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

Chapter 10. The Customer Is No Dummy

All these years of marketing have led us to one basic conclusion that reigns as a rule over all our creative decisions at Cesari Direct. The key component in today's successful direct response campaign is not the product or service, at all. It is, in fact, the consumer. Think about the explosion of "reality" TV in the past decade. What is the common thread in reality TV programs? The participants are like us, complete with the flaws, imperfections, frailties, and follies of the common folk. When Carrie Underwood makes it from obscurity to stand on American Idol, belting her way to a million-dollar record deal and fame, millions of young girls are in front of their TVs saying, "That could be me." There is something very honest, raw, and compelling about viewing what we perceive to be "real." We feel that "reality" represents us. We like to watch "TV about me." Understanding this is simple, but one of the hardest concepts to build into what we in the business call a creative.

One of our media clients has a very successful show for a product called P90X. You've probably seen it. The creative is a compilation of consumer home videos touting the toughness of the exercise plan. Cesari Direct did not make the show, but we recognized the brilliance behind it was that it went against the grain of the exercise culture. That is, everybody else was making shows about how fun or easy their programs were; these guys flew in the face of that, bragging, "This ...