Buy Now: Creative Marketing that Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product by Rick Cesari & Ron Lynch

Author:Rick Cesari & Ron Lynch [Cesari, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-01-18T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

OxiClean®

“Powered by the Air You Breathe, Activated by the Water You Drink”

By the mid to late 90s, of course, my company was regularly handling more than a dozen different direct response television product launches a year. I talk here about the most recognizable, because these are the projects people ask me about the most.

It was early in 1997 when I first met Joel Appel. It was his father, Max Appel, who had developed the all-natural cleaning products their company manufactured and distributed. Although Max wasn’t a chemist or a product researcher, he had spent the early part of the 1980s experimenting with natural cleaning products. He had done so out of a genuine concern for people’s health and the environment. He was intentionally working toward a goal of finding equally effective ways to clean house with nontoxic products.

Appel and his wife, Elaine, maintained their full-time jobs while building their small business and caring for their four growing children. In his garage in Littleton, Colorado, he experimented with all kinds of natural ingredients. His search eventually led him to explore a range of essential oils. He started looking at these oils because a few plant-based oils were already common ingredients in certain household cleaning products. Think about Lemon Pledge.

What he discovered in initial tests was that orange oil offered some interesting possibilities. Orange oil is a slightly sticky, oily substance, similar in consistency to that of turpentine. It was well known to have some rather effective cleaning properties, while still being all natural and nontoxic.

After much trial and error and, according to one interview, only minimal damage to a few of his kitchen cabinet doors, Appel devised a cleaning product that worked yet was entirely free of harsh solvents or toxic petrochemicals. The first thing he created was a wood cleaner and polish, which ended up containing the oil of 78 Valencia oranges per bottle. So aside from being all natural and nontoxic, the wood cleaner also had a refreshing orange scent that reinvigorated whatever area of the house had just been cleaned.

Then, starting in 1986, Appel sold the wood cleaner to friends and acquaintances. He and his wife were still working full-time, until they felt certain the company would succeed. Initially, Max was in charge of mixing and making the product, and was dubbed the “sales specialist”; Elaine managed all other operations—packaging, orders, and shipping. They finally recognized that their business would “make it” when Elaine had to leave her regular job one afternoon—“claiming a family emergency,” she says—in order to fill customer orders waiting at home.

The business grew by baby steps. Before long, they were selling a variety of items, such as carpet sweepers and household cleansers, at home shows and state fairs across the United States and Canada. This is the same kind of approach we took with our coast-to-coast Juiceman seminars.

The Appels’ one-on-one interactions with customers proved to be just as invaluable to them as our experience during the Juiceman seminars. Loyal customers around the country

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