What Makes Great Infomercial Products?

Not all products can be infomercial products. Each product is unique and needs to be sold in the channel that it is best suited to. Lower margin or lower priced items are typically sold in grocery or discount stores. High end luxury items are sold at fancy department and specialty stores because they need to be explained and sold by a person.

Using an infomercial to sell a product is a form of direct selling. In most cases direct to the consumer. For a product to sell through an infomercial it must be many things. These include:

1. Priced at more than $20 in most cases
   
2. Solve a specific, definable problem or fill a need or want
   
3. Be easily demonstrateable
   
4. Offer an outstanding mark up of 8 X 10 times product cost
   

Most of us watch infomercials. If you don't, you should. You can learn many things from successful infomercial campaigns. The reason is that if an infomercial has been running for any length of time, it works. One of the best things about selling direct is that every variable in the sales process can be measured and tested. This is unique to direct selling.

If you are selling at retail it is often difficult to determine what is and what is not working. I have sold products that didn't move at all from the retail shelf. Was it the price? The packaging? The awareness of the product? There was no way to tell initially.

At retail the price will always get dropped if an item is not moving. The problem turned out to be a combination of price, messaging on the packaging and awareness of the product. Unfortunately this took two years to figure out and we lost some big retail chains in the process.

Hint: Don't sell to Walmart until you know your product will move off the shelf. If your product does not sell they will make you pay.

When selling an infomercial product you can test all of the variables separately or in combination. It is far easier to find out if you have a winner or loser that cannot be fixed when you are selling direct. That is the main reason many new products are now launched direct to the consumer before they get sold into stores. Once a winning campaign is developed with an infomercial, retail success is that much easier.

The Snuggie is a great example. Every retailer in the US was selling the product after it tested successfully on TV.

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