Episode 4: The OxiClean Story

Our host and founder of Harvest Growth, Jon LaClare, recounts the behind-the-scenes story of OxiClean.  Hundreds of outside marketers and agencies worked on pieces of the OxiClean brand over the past 20+ years, but Jon has a unique perspective FROM THE INSIDE.  
Jon was a Brand Manager for Orange Glo International (the makers of OxiClean) for several years until the company was sold to Church & Dwight in 2006 for $325MM.  Jon shares some never-before-heard stories of how OxiClean was able to rise from a garage to over $300MM in annual sales in less than 10 years.

Transcript

Jon:
Welcome to another episode of the Harvest Growth podcast focused on helping consumer product companies, inventors and entrepreneurs harvest the growth potential of their product businesses by teaching cutting edge marketing strategies and interviewing successful marketers as well as product marketing experts that share their stories to inspire you to achieve hyper- growth for your own business. I'm your host, Jon LaClare, founder and CEO of Harvest Growth and I believe that if you want to make your product the next household name, you just need to follow the right plan and that even the best products struggle to succeed when they step away from proven strategies that work and I believe that you can grow profitably, which means you don't need to be a fortune 500 company or have access to venture capital in order to grow your business. If you'd like to learn more about what we call the perfect launch process for marketing products, check out HarvestGrowth.com and if you still have questions on how you can implement this process for your business, you'll see a link on our homepage to set up a free consultation with one of our product launch specialists.

Jon:
Welcome back to the Harvest Growth podcast. This is Jon LaClare founder of Harvest Growth and I'm here to today to share a story that I've been asked many times from our clients over the years is the behind the scenes story of the Oxi Clean success. So Oxi Clean was sold the Church and Dwight for $325 million back in 2006 at the time I was working for the company as a brand manager, what we used to call a strategic business unit leader, running the new product launches for Oxi Clean , running the Kaboom business back at the time as well. And when they were sold off, it's when I moved on and started Harvest Growth. And as they say, the rest is history from my perspective. But I want to share what happened before then, what led to that great success from a great family and a great company and a great product. So let me give you kind of a peek behind the tent and see what works for them and how it might be able to help you if you're an inventor, an entrepreneur or product marketer looking to grow your business; I think there's a lot of things you can learn from the Oxi Clean story. So first of all, I want to share a little bit more of my story, what brought me into Oxi Clean or the company as it was known back then of Orange Glow. 

So I started my marketing career at Kraft Foods. At the time I left, I was working on the Nabisco Hundred Calorie Packs, which were essentially a diet food, right, a way to eat cookies. They are still around today and very successful, but a way to eat cookies and crackers in small quantities and controlled portions and really at the time was at the forefront of that idea. Now you see limited calorie snack packs in almost every brand, almost every variety across the country, but at the time we were one of the pioneers of that and had some great success with it. So I was having a lot of fun; I was in no rush to leave the company. But when you work at a company like Kraft foods, you get calls from head hunters , constantly looking to take you into other consumer products companies, oftentimes a little bit smaller than Kraft Foods, but take your experience you've learned there and transit into their company. I was in no rush to leave. I loved the company I was working for. I love the brand. It was a great team I was on. So I was having fun. There was no rush to leave, but my wife was from Colorado. She grew up here, which is where we live now. We've lived here for 15 or 16 years now in Colorado and had a great time. Every time we come out here to visit, the weather's beautiful. 

So at the time I'm like, you know, every time a headhunter would call, I would say I'm not in any rush to leave, but if you find an opportunity in Colorado, let me know. And I just assumed it would take months or years for anything interesting to pop up. Well, as luck would have it, a couple of weeks later, I get a call from one of these headhunters and said, "Hey, I've got an opportunity based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, just south of Denver, a company called Orange Glow". So I had to go check them out online. Didn't even know much about Orange Glow at the time. I looked at the website, it's Oxi Clean, Orange Glow and some other brands back then and it looked to me that it just wasn't a fit. Like, do I really want to work for this small cleaning product company? I'm having so much fun working with cookies and crackers and a big business to Bisco , et cetera. But I said, you know what? I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. This is a company that was founded by a father and two sons Max. The Dad, Joel and David are the two sons that really built up the business and they were very entrepreneurial. I said, don't let me go out and meet with them and see how it feels. I walked through the door, met with all three of them and had a great experience. Um, some excitement for the brand to see exactly what they were doing as they grew this business got really excited. And a month later, basically I was moving my family out to Colorado and working for orange glow again, a new products, helping launch Oxi Clean brands and running the Kaboom business for a few years before that company was sold. A lot of fun. So , um, it goes back to my, my desire and the reason that I chose to work there. 

The first places I've for my entire life have been looking to develop or find the perfect product launch approach. So I actually started my education in marketing at the Chicago booth, Graduate School of business, University of Chicago and very was, you know , as a great school, had a great time, learned a lot. Um, but really what I learned was really a Thiel theoretical model as well as a very expensive model to launch products. Most of the new products courses I took there were about how to launch products at big companies, pharmaceutical companies or even big consumer products companies. But when they'd got billions of dollars behind them , uh, the, the approaches to use it , and again, it was very theoretical as well. So it was good. It was a great start. From there, I went out to work for Kraft foods, who in my opinion was the best at the time to be able to help me to really learn how to run a consumer products business. And I did have, as I mentioned before, had a great experience there. But what really, if I can boil it down, what I learned was can now after years at Kraft foods, I understood how to launch a product successfully if I had at least $2 million in funding behind it, which is great when you're working for big company. I felt like I could take that almost anywhere and help other companies launch products, but could I help inventors could have helped myself to launch a product. I don't think I had that knowledge yet. So that's when I took that step to a smaller company Oxi Clean where they literally founded their company in the late nineties out of their garage Max originally, and eventually reached almost $300 million in sales before we sold off the company. But they started very small. 

They started at zero really, and even stayed fairly small for several years until he grew this. And I'll kind of walk through their stories. I get through this, this , uh , episode today, but that's the much like many of our clients at harvest grew up. They're starting on their own entrepreneurs and ventures or even, you know , companies, but they're not in billions of dollars in revenue yet. So how do you use that bottle of the learnings from Oxi Clean to grow those businesses that I'll walk through their story so you know what or what I learned from my time at Oxi Clean before I get into their story, a were from the three founders. So for Max, the father from him, I really learned how to be a visionary. He's, if you ever meet or had the chance or luck to meet with Max Apple, it kind of reminds me of like what I imagine Albert Einstein to be. It's just, you know, a quirky genius, right? So he's a very, very intelligent man and really a visionary, right? So he was in the early days , kind of the visionary of, of uh , product development, have the ideas, et cetera . And then Joel and David, the sons would come in and help with execution. So Joel, really from him, I learned how to be a passionate entrepreneur. He loved Oxi Clean , he loved what he was doing and he loved the growth trajectory and did everything he could to really drive growth in the company and not resting on his laurels even when they had great success and hit 10 million, 50 million, $100 million in sales, always looking to, hey, what's next? How do we grow this to the next stage? And then finally from David, his brother, I really learned how to translate my big company experience from Kraft foods and my background at Ernst and young as a public accountant before that into running my own business, which I've helped to hopefully convey that to our hundreds of clients who've had over the years as well. David had a big company background, worked for Anderson Consulting, became Accenture, lived overseas for a while and it was great to have his analytic background from, you know, kind of that deep , uh , thinking mindset and deep analytics mindset that he brought in from big companies and how to translate that into, even though we were very calm, very successful at orange school at the time, you know, a relatively smaller company and helped drive success that way. 

So let me return to the story of Oxi Clean. So it originally, it started off with Max Apple , the father and traveling the company selling Oxi Clean selling orange glow and some other products at home shows consumer shows, fairs across the country. Literally, literally traveling the country, hocking these goods for the trunk of his car and he was very successful with it. It was originally orange glow, wood Polish, and again, eventually Oxi Clean. And he built it into a a good six figure success as he grew his sales skills and his abilities to sell directly to people. And I will say, you know , even as we grew the country into hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, we still used these home shows, consumer shows and fairs because they're an amazing way to get learnings in a literal grassroots way to be at , to be out in front of the public. As we launched our tested new products to find out what are the questions, what are their concerns, it helps us to focus our resources on, on the likely successes as a company. 

So even as we grew and even to this day at Harvest Growth, we counsel several of our clients to get out in front of the consumers as much as possible, whether it's meeting with retailers or hopefully into consumer shows, just selling it, you know, even spending a weekend. It's amazing how much you can learn in just a few hours of time and talking directly with consumers, getting their feedback, getting their questions, their concerns, because they will be open with you. They'll be honest and upfront with you as well. So while Max was traveling the country , uh , going to these home shows and trade shows, he ended up befriending a pitch man that had started off his career and had done only this as a career for over 17 years, originally on the Atlantic city boardwalk. And eventually through traveling the country, selling it home shows, consumer shows and fairs, etc . This is, of course, Billy Mays know , may he rest in peace. The, the constant pitch, man, I would argue that best pitch man ever and can never be replaced. And if you know the Oxi clean story, if you know the Oxi Clean brand and you know Billy Mays, so unfortunately he passed away several years ago, but he is one of the biggest reasons that Oxi Clean became a big success. 

And I'll talk about how he interlaced or connected with Oxi Clean as I get further to the story. So one of Max's favorite stories that he would share about Billy Mays is they became friends. They would often pitch products in across the aisle from each other. And when they're slow times, of course you talk and get to know each other. Well one day Max who is a , I would say not the loudest person in the world, he's a the one of the nicest guys. He'd made just a very pleasant personality. And if you knew Billy Mays or have seen his commercials, even, you realize Billy knew how to project his voice. He's known for his yelling, not angry, yelling, but projecting his voice, getting your attention, you know, even on his TV commercials. So Billy had a working microphone but didn't really need it necessarily. Max's microphone broke halfway through this trade show and Billy realized, Hey, this guy needs it more than I do, gave his microphone up to Max. And it really spawned this close friendship on that one simple act of, of serving and sharing that uh, that led to a fantastic connection , uh, for years and years. To come a little bit more of background on Joel Story . So Joel Apple worked for Quaker foods and national sales, and he would travel the country selling Quaker to big retailers. And then oftentimes what he would do is he'd have an appointment on Tuesday to meet with Safeway, let's say it , to talk about Quaker products. And while he's there, he had set appointments for Wednesday to the next data to sell orange glow products, Oxi Clean products, et cetera. They ended up getting into tens of thousands of retailers just while Joel was not even working full time and Oxi Clean Max was working essentially full time. Joel was traveling the country selling in. But it's still, you know, even as they hit seven figures getting into mass retail like this, it wasn't super profitable. Uh, Joel had this passion to really want to grow this business, not just the revenues, but the profits as well, and was looking for ways to do that. And it just wasn't quite hitting the mark yet. So he eventually left Quaker and moved to Denver to work full time with his dad and even cashed in his 401k. And as you hear the story from Joel, which is very inspirational, he , uh , eventually pulled it, pulled a salary of about $40,000 a year for the first couple of years, which is not what , not nothing, but when you're running a multimillion dollar business, it's a sacrifice to make that again, putting all the money he could for a couple of years or several years back into the business and really started to grow at seeing this vision for the long term possibility of longterm success for orange glow and Oxi Clean. I'm from here on out, I'll probably be call it Oxi Clean. That's what everybody knows it as. They don't know the company name of Orange Glow and Oxi Clean of course, as the brand, it's become most famous and it was really the driver of the sale to church and Dwight eventually, so they found out that, you know, retail was was difficult. It was a great product if you've used Oxi Clean. It's one of the reasons it's been so successful is because it works, but no one knew what it was. And frankly, it looked pretty cheap back then. The packaging wasn't the best. He looked homemade almost, right. Um , it just wasn't, it wasn't as polished as it has become today. And so it would sit there on the shelf and they would sell it in , like I said, tens of thousands of retailers, but not many consumers would buy it , relatively speaking. So it was hard to grow that business. 

So they had the idea, let's try this out on the home shopping network. So it , which is now known as HSN, it would give them a chance to demonstrate the product on live TV. And from day one it took off. It was a massive success. The demos were incredible and when people try the product, they loved it because it worked. They got it in their homes so they would buy again and again and again. And word of mouth really started to spread even in these very early days when it's only on shopping network at home shopping network and in a bit of retail as well. And this mind you is well before social media, well before Facebook or any of these other social media platforms existed, we're a mouth was literally by people talking about it. At the office or in elevators, and you'd hear these stories that people talking about these amazing experiences they had with Oxi Clean because it was a miracle product. You've taken care of some stains at other products. Certainly could not at this point. 

They're now reaching eight figures or you know, 10 to $20 million in sales driven by a home shopping network, retail, et cetera. But they realize that there's, there's only so far you can take that there's, when you're on the home shopping network, that's one station and you , you can't air your product on the air 24 hours a day. It's hard to grow the number of airings you get. So it's hard to grow awareness. It's hard to grow sales once you reach saturation on home shopping network. So they were very successful. But again, having this vision or passion for exponential growth, what, what do you do next? So this is where they started to look for or look into TV infomercials. This was their chance now to grow awareness and demand exponentially because now they could control the number of earrings that they're showing for Oxi Clean and other products. And they could air it across dozens of stations at the time. Now it's hundreds of stations related . You can, you can air on a TV, but on these many different stations and you can air a more frequently and you can find out which ones are working, which is kind of the science behind TV, put more dollars behind that, get more airings and really exponentially grow the awareness and demand and really driving into retail as well. So this time they, they remembered Max. 

Remember Billy Mays who had got to know the trade source show circuit? He became the immediate spokesperson for Oxi Clean on HSN as well as in infomercials and really was the face of the brand until his untimely death in 2009 so for many years he was the face of Oxi Clean. Many people think that that Billy Mays was a founder, the owner, he was not, he was simply the face of it. Of course, he had a great connection and really was a cause or a driver of the success, but he was not an owner in the company. So once they launched with TV infomercials, they hit nine figures in a matter of months. Crazy growth, great success. At this point, they were still not making a big inroads into what , what is that become or has become one of their biggest points of success, which is Walmart at the time that a Sam's Club, buyer's wife actually as the story goes, and if you talk to the apple family, this is exactly what happened. Uh, where uh , one of the buyer's wives wife , uh, asked him, Hey , what ? I've seen this product on TV. I've tried it. I love it. Why don't you carry it in Sam's club? So he tried it, liked it, brought them out, ended up putting it in a Sam's club. It was a great success that put it into a Walmart eventually, which became a massive success. And at the time, Walmart, when they first introduced this, they were selling a two and a half pound tub of Oxi Clean for 40 bucks, two and a half pound tub of Oxi Clean for $40 which is crazy if you think about that today, a for the price that that Oxi Clean is currently sold in Walmart. It's, it's, I don't know the exact price now, but it's under $10 I think it's around seven or $8 for that same two and a half pound tub. But they , you know, of course the prices were up and down all the time, but also Walmart is famous for driving prices down. Have you talked to inventors, entrepreneurs that want to sell to Walmart and they're always scared of it and it certainly does happen if you're a commodity product or you're , you're selling something that's just better than a competitor, but it's basically the same thing or whatever. Yes, they're their number one goal is to give value to their consumer. So they're always going to try to drive down their price, not so that they can get a higher margin from you, but so they can lower the price for their customer. That's who Walmart is. So that definitely does. But if you bring in a product that brings amazing value that nothing else can deliver, which Oxi Clean at the time was doing, nothing else could solve this stain problem in the same way that Oxi Clean could. They were willing to sell that for $40 39 99 on the shelf. And it was a massive success. Of course, it's come down over time.

As you know, the business model has changed at Oxi Clean. Their costs have come down and awareness is much higher now, of course, than it was 15 years ago. And this was really at the heyday and they're still very, very profitable. Uh , but at that time it's, it's a kind of an amazing part of that story. You think about, you know, there's very few things that are sold at that high of a price point in Walmart because of the great success that they had at Walmart. Walmart really took anything that the company threw at them. So back in the day, we tried lots of stuff. I think one of the funniest ones that I remember, it was something, we call it the bar of oranges. It was bath soap, you know, going off the trend of orange glow. Right. But this is not a furniture policy. It's a , it's a bath soap bar of oranges, which we bought a , brought in a lot of inventories, send it to Walmart and they would take anything we threw at them. That one, for whatever reasons, sat on the shelf, didn't sell through. We had to eventually buy it back. So there were some fun financial missteps along the way. And in part because it became so easy to sell things into Walmart just because of our great success we'd had in our first couple of products. So, you know, not, not everything sold at , we brought, in fact, most products didn't. And really because they didn't have the power of TV behind them, unlike Oxi Clean orange glow and eventually kaboom. So we as a company realize we need to get back to our roots of what we call the TV to retail model that we really had pioneered back in the days of Oxi Clean. 

So in the late nineties right when we were analyzing a company, Oxi Clean was starting out, or orange glow, most infomercial or as seen on TV companies didn't really care that much about retail because they were making so much money on TV. They would spend money on TV and get a big multiple. And for every dollar that's spent on TV, they might at the time get back five six $7 back in, in revenues from people calling in over the phone or sending mail order checks even at the time of or eventually getting to two websites as well. So the money was pouring in so they didn't really pay attention to retail as much. And that actually spun one of the biggest as seen on TV companies tele-brands, which you may have heard of. And they started to make knockoff products in their early days of hit TV products and then take them to retail. So it makes something that looked and it looked very similar, performed very similarly. And the brand name even sounded very similar. They got sued a few times, but that's the route, the route that they took, they realized that hey, these guys, they may have been putting it into retail but they weren't spending much time on it . It wasn't their effort . So let's take advantage of that. And I'm not, I'm not encouraging or supporting what they did in their early days, but that's, that's part of the history of this industry. Well , we realize back in our early days of Oxi Clean that retail was going to be the biggest part of our success. And really we helped pave the way for an industry that almost for almost 20 years would re most of the, in retail, even when we're spending profitably spending tens of millions of dollars in direct response television campaigns or infomercial campaigns . So even though we're making money on the TV side, retail is where most of the profits would end up coming in. And a stat that I found to be true and you hear touted all the time in the industry is, especially in the heyday when you, for every single unit you spent, you sell on TV buying from your website or from your call center, you'll sell eight to 10 units in retail. So very one, you sell on TV, you'll sell eight to 10 in retail. Sometimes that's higher, but that's the only 90% or 80 to 90% of your revenues are going to come in from, from retail. Even for a very successful TV campaign. 

We helped really drive that. And one of the beauties of the Oxi Clean business and specifically was of course the uh , replenishment part of the business. If you buy Oxi Clean, you like it, use it up. It's not something you can keep forever, right? So you have to buy it every, every several weeks or every month or whatever it might be. So that's really where retail started to help. So even when we sold the first unit on the phones or from the website, they get in their home, they try it. Oftentimes they would replenish in a Walmart, Walgreens, or many other retailers across the country. So I was actually brought into orange glow at a time when we're where we are as a company, where we're trying to right the ship and really control this flow of new products in order to harness profits from the most successful products while minimizing mishaps from jumping into market with the wrong products. So, and in this, in this kind of heyday of Oxi Clean competitors really started to swarm. As you can imagine, you see a big success like this. We see it all the time. Competitors start to want to come in and compete against that . One example is Clorox. Clorox is a hundred year old, multibillion dollar brand and it was really the biggest company to launch a direct attack against Oxi Clean. They had a product that they called at the time, Clorox, Oxi Magic. Now this product was done as a powder and a spray at the time. They spent millions of dollars in TV ads. And really they took a huge dent out of Oxi Clean sales as they really did a hard retail push with this big advertising campaign behind it. But they weren't employing direct response TV or DRTV tactics. So they had to rely 100% of retail sales to support their massive advertising campaign. So they would spend all this money and wait and hope and pray, which is kind of a typical retail model even to this day with the big companies, right? You spend these massive amounts of money on TV and other forms of advertising, and then you wait and hope that people come into retail to buy. And they did for a time. 

So you know where we benefited from the DRTV model, we drove immediate revenue from TV to pay for the advertising. So for us, a $10 million TV campaign could be essentially free, right? So if you spend $10 million in a drives, $20 million in revenue, that pays back your advertising, your product costs, everything else, even a little bit of profit. We're making money to advertise our business. So even though clerk's had very deep pockets, when they run a $10 million advertising campaign, they have to fund all of that. Right, and wait and hope and pray that it comes back and retail when they, and often is the case, when we did the same thing at Kraft foods, we would, we would do a burst of heavy advertising in the very beginning because you're driving awareness for a brand new product and then you start to slow it down and you hope that people, especially for a replenishment type product, like a cleaning product, that they'll come back and continue to purchase more from you. We found with Auger , with Clorox, when they slowed their big spend or their push into retail, retail sales really started to suffer and they couldn't afford to keep that brand going. It was eventually dropped and Oxi Clean's massive competitor no longer existed. So this big threat to us that did certainly take a bite out of Oxi Clean at the time were now gone. That product no longer existed is no longer around today. Now we could keep going. We could afford to keep spending massive amounts of advertising even as we're struggling in retail with this big intense competitor against us. Because again, our advertising was almost free. We'd spend money, we get money back directly on t v from our website, from our phones, et Cetera . And then , uh , we able to fund further growth as we, as we grew those campaigns. Now I want to talk about kind of what happened next. So after weathering this storm, we were able to grow this business back to almost $300 million in sales Oxi Clean now, and we did this by continuing to launch new products. So even though we had this very successful business with Oxi Clean powder, as you know, the original product was we launched a spray. We launched a liquid. We launched , uh, the Kaboom brand shower tub and tile cleaner, the Kaboom Bowl blaster, which is a foaming toilet cleaner. And the original form, you pour some powder into a cup port into your toilet. And this foam would rise all the way to the rim. And then as a descended, it would scrub literally through chem , you know , chemically scrub the sides of your toilet so you no longer needed to brush your toilet. It would basically brush for you through this foaming toilet cleaner. And this fully , this court toilet cleaning category was, was really an untapped cleaning category , uh, within retail stores. Now we also launched orange glow hardwood floor cleaning system. It was a hardwood floor microfiber mop and spray, which really launched or spawned a long time partnership between Harvest Growth and Bona that lasted for many years and bone and eventually became a success. 

We as a company, once I launched Harvest Growth, we're actually able to help them launch into retail with their bona hardwood floor mop , which has become even a bigger success nowadays and there are over 30,000 retail stores. We also launched Oxi Clean Miracle Forum, which was foam, which is a spray but a foaming all purpose cleaner for this one. My story I always love to share in this is I get to borrow or had to borrow Billy Mays dress pants in order to pitch this product to HSN. I flew down to Tampa, Florida. We were filming a two minute, a direct response TV spot actually in Billy's house. And uh, Joel Apple, the one of the founders of Oxi Clean said, hey, we've got an appointment this afternoon with HSN. I had no idea. Of course I'm down for shooting in hot, it'll the summer Florida. We've got shorts and a tee shirt on or whatever. So I had to address a little bit more nicely to go pitch to HSN. So I got to borrow a Billy Mays dress pants , uh , to go pitch to HSN, which was a lot of fun. We were able to sell that in. I became a big success. And then after that, the Oxi Clean detergent ball that , uh , I let the launch for as well. This was a , a ball that you , uh , put it inside a , uh, essentially a silicone rapper or container, drop it in your Washingtons , leave it in there for 30 days, no scooping , no measuring. And really this product was working really well and starting to take off in a big way. Right when Church and Dwight bought the company, bought Orange Glow for $325 million in cash. And ever since then church and Dwight has been running Oxi Clean running the brand running kaboom orange glow and launching additional products , um , but still using that similar TB to retail model that we pioneer back in the early days. So they've been a big success. And in fact church and Dwight has really entrenched themselves into the direct response TV or TV or retail model where they just bought another company. So the finishing touch and flawless shaving brands, which was previously owned by idea village, a big as seen on TV company, they'd purchased for almost a billion dollars. So surprisingly the multiples are actually going up. 

So even as TV, the landscape is definitely changing. The multiple that we got for Oxi Clean when it was sold off was actually smaller than these guys received. So their sales were estimated to be about $180 million a year right now for the flawless. Shouldn't finishing touch brand. But the company was bought for over $400 million cash plus another 400 plus million dollars in earnouts based on success over the next 12 months, almost a billion dollars in sales, which area for the , uh , for the company to be sold, which is a phenomenal success. So really a lot has changed since the early days of Oxi Clean in the late 1990s. Today, DRTV or direct response television or infomercials as a, as a means of marketing products absolutely still works. But you have to have a good quality products. Product. Word of mouth is so much more powerful now even so than it was back in the early days of Oxi Clean beets . It's immediate, right? So now if something bad happens with the product, again , if the quality's not there, if they're not meeting that promises that they're making, then it say passes by Facebook, Instagram, social media, people know right away or reviews on Amazon. So were Oxi Clean back in the day benefited greatly from elevator conversations.

 Now these product conversations can go global in a matter of seconds with these social media platforms. If your story is good, then it helps you. Absolutely. But if you have quality, then people will instantaneously move away from your product to a competitor. It's really a consumer's market. Now. Consumers are in charge. They can get so much information about products that it's the trust doesn't even need to be there. Even as they walk through retail isles , they've seen an ad for a product. They can quickly pull out their smartphone and see, hey, what are the reviews look like on Amazon? They may actually purchase from Amazon if they get a lower price, but at a minimum they'll see reviews or they'll hear about it from their friends on social media platforms. So some of the old business, I call it old, right, but from the back from the 90s in the early two thousands the old business model of selling gadgets and Gizmos that are fun and exciting. Some of those businesses are really struggling right now. Some of the companies that have been around for a long time are folding or they're rapidly shrinking as they look to change their business model. But we found that with high quality products, the direct to consumer model is stronger now than it's ever been. It's just different. 

Video marketing is still the most efficient form of marketing when introducing a new product to market or for growing an existing business, there simply is no better or more efficient way for marketing a product. The style of video that that works, it changes constantly. So you have to be really, really have to have your finger on the pulse of the market and know what the trends are, know what's working. And we have found that what works on Facebook is oftentimes very different from what works on Instagram and different from what works on TV and different from what works on Youtube or from the video on your homepage. So it's important to have a strategy to have specific videos for each platform that you're marketing for your product. As of today, we found that the best approach is to be starting your paid video campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. So even if you're looking towards going to direct response television, eventually it's great to start on Facebook and Instagram because it's, it's very targetable. You can target even specific people, not just demographics like on TV. So that's it . You can start smaller with your spins , prove it out, raise your revenues and then move on to other platforms beyond that. But it's a great platform to be able to test his Facebook and Instagram and then eventually, or very quickly I would say you don't follow up with a supporting and effective presence on Amazon for some product categories. TV comes next. So TV for TV , if they have a really broad audience or fairly broad audience to make it work as opposed to being very specific and very targeted on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms. But there are benefits of TV over digital marketing. It's really the biggest benefit is scale. So we're Facebook and Instagram and other similar platforms which are very targetable. Their advantage is ROI. You can achieve a higher ROI, meaning you earn more dollars in revenue for every dollar you spend on advertising. But the scale is more difficult. So on TV, that's where you have tremendous scale because it's a very mature form of marketing. So we asked why we often start with these smaller platforms and you can actually be very successful. We have clients that are spending $50,000 a day on Facebook profitably. But for many it's, you know, it might be less than that. TV can scale a business even higher. You can scale to , to phenomenal levels with, with television. And Really TV still is what drives other channels most effectively, like a retail. So if your ultimate plan is to get into retail, doing a DRTV, a part of your campaign to really drive that retail is very effective and successful. I will say Oxi Clean story is inspirational, it's really motivational. 

But there are new Oxi products popping up every day and we've been blessed to work with many of them among the hundreds of products that we've launched and we've helped grow over the past 13 plus years that we've been in business at Harvest Growth. The key takeaways I really want to share from this Oxi Clean stories, the power of direct to consumer marketing. When you launch a campaign that brings in immediate revenue, your advertising pays for itself. When you're advertising free, you can grow your business exponentially and today this form of marketing is less expensive than it has ever been and with the process that we use at Harvest Growth, the success rates of new products today are now 10 times higher than they were five or 10 years ago. I hope you enjoyed my insider's look into the Oxi Clean story we have. We have many more stories coming your way right from the founders themselves. So I hope you stay tuned and subscribe to our Harvest Growth podcast and continue to listen to these stories and support these inventors and entrepreneurs.

Jon:
I hope you enjoyed the latest episode of the Harvest Growth podcast where we seek to teach the latest strategies and trends to profitably grow your consumer product business. Be sure to check out Harvest Growth podcast.com to see other episodes that we have recorded. And if you liked this episode and want to learn more about how Harvest Growth can help your business, check out HarvestGrowth.com and you can book an appointment with one of our product marketing specialists right from our homepage . If you'd like to hear more shows like this, please be sure to subscribe to our show and leave us a review at Apple or Google Podcasts.