I was watching several old infomercials over the weekend, and I came across the George Foreman grilling machine infomercial that aired back in 1996. After I watched the entire video, I felt a desire to buy one of his grills. Using my marketing eye, I explain why that happened, and the marketing lesson you can learn from it.
Over the weekend, I decided to go back in time and watch some old, short infomercials for fun.
I especially revisited the ones I remembered watching in the past. Some of them include:
Billy Mays on Oxiclean
Vince Shlomi on Shamwow
The press2paste commercial
But the most interesting one I came across was the 1996 George Foreman's Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine Infomercial. And the product does exactly what it sounds like, cooks food while draining their fat.
That particular infomercial was one of the longer ones, about 30 minutes.
I’ll be honest. After watching it, it made me want to buy one. There were several things that made it so, and I’m going to talk about some of them here.
But before I do, I’m going to share with you a quote from one of the great copywriters, Eugene Schwartz. And yes, I’ve been talking about him quite a bit lately, mainly because I’ve been studying his ways of copywriting for the past week.
Anyways, I was listening to one of his seminars and he said,
“Think about what your product "does", not "is," and demonstrate it.”
That’s exactly what happened in the infomercial.
George Foreman himself cooked food using the grilling machine in front of a live audience. He showed how fast the machine cooked the food, and all the fat that gets drained. Not only that, he took it a step further and let some of the audience members try the product out for themselves. And if that didn’t push you over the edge, he even brought in health experts to give their testimony.
Now you might be thinking, “Well, it’s easy to demonstrate a product on TV. How can we do it through email?”
Patience, young padawan. I’m getting there.
Going back to Schwartz’s seminar, he teaches how you can do that in a sales letter, but it’ll work with email too. Without giving too much of his teachings away, he basically said to share actionable information your potential customer can do immediately, as in right after they finish reading your email.
It’s as if they’re using your product as they’re reading your email or sales letter. And if they see results, well then that can only be good for you and your wallet.
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