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

Chapter 11. Channel Explosion: The Next Paradigm Shift

At Cesari Direct, part of our operating philosophy has always been to sell products we felt good about selling. Whether we were selling food processors, juicers, or storage systems, we always wanted to sell things we would sell to our family members, with our heads held high. Our success came from picking low-hanging fruit. After all, every home should have a Juiceman, a George Forman Grill, and OxiClean. When there were only 40 television channels that made perfect sense. The reason being, the viewing audience were all in a very small corral. We just assumed it was big. We also believed that for an item to be successful in DR it had to be marketable to about 80 percent of America. What we eventually learned is that the explosion of cable to 400 or more stations reshaped the ability to precisely target smaller demographics.

A very interesting thing happened around 1998 or 1999: More and more unique channels started filling the cable space, and show performance declined across the board. Media companies were closing faster than Yugo dealerships. There still were hit shows, but the astronomically successful airings, where you'd spend $1,000 for a half hour and sell $7,000 worth of goods, were drying up. Companies blamed show producers, producers blamed media agencies, media agencies blamed stations for gouging prices. And I considered I might just sell the shop and go back to the beach.

I muddled on, though, and the industry struggled ...