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

Chapter 8. The Biggest Knockout in History

George Foreman exuded an everyman quality. He somehow came across as an uncommon man with the common touch. Our creative staff was able to couple the engaging personality of this champion boxer with a clunky taco maker to capture the fancy of the public in a way that no one could have ever imagined. The proper message and a charming on-air posture delivered phenomenal profits for Foreman and Salton—plus one of the world's most recognized brands. The challenges were many, however, including how to endear this huge man—6 feet 3 inches and more than 250 pounds—to a mostly female audience. A major piece of the solution was to expose and maximize his charismatic smile, big heart, and established credibility, and reposition a curious, tilted taco machine.

How a Champion Boxer and a Failed Taco Maker Created Sizzling Success

In the mid-1990s, Salton Inc. experimented with several innovative kitchen appliances. Because of our long-standing, positive relationship with Salton, which began and prospered during our Juiceman years, we worked together often. Salton had seen time and again how targeted, creative campaigns stimulated big spikes in retail sales for household products—the kind of products Salton specializes in. The company's CEO, Leon Dreimann, first brought us a bagel maker. We did a test, but in the end we determined the bagel maker had too fine a profit margin for it to work as an infomercial product. The price point was high and consumers ...