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

Chapter 6. Expanding the Brand: The Breadman®

One of the biggest advantages of building our company through seminars the way we did with the Juiceman was the extensive customer database we accumulated over time. Because we grew pretty much in a grassroots fashion, we attracted consumers who were passionate about health and nutrition; people who were ideologically aligned with our company's goals. After all, it takes a lot to motivate a potential customer to get up off the couch to attend a seminar (even if it's free) just to find out more about juicing.

The people in our database ended up being a gold mine of information and recurring sales. For instance, when our engineering department developed a new juicer blade-basket combo that delivered 20 percent more juice, we sent out a simple postcard (this was before e-mail marketing existed) to our database, and it generated over $500,000 in sales. We also explored ideas for potential new products after the Juiceman through surveys mailed to our database customers.

We found that our customers had a growing interest in eating healthier, and were looking for easier ways to do it. Juicing was an easy way to get more fruits and vegetables in their diets. We decided we could do the same thing for whole grains, with a bread machine. Hence, the Breadman was born.

Few people knew much about bread-making machines, and didn't know how to evaluate which one to buy. It was the Juiceman machine's top-brand-name quality that led customers to feel they ...