Infomercial Sales Tactics

This past weekend, I settled into one of my periodic bouts of melancholy and ennui and did what I suspect quite a few people do when they find themselves in the doldrums - deposited myself on the couch and watched mind-numbing junk on television for a couple of hours until disgust and self-loathing prompted me to find something else to do with my time (i.e., housework). In particular, I watched a series of infomercials for products I am wholly uninterested in buying and have a difficult time understanding why anyone would - while that kind of thing is candy to my inner cynic, it is also interesting to study the sales patter to understand how hammy sales tactics are intended to work.

The old-school hard selling tactics are contrived and obvious, following a four-step process:

1. Tell the mark that they have a problem
2. Show the mark how your product solves this alleged problem
3. Convince the mark that your product is cheap and easy to obtain
4. Usher the mark to the register 

In a commercial or infomercial, this sequence is repeated multiple times.   One of the infomercials I watched managed to do this seventeen times in thirty minutes - which is impressive, but hardly the theoretical maximum: I've seen thirty-second spots that run the process twice, so in theory a half-hour infomercial could repeat the sequence 120 times.

My sense is that once is likely enough - or more aptly, 0.25 times is likely enough for most prospects, because they can likely determine whether they are interested at the end of the first step: do you have trouble getting grass stains out of your umbrella?  Do you spend hour after tedious hour peeling hard-boiled eggs the old fashioned way?  Do you have trouble figuring out how to use a blanket?   If the answer is "no," everything else that follows isn't worth your time or attention.

As an aside, I have the sense that this is where the specious claims about the dwindling attention span of the American public comes from - the reason we tune out after seven seconds is we have already decided that it's not worth paying attention to the rest.  It's not a matter of diminishing capacity to pay attention, but improving abilities to decide whether it's worthwhile to pay attention to filter out the clutter in our environments.   But that's a different rant entirely.

What I was most stricken by is that even softer and more sophisticated sales tactics also fail at the first hurdle: they begin by assuming that the prospect has a given problem  and if they do not, then they stop paying attention: they ignore the sales patter, toss the direct mail piece in the trash unopened, or simply do not give attention to anything online that seems to have the appearance of being an advertisement.

This leads directly to the conclusion that advertising needs to be better targeted in order to be effective.   But even that is assumptive - in that it presumes that anyone at all would be interested in the product that is being sold ... that somewhere out there, there are a sufficient number of people who are mortified by the grass stains on their umbrellas, struggling to peel a crate hard-boiled eggs, and can't figure out how a blanket works.

It likely doesn't help my argument that some of them are entirely right about that, as products that solve these ridiculous problems sell by the millions and make their inventors very wealthy indeed.   But I would posit that these are the exceptional cases rather than the typical and that, these exceptions aside, the problem of selling in general is less to do with the tactics than the presumption of the needs of the prospect.