Joe Sugarman
Joseph Sugarman a marketing legend, and chairman of JS&A Group, Inc.; BluBlocker Corporation; and DelStar Publishing—all based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was raised in the Chicago area and in 1962, follow- ing three and a half years at the electrical engineering college of the University of Miami, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He spent more than three years in Germany serving with the Army Intelligence Service and later with the CIA. Upon returning home, Joe formed a company to market Austrian ski lifts in the United States. Then in 1971, he formed a company to market the world’s first pocket calculator through direct marketing (all from the basement of his home in Northbrook, Illinois).
This company, JS&A Group, Inc., quickly grew to become America’s largest single source of space-age products, and throughout the 1970s Joe introduced dozens of new innovations and electronic concepts, in- cluding the digital watch, cordless telephones, and computers. In 1973, JS&A Group became the first company in the United States to use the 800 WATS line service to take credit card orders over the telephone—
this was something that direct marketers had never done before. Joe was selected as the Direct Marketing Man of the Year in 1979.
In 1990—five books and numerous marketing seminars later—
Joe decided to focus all his energy on his line of BluBlocker sun- glasses. These he sold in direct mailings, mail order ads, and catalogs, and on television through infomercials, TV spots, and QVC, the home shopping channel. He was one of the early pioneers in this direct marketing segment, having entered the field in 1987, and over 7 mil- lion pairs of BluBlocker sunglasses have since been sold through his infomercials and over 20 million pairs worldwide! In 1991, Joe won the prestigious Maxwell Sackheim award for his creative career con- tributions to direct marketing.
If all that wasn’t enough, Joe is also a professional photographer, graphic designer, pilot, scuba diver, and public speaker. From 2000 to
2005, he was the editor and publisher of the Maui Weekly—one of the fastest-growing newspapers in Hawaii—which he has recently sold to a West Virginia newspaper chain.
To find out more about Joe Sugarman, you can visit this web site:
www.BluBlocker.com
H
ere’s an idea that worked so incredibly well that I’m sur- prised nobody has used it since I did in 1976.I met somebody who was the licensing agent for Pablo Pi- casso. The art of Picasso, who had died in 1973, was so popu- lar that his licensing firm was able to license everything from bedsheets to many household items—all with his images.
I got to know the licensing agent well. And one day he ap- proached me and made a suggestion. Why not put Picasso’s images on six 6″ ×6″tiles? It had never been done before, and besides, it would be an authentic limited edition by Picasso and licensed by the Picasso family estate.
The idea appealed to me but primarily because I thought I’d have a little fun with it. First, I realized that to simply sell a limited quantity of a piece of art on a tile was okay, but I wanted to develop a business from this with ongoing sales.
I also realized that I didn’t have a mailing list of strong prospects to whom I could mail the offer. And I knew that it took years to develop a strong list, anyway. And since the tile was a new art form, it might encounter buyer’s resistance from the public.
I saw the marketing challenge as multifaceted. First I needed to somehow build a mailing list. Second, I had to es- tablish a strong value for an art form that nobody had heard of with an artist who was world famous; and finally I had to do it rather quickly. I didn’t want to wait years to establish a com- pany. So here’s what I did.
I took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journaloffering a limited edition set of six tiles at a very reasonable price—$7 per tile. In addition, I explained that the price and the offer
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were limited since we had only 1,250 sets to sell and that we were not making any money from it. In fact, I showed the cost to make the tiles and the cost of the ad in the Journal, in- dicating that we were not making a penny from it. I also ex- plained that we would surely be oversold and that we would use a “random selection process” to select the future owners of the tiles. In short, we would let our computer randomly generate who our customers would be. The ones who were not selected we would advise that the series wouldn’t be available to them.
The ad ran and it was a huge success. Not only did we sell all 1,250 tile sets, but we received a total of 8,000 requests, most of which we had to turn down.
Presto! Overnight, we had a large, hot mailing list—a list that consisted of customers who were rejected and denied the opportunity of buying from me. In addition, we took the focus away from the unusual nature of the art form. It didn’t matter if it was a tile or a canvas, as it was the hot nature of the limited availability of a hot collectible that was more important. And finally, we had 8,000 people who would love to buy our next offering whom we could reach by mail (thus avoiding the high cost of advertising in the Wall Street Journal) and of course we could earn a nice profit. And that is exactly what we did, fol- lowing up with a series of Picasso tiles.
Our first mailing generated a 65.8 percent response rate—
one of the highest in my career and one of the biggest re- sponses I’ve ever heard of by anybody else. Typically if you received a 2 percent response that was considered good.
The subsequent promotions did very well, and with a strong base of 8,000 names we were able to build a nice busi- ness for the next few years.
Deny somebody something, create a mailing list of rejected customers, offer them something in the future, and sit back and count the profits. Not a bad way to generate a nice little business, let alone a nice income.
Mad Scientists Using The Great Formula