a uh minister and every sunday he
would be teaching a sermon in downtown houston and um he had a very good story that was uh to promote and people he was a very likable guy and just kind of a funny thing in addition to doing the television we also did a lot of qvc and one of the things you know you get again at the time this was our instant Feedback you would get instant feedback when a certain sales message or something happened so every time george took a bite of a hamburger the phones would light up and for whatever reason when
he was eating um it would help generate more sales and i don't i don't know the psychological reason behind that but it really did so every commercial we made from that point on we had showed more of george eating and you know we basically used what Worked and used it in our advertising that is a fascinating detail and again one of those counter-intuitive ideas you know if we're writing marketing scripts or writing commercial scripts or webinar scripts or infomercial scripts how very few of us are going to go you know what let's make sure we
get the subject to eat a certain number of times right that's probably the least attractive idea we could come up with but george foreman because he Was such a big personality a big guy and you know he just made things look i remember these commercials i remember thinking to myself george foreman has no idea how that grill is made yeah it's got his name on it he's sitting there and he's as happy as a guy can be and he's showing us how to cook a hamburger this is a crazy thing and yet sure enough on
my you know countertop there's at least one george foreman grill there for at least 10 Years i i don't know uh it's a really amazing and and we felt perfectly fine about it uh hey ed uh bear with me just a minute i'll be early i'll jump off okay all right all right we'll back up just one step there um we probably have enough for two episodes we do actually uh before we go back i'm gonna i'm gonna break it right here for a second uh we probably should break This into a uh uh another
episode to do the gopro and oxiclean because i i think all these story details are amazing and uh and they deserve to be told but uh i want to make sure we get this point about george uh in the in the hopper here so um all right so i'm going to i just want to make sure i think of our our break point here okay So my my memory of the george foreman grill it dates back you know i don't know even what year were these sold uh the the heavy time of george foreman grills
well we launched it in 1996 and so from probably 97 through 99 were were the big growth years um for that for that product or probably 97 through 2001 to be honest with you it was such a powerful commercial and again it's Counter-intuitive to think of coaching up the the the star to go hey make sure you eat a bite you know here and we're going to do close-ups the right that the opposite way that you would you would script something is what actually ended up working and this is this is one of those marketing
lessons you know rick already said he doesn't know the psychological reason i certainly don't but when you find and this is the the ultimate lesson when you Find something that works regardless of why it works that the why is quite irrelevant you keep using it right and that's ultimately what you guys decide to do and every subsequent commercial every subsequent infomercial you made sure george was chomping down on a big bite yeah absolutely and you know that goes back to something again that's relevant back then but relevant today even more relevant is being able to
test your Commercials and finding out what works and what doesn't work and when you do find that one thing that works i've always found in all of these projects and that we've been talking about and the ones we're still going to talk about you kind of find the key that people respond to and once you find that key you can then take that and build a really really big business leveraging that one idea or the one thing that gets People excited and gets them to respond it's not always obvious what that is but um once
you find that and you do that through trial and error i mean nobody's an overnight success you you test shows i mean one of the things the interesting things about uh george's show is a perfect example the very first infomercial we tested didn't work and we started we thought it'd be really Cool again and this is it is an important lesson um we thought it'd be really cool to start the infomercial out we we called up hbo and bought 15 seconds where george was knocking out michael moore and we started out the show with a
boxing sequence and that was not really understanding who our target demographic was which was primarily women and women i'm making generalizations here but a Lot of women do not like boxing or are violent so we were turning off our primary target at the very beginning of the show so we came in re-edited the show took out the boxing and we actually raised the price from 59 to 79 and we did those two things and the product took off and again it's a function of testing this this first of all the lesson of testing you know
you've heard rick who's built these you know massive massive brands And we're going to talk more about his book here in a minute um but you know these these brands that have you know such extraordinary power and you know have the potential to be billion dollar brands and he still is talking about testing and talking about making mistakes by the way right this idea i'm sure that hbo wasn't like oh yeah you could have this footage for free right how much do they charge footage so they had to pay a big amount Of money they
put that lead in it turned off their viewers which obviously they figured out subsequent to that first ad running and was there any point after that first commercial you guys like oh i guess this isn't going to work let's let's roll it out and forget about it you know there's always that thought process um when you're you're testing a new product Because again this is the very beginning there there weren't a lot of success the the product that evolved into the george foreman grill wasn't successful and that's really where perseverance pays off and there's you
know there the ceo of the company could have said ah we tested it didn't work and we just said well you know let's give it another try and fortunately when we made the changes and brought it back out um it it it worked Well so again it's another lesson of not giving up um and basically following through and look at where it could lead you just imagine if the ceo or rick himself or anybody on the team at the time had said you know what i thought this was a good idea but it turns out
people don't like boxing and Cooking after all and that whole thing this whole genre that we all now know very well the george foreman grill that could have been gone it could have never existed yet by simply sticking to it and then having the uh maybe the the i don't know that being humble enough to say what do we do wrong what can we do better how can we improve this yeah that is enough to to be able to persevere and I think that's a big lesson you know you guys weren't caught up in the
ego of no this thing is perfect we just need to get those stupid customers to pay better attention you guys retooled the thing right no absolutely and that's a that's an important point you bring up right there is and and one of that's number three on my list of five keys to building a brand we talked about usp unique selling proposition positioning Number three is always listen to the customer and basically you'll find out more and we'll talk about how that plays a role in all the different products but their customers the best source of
feedback to tell you what they like about the product what they don't like and how you can make improvements and really the customers were sending us a Message saying that they didn't like what we were doing and we were able to talk to some of them and really identify what our target market was and make changes and then make the project work so this again just trying to tie parallels into modern day or relevant things for the awesomers out there listening when when you are thinking about developing a product and you start your Research typically
on amazon because that's the uh the easiest and most likely place to to begin a search the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna look at the reviews right and that is listening to customers so you get in there and you look at the good reviews and you see oh what's positive about this thing and then you also go look at the negative views it goes how's this thing falling down and if you can enhance the positives or at Least retain the positives and eliminate the negatives you've already incrementally made you know an improvement
in the product and now it has a potential to live but fundamentally i couldn't agree more with rick's um assertion that if you ask customers they will tell you it's so often we we are running around and you know we don't know why this is doesn't work we don't Know why this doesn't work but you started your process with asking customers you talked about this at the trade show with the cameras and talking to the dentist you know if you engage your audience the earlier on the better i think you're going to be really surprised
at some of the things they tell you yeah and to this day whenever we start working with a company for the first time or a new product for the first time the very First thing i ask them is i want to speak to some of your customers do you have a database some some people are just 100 on amazon they might not you know have a database but as many many companies do and the very first thing i'll do is is basically my team will call up set up uh where we talk to 10 to
15 people we'll bring them to a house and i'll sit down and interview these people and really it tells me a lot of The things i need to know about the product and again you meant what people like what they don't like and i really pay attention to in in this case you know negative reviews on amazon but the things people don't like and how can we overcome those objections or the things that the reasons why they might not buy the product yeah it's so often a surprise in what is really motivating And pushing these
customers to make decisions i remember a quick story and because of rick's extraordinary experience we're probably gonna end up doing a back back-to-back episode or a subsequent episode to talk about gopro and oxiclean but just a quick little tiny story from my background one time we launched a product is actually provided by a manufacturer and it had huge apparent value i mean it was it was just really Big and thick and you know luxurious and it seemed very clear that this had high high apparent value and my at the time you know i was still
learning and you know my weak mind says you know what i want to sell a ton of this so let's really lower the price and let's let's get at a low price so we had this really huge big beautiful high apparent value item at a very very low price and it would not sell And after a month or two and by the way with considerable focus and marketing energy and you know all the direct marketing and things that we did to try to support it it still would not sell and so finally we just put
it up to you know kind of uh not just a regular price but probably a regular price plus 30 or 40 percent because we were p we were mad at the product as if it was responsible somehow And believe it or not and of course rick already knows uh or he can infer the end of the story the sales blew up the product started selling and it reminded me of that story because of what you said not only did you retool the episode you changed the price from 59 to 79 and i think most marketeers
would have said let's change it from 59 to 29 and see if that helps and that is not always what the customer needs to see and that's not What makes them happy yeah so that's a that's a great story and and again it further endorses one of the things whenever i bring a product to market i always and again this comes from research talking to people whatever but i always try to launch it at the highest reasonable price because it's very easy to come down but it's hard to go go back up and then You're
testing really what the marketplace would be willing to pay for the product and there's again another element of human psychology here where there's a certain price point where people think well it must be cheap are not a good product if it's a certain price but by putting it up at a more of a luxury price point they feel better about buying the product and it doesn't work you know that i'm not saying this works across the board go and raise your Prices on all your products but it's something you should when you're launching a new
product absolutely test different price points including the higher ones well and the other thing it helps you do is it helps you pay for marketing and it helps you pay for high customer service that's the more the more you true right and because you become embittered when a customer is like you know hey i have a problem with this you're like hey man You paid such a low price why are you bothering me for right but if they pay a fair reasonable price then you should be able to offer that support you should be able
to support the marketing so yeah that is pretty cool that's a hugely important point almost every product we talk about is in order for them to be a success they had to be at a high enough price point so there were enough margin dollars to Pay for the advertising to provide the great customer service um all the things that you need to do and you know you look at companies that are very successful and i'll just pull one out of there starbucks you know underneath of everything else there's huge margins when they sell you an
expresso and with milk in it and um that Huge margin is what facilitates them being able to be a global brand and you know i that's one of the very first things when i'm looking at a product we're kind of doing a financial analysis and the numbers have to work because sometimes you might have the best product in the world um but there isn't enough margin dollars between your cost of manufacturing and what you can sell it for that you know you could that's going to enable you to use to have Advertising dollars and marketing
dollars and customer service dollars and we can eliminate a lot of products that way and so every once in a while you find the right product with the right margins and and usually that that the consumer likes or a mass consumer will like and those are the ones you can usually turn into big big businesses i couldn't have said it better myself rick we're against the clock so i'm gonna i want to have you Back and and get part two of this extraordinary journey um i love it i know awesomers out there love it will
you join me again uh and and do a part two with me yeah i'd love to we still got a lot of great things to talk about we're going to get into the book we're going to go and all the links um and awesomers you'll be able to go into the show notes and get the details we've already covered so far there's so much here this is really exciting stuff and i Thank you again for your time today rick it is a really a great pleasure to kind of recount these historic moments in in marketing
and branding with you great thanks thanks steve you've been really easy to talk to and i really appreciate being able to share experience uh experience and knowledge with your listeners of course it's our pleasure awesomers we'll be right back after this hey amazon marketplace professionals This is parsimony erp and we get one question over and over can you please tell me exactly what parsimony does well we'll try but this is only a 30 second spot so we're gonna have to hurry connect to your seller central account and pull all the new orders enter the orders
with all customer data enter all of the amazon fees and charges store them at the item level generate profit and loss reports at the sku level automatically generate income statements Handle multiple companies handle multiple brands handle multiple currencies facilitate budgets and forecasts store all customer interactions in a sophisticated crm system manage your supply chain project and task management maintain an auto log hey you get it that's proximity p-a-r-s-i-m-o-n-y dot com proximity.com we've got that well i tell you what uh we have Delivered yet again i think something very special and rick has uh what a
great sport to to come on for a second time so this is just part one by the way of our two-part series with rick cesari i i know i mispronounced his name about every two seconds so my apologies to rick but his experience and his knowledge of just his sense of humor and his you know just kind of a fun guy to be around really really amazing fella and we're Sure glad he joined us today was just the first half of that two-part series so don't forget to join us tomorrow where we go into the
next bit as well and you know today we covered again juice band sonicare and george foreman grill but tomorrow we're going to dive deep into the other two really cool brands that you've probably heard of which are gopro and oxiclean all of these names are such amazing brands and your chance to kind of talk to one of The the key architects and engineers of these billion dollar brands is something that i think is quite special and i feel privileged to just be on the the other line with him and i was lucky enough to have
him come to the catalyst 88 mastermind group recently and talk to the team there in seattle at length and it was just a really great experience so anyway this has been a great episode i can't wait to have you join us tomorrow As well don't forget this is episode number 55 of the awesomers.com podcast series and all you have to do is go to awesomers.com 55 to get all the show notes details and bonus links and things like that well we've done it again everybody we have another episode of the awesomers podcast ready for the
world thank you for joining us and we hope that you've enjoyed our program today now is a good Time to take a moment to subscribe like and share this podcast heck you can even leave a review if you wanted awesomers around you will appreciate your help it's only with your participation in sharing that we'll be able to achieve our goals our success is literally in your hands thank you again for joining us we are at your service find out more about me steve simonson our guest team and all the other oscars involved at awesomers.com thank
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