Buy Now: Creative Marketing that Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product

Chapter 4. Juicing for Dollars

You never know exactly what about a situation, a product, or a project is going to be the "one thing" that answers the nagging question or solves the outstanding riddle. It could be anything, from a comment overheard at a dinner party to something you find in the research. The "one thing" that suddenly makes all the other aspects of an issue fall into place and become manageable could be absolutely anything.

That's why I've taken the approach of sharing the evolution of my most important projects as they developed. I could easily just say, "I did this and this, and—voila!—it all worked." But that isn't the way real insights and realizations happen. No one ever developed his or her own dish by only following the recipe. It takes owning the ideas and applying them to your own situation to stimulate true learning.

As I wandered the expanse of the Seattle Coliseum's annual kitchen show in 1988, I noted a particularly popular pitchman doing a demonstration. I could sense how his charisma was affecting the dozen or so people around him—they were mesmerized. That man was Jay Kordich.

While Kordich was indeed captivating, his consummate skill as a salesman wasn't the only thing that grabbed my attention. He also was teaching—teaching people the nutritional benefits of drinking fresh juices. I'd been "into" health and nutrition myself for quite a while and I was always on the lookout for easier ways to make truly nutritional foods. In the mid-1980s, the health ...