You may not know him by name, but chances are if you have ever had a sleepless night and turned on the television, Ron Popeil has been there to keep you company.
He is the king of the late night infomercial, and the man who made famous such catch phrases as “But wait, there’s more!” and “It slices! It dices!”
But, Popeil is also more than that. Over the past forty years, Popeil has created for himself an empire.
By inventing and selling over $2 billion worth of products, Popeil has turned his company, Ronco Teleproducts, into a global leader in direct response marketing.
There are some who say that what Popeil has been able to accomplish in his career is nothing short of magic. To create an empire out of seemingly nondescript kitchen wares is without a doubt an impressive feat.
It was not, however, magic. The secrets behind Popeil’s success are as simple to follow as the instructions on his Veg-O-Matic.
“The first time I went there the proverbial light bulb went on in my head. I saw all these people selling products, making sales, pocketing money, and my mind went racing. I can do what they’re doing, I thought, but I think I can do it better than they can.
I talked, I yelled, I hawked, and it worked! I was stuffing money into my pockets, more money than I had ever seen in my life.
Through selling I could escape from poverty and the miserable existence I had with my grandparents. I didn’t have to be poor the rest of my life.
Developing and marketing a product are like left and right feet. They both have to work for the product to succeed.
If you have that passion, it is conveyed through marketing. People see it. I get up before them and show them something new and wonderful. When I create something, I believe in it, and I am very passionate about it.
They throw a lot of stuff against the wall and hope something sticks. The failure rate is dependent solely on what you’re throwing up against the wall.
I’m willing to make a serious investment in an idea and take two to two and one-half years of my life to create it, to get behind it and understand it and take it to the marketplace.
First, I see what is needed in the marketplace. The next thing is I ask what’s out there. What you don’t want to do is come up with a product and then find out that someone is successfully marketing a good product and can take business away.
If you create a product that’s needed in the marketplace, people are going to buy it. It’s so easy for me to sell my products because the market exists.
I have an innate talent. I used to think it was luck, but after one success after another, I realized that I know what is needed in the marketplace. Most people don’t understand the market. Most people have no clue. All they know is ‘I got an idea, and I need a patent.’
Before I went on TV with the Chop-O-Matic, I spent several weeks selling the product at Woolworth’s. After several days of demonstrating the product, I learned what features consumers were particularly interested in.
If I’ve been chopping away for 10 hours a day, giving the same pitch over and over again refining it a little bit each time, why would I ever need a script?
You hear about all these people making all this money on paper. And everybody wants to get rich quickly, but they don’t want to work for it. They want to sit back and leverage everything they’ve got to make the big score. People say, ‘Ron, you’re so lucky.’ Yeah, the harder I work, the luckier I am.“
