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

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. ...