Suckers!
The fact: more than a million people bought rocks as pets. The lesson: you can sell anything to anybody.
He was like any of us, just somebody with a dream-and a rock. It
was April 1975 when Gary Dahl, a California ad man, started
grousing about the chores of taking care of a pet. Suddenly, Dahl
was spinning a yarn to his friends about his pet rock-which had a
great personality, and was easy and inexpensive to care for. And so
simple to train: With just a little help, pet rocks roll over and
play dead very well.
Dahl, then 37, recognized a potential gag gift and spent several
months writing the Pet Rock Training Manual. (Sample
instructions on house-training: "Place it on some old
newspapers. The rock...will require no further instruction.")
He included a rock with each book and charged $3.95 for the set.
(In 1999's dollars, that would be $11.25.)
To even his own amazement, Dahl sold 1.5 million.
P.T. Barnum is reported to have said, "There's a sucker
born every minute." You have to wonder what ol' Barnum
would have made of a late-20th-century America that's gone mad
for everything from pet rocks to Pop Rocks, from Cabbage Patch Kids
to Beanie Babies. But if the consumer receives pleasure from a
product, and if the product does what it's purported to, who is
anybody to call anybody else a sucker?
In fact, cigarettes may be the only true sucker product: If you use
them correctly, they're virtually guaranteed to kill you in a
slow, painful way. Pork rinds have to be a close second. (Think
about it. Pieces of fried fat in a bag?)
So if you want to create a sucker for your product, remember,
it's all in the eye of the beholder-or the wallet of the
consumer. Regardless, the products featured in this story are far
from obvious, slam-dunk sells. But these entrepreneurs made them
their business anyway, and in a big way.
Geoff Williams has never forgotten a touching father-and-son
moment in the late 1970s when his dad drew his young boy aside and
said, "Son, this is my pet rock." "I'd like to
say I thought he was crazy," Williams admits, "but I
suddenly wanted one, too."
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 
|
What makes a good client gift?
What guidelines do you follow when buying gifts for your clients? Have you ever received an unusual or inappropriate gift?
|