A few months after creating a freezable lunch bag, Melissa Kieling, co-founder of PackIt, got a meeting with Target. The buyers told her that the product's uniqueness wasn't obvious, and they turned her down. "When they passed, we knew we had to do something out of the box," Kieling says.
So she and her co-founder, Jeannette Michels, turned to the land of the ThighMaster. They hired Euro RSCG (now Havas Worldwide) to create a two-minute infomercial demonstrating their product's features. PackIt's infomercial ran on Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, among others, and within a year, its sales went from $150,000 to $6 million. PackIt, which is based in Westlake Village, California, made the 2015 Inc. 5000 with $15.5 million in 2014 revenue.
While infomercials might seem like relics and can be expensive (from $40,000 to more than $1 million to make and another $150,000 and up for airtime), they can also be a marketing juggernaut. These founders tell you how it's done.
1. Make sure your product is "infomercial worthy."
"Infomercials can be a huge capital investment, and most products don't work with the format," says Eric Nelson, co-founder and president of New Berlin, Wisconsin-based Norman Direct, the company behind Shower Wow, Mr. Lid, and the Sift and Toss. All of the winners, he says, share three traits: "They're unique, they could appeal to a mass market, and they solve a common problem." Impulse-buy products selling for less than $20 that can easily pivot to retail shelves are a good fit for short-form commercials. Larger-ticket, high-margin items such as premium cosmetics and exercise equipment are a better fit for longer-form ads, like the half-hour "talk show" format. Products aimed at a niche market don't tend to fare well.