It’s not too often that you hear of a product selling on television with a price point about $1,500, let alone through a short-form campaign. So you can imagine the excitement of The Warren Group Ltd. (formerly First Madison Communications Ltd.), an Austin, Texas-based direct marketing company, when they aired a spot to sell Southern Therapy’s Scooter Nation motorized scooters, which sell for between $2,300 and $4,600, and actually made some direct sales.
Initial Success
The short-form campaign, titled “Keeping Up with the Jones’,” won First Madison the 1999 Electronic Retailing Association Award for the “Best Short-Form Production Under $30,000.” Originally airing as a lead generating spot, the success of the spot brought up the possibility of producing a half-hour show for Scooter Nation. But The Warren Group first decided to tweak the lead generating spot into a direct sell spot and released it nationally on cable with a modest budget to generate information for the half-hour show. “We just threw the spot out there to get data and demographics, but we didn’t expect any sales,” says Jim Warren, CEO of The Warren Group.
To everyone’s surprise the first day the direct sell spot aired they sold two units—a $4,600 unit and a unit for under $3,000—and as they continued to sell a few units a day they decided to take the next step and make a long-form 30-minute infomercial that is scheduled to break on national cable and regional broadcast media on Feb. 15, 2000. The half-hour show is expected to sell the scooters directly as well as to still serve as a lead generator for the product, Warren says, “For me what was so exciting was that I’ve never heard of a product selling on TV for more than a $1,500 single purchase price.”
The new, direct sell spot began a two week national test on Nov. 15, and has already exceeded its goals—which were to set up in-home demonstrations, send out informational videos and collect data for the half-hour infomercial—in the first four days of the test. “Our original goal was to get in 10 percent of the media, which would have been to sell one unit and generate ‘X’ number of leads,” says Warren. “We’ve exceeded all of our goals because we would have been happy just breaking the milestone of selling one unit.”
A bright future ahead
Production of the long-form show began Nov. 15, the same date they sold the first unit. Warren says the infomercial has a decent budget—a little more than $250,000—and is planned to be shot on location in Hawaii. The Warren Group is handling the creative/production and media planning for both the long- and short-form campaigns. No other media is currently planned to accompany the DRTV campaign except for Southern Therapy’s website for Scooter Nation (http://www.scooternation.com). The product is also available in 3,000 retail outlets under a different name—where it is offered without financing unlike it is when bought directly.
Warren says the target audience is people 55 and older who are physically limited or challenged, but people have been purchasing the scooters for themselves and for their loved ones as well. He also says the infomercial is using an approach that asks, “What is the happiness of your parent worth to you?”
The goals of the long-form campaign are to drive direct sales and to offer multi-platform financing of the scooters, says Warren. “If we are able to sell a couple hundred units a month that would be phenomenal. I expect to exceed that goal, but [Scooter Nation] would be happy with half of that,” he says.
The short-form campaign is expected to continue running until the infomercial launches depending on how the tests go. “What we’re trying to do is to generate a direct sale and get data instead of just generating leads,” says Warren. “Until now people have been afraid to ask for the purchase of a product anywhere above $1,000, and in my opinion we’re seeing that the market is now willing to pay it.”
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