Issue #3 —Wednesday, April 25, 2018
SECRETS OF AD PLACEMENT:
Go Where Your Competitors Go
Go Where Your Competitors Go
Posted by Denny Hatch
On
a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, tall and lanky outdoorsman John Peterman
bought himself an ankle-length horseman’s coat—standard gear in the West but
unusual and distinctive back East. He wrote in his first catalog:
“People want things that
are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance about them.
“I had this proven all
over again when people actually stopped me in the street (in New York, in
Tokyo, in London) to ask me where I got the coat I was wearing.
“So many people tried to
buy my coat off my back that I’ve started a small company to make them
available. It seems like everybody
(well, not everybody) has always wanted a classic horseman’s duster but
never knew exactly where to get one.
“I ran a little ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and in a few months sold this wonderful
coat in cities all over the country and to celebrities and to a mysterious
gentleman in Japan who ordered two thousand of them.”
That
was 1987. Peterman sold 2,500 dusters and added three more items to his line. That
year, revenues climbed to $560,000 and the company broke even. The following
year, Peterman and copywriter Donald Staley launched the first catalog.
The
J. Peterman Company was off and running.
Lillian
Katz’s Story
In
1951, working from her kitchen table in a tiny apartment, newly married Lillian
Katz ran this little $495 black-and-white ad in the mail order section of Seventeen Magazine.
She
generated 6,400 orders and $32,000 in sales. Katz—a 5-foot-1-inch
dynamo—changed her name to Lillian Vernon and spent the next 50 years building
a catalog business with annual sales of $250 million.
Takeaways
to Consider
•
A fledgling Shark Tank inventor might
want to advertise where nobody else advertises—virgin territory! Trust me. These
venues have been tested a gazillion times and never generated response.
•
Lillian Katz went into the mail order
section of Seventeen, brimming
with little ads like hers. She came up with a USP (Unique Selling Proposition),
low price and involvement that set her apart from all others. Bingo!
•
John Peterman went where guys go: The New
York Times and The Wall Street Journal,
loaded with ads for bespoke men’s wear, cigars and man cave gadgetry.
• "Going where your competitors go" makes sense for TV and online as well as print.
• "Fish where the fish are."
—MacRae Ross
• "Fish where the fish are."
—MacRae Ross
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Word count: 406
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Invitation to Marketers and Direct Marketers: Guest blog posts are welcome. If you have a marketing story to tell, case history, concept to propose or a memoir, give a shout. I’ll get right back to you. (Kindly stay within the limit of 500 words.) I am: dennyhatch@yahoo.com.
215-644-9526 (rings on my desk).
You Are Invited to Join the Discussion!
When you go duck hunting, you go where the ducks are. Duh!
ReplyDeleteThe trick here seems to me to be one of translating this principle from paper and ink into today's medium. Show me how and where to be able to do this and you've got a friend for life...
ReplyDeleteThank you for taking the time to write.
ReplyDeleteWhat triggered this post was watching episodes of Shark Tank starring fledgling entrepreneurs who put up thousands of dollars to create a product or service. Suddenly they are desperate for more cash. On Shark Tank, they go public—looking for investors to pony up six and seven figures in return for a percentage of the business.
Alas, they are also telling millions of viewers around the world about their business models, the nitty-gritty of costs, false starts and marketing results. In my opinion, Shark Tank is a giant trough of proprietary information to be scarfed up by piggish thieves throughout Asia and the Far East. It gives me the creeps.
This issue of the blog is the story of two fledgling entrepreneurs who started with tiny ads and built huge businesses. Neither Peterman nor Vernon was a seasoned marketer. They came up with products they believed in and loved, did exhaustive arithmetic, went where the logical customers were and were rewarded. They started small and they alone knew their results. They grew their businesses slowly and with great care. To me, this is thrilling.
Maybe the concept of “going where your competitors go” is simplistic.
In 60 years of marketing, I have seen and heard of myriad examples where well intentioned but inexperienced marketers made elementary mistakes and ran out of money. Ouch.
Thanks again for writing. —DH