#3 Secrets of Ad Placement: Go Where Your Competitors Go

Issue #3 —Wednesday, April 25, 2018

SECRETS OF AD PLACEMENT: 
Go Where Your Competitors Go

Posted by Denny Hatch

On a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, tall and lanky outdoorsman John Peterman bought himself an ankle-length horseman’s coat—standard gear in the West but unusual and distinctive back East. He wrote in his first catalog:

“People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance about them.

     

“I had this proven all over again when people actually stopped me in the street (in New York, in Tokyo, in London) to ask me where I got the coat I was wearing.  

“So many people tried to buy my coat off my back that I’ve started a small company to make them available.  It seems like everybody (well, not everybody) has always wanted a classic horseman’s duster but never knew exactly where to get one.

     

“I ran a little ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and in a few months sold this wonderful coat in cities all over the country and to celebrities and to a mysterious gentleman in Japan who ordered two thousand of them.”

That was 1987. Peterman sold 2,500 dusters and added three more items to his line. That year, revenues climbed to $560,000 and the company broke even. The following year, Peterman and copywriter Donald Staley launched the first catalog.

The J. Peterman Company was off and running.

Lillian Katz’s Story

In 1951, working from her kitchen table in a tiny apartment, newly married Lillian Katz ran this little $495 black-and-white ad in the mail order section of Seventeen Magazine.

She generated 6,400 orders and $32,000 in sales. Katz—a 5-foot-1-inch dynamo—changed her name to Lillian Vernon and spent the next 50 years building a catalog business with annual sales of $250 million.

Takeaways to Consider

• A fledgling Shark Tank inventor might want to advertise where nobody else advertises—virgin territory! Trust me. These venues have been tested a gazillion times and never generated response.

• Lillian Katz went into the mail order section of Seventeen, brimming with little ads like hers. She came up with a USP (Unique Selling Proposition), low price and involvement that set her apart from all others. Bingo!

• John Peterman went where guys go: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, loaded with ads for bespoke men’s wear, cigars and man cave gadgetry.

• "Going where your competitors go" makes sense for TV and online as well as print.

• "Fish where the fish are."
—MacRae Ross

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Invitation to Marketers and Direct Marketers: Guest blog posts are welcome. If you have a marketing story to tell, case history, concept to propose or a memoir, give a shout. I’ll get right back to you. (Kindly stay within the limit of 500 words.) I am: dennyhatch@yahoo.com. 

215-644-9526 (rings on my desk).

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