"What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gladwell Malcolm)4.Ron Popeil started pitching his father’s kitchen gadgets at the Maxwell Street flea market in Chicago, in the midfifties. He was thirteen. Every morning, he would arrive at the market at five and prepare fifty pounds each of onions, cabbages, and carrots, and a hundred pounds of potatoes. He sold from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, bringing in as much as $500 a day. In his late teens, he started doing the state- and county-fair circuit, and then he scored a prime spot in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington, in the Loop, which at the time was the top-grossing Woolworth’s store in the country. He was making more than the manager of the store, selling the Chop-O-Matic and the Dial-O-Matic. He dined at the Pump Room and wore a Rolex and rented $150-a-night hotel suites. In pictures from the period, he is beautiful, with thick dark hair and blue-green eyes and sensuous lips, and, several years later, when he moved his office to 919 Michigan Avenue, he was called the Paul Newman of the Playboy Building. Mel Korey, a friend of Ron’s from college and his first business partner, remembers the time he went to see Ron pitch the Chop-O-Matic at the State Street Woolworth’s. “He was mesmerizing,” Korey says. “There were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking. He would go into the turn, and people would just come running.” Several years ago, Ron’s friend Steve Wynn, the founder of the Mirage resorts, went to visit Michael Milken in prison. They were near a television, and happened to catch one of Ron’s infomercials just as he was doing the countdown, a routine taken straight from the boardwalk, where he says, “You’re not going to spend two hundred dollars, not a hundred and eighty dollars, not one-seventy, not one-sixty…” It’s a standard pitchman’s gimmick: it sounds dramatic only because the starting price is set way up high. But something about the way Ron did it was irresistible. As he got lower and lower, Wynn and Milken – who probably know as much about profit margins as anyone in America – cried out in unison, “Stop, Ron! Stop!” Was Ron the best? The only attempt to settle the question definitively was made some forty years ago when Ron and Arnold were working a knife set at the Eastern States Exposition, in West Springfield, Massachusetts. A third man, Frosty Wishon, who was a legend in his own right, was there, too. “Frosty was a well-dressed, articulate individual and a good salesman,” Ron says. “But he thought he was the best. So I said, ‘Well, guys, we’ve got a ten-day show, eleven, maybe twelve hours a day. We’ll each do a rotation, and we’ll compare how much we sell.” In Morris-Popeil lore, this is known as “the shoot-out,” and no one has ever forgotten the outcome. Ron beat Arnold, but only by a whisker – no more than a few hundred dollars. Frosty Wishon, meanwhile, sold only half as much as either of his rivals. “You have no idea the pressure Frosty was under,” Ron continues. “He came up to me at the end of the show and said, ‘Ron, I will never work with you again as long as I live.’ ” No doubt Frosty Wishon was a charming and persuasive person, but he assumed that this was enough – that the rules of pitching were the same as the rules of celebrity endorsement. When Michael Jordan pitches McDonald’s hamburgers, Michael Jordan is the star. But when Ron Popeil or Arnold Morris pitched, say, the Chop-O-Matic, his gift was to make the Chop-O-Matic the star. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers – not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use. Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the Once, when I was over at Ron’s house in Coldwater Canyon, sitting on one of the high stools in his kitchen, he showed me what real pitching is all about. He was talking about how he had just had dinner with the actor Ron Silver, who was playing Ron’s friend Robert Shapiro in a new movie about the O. J. Simpson trial. “They shave the back of Ron Silver’s head so that he’s got a bald spot, because, you know, Bob Shapiro’s got a bald spot back there, too,” Ron said. “So I say to him, ‘You’ve gotta get GLH.’ ” GLH, one of Ron’s earlier products, is an aerosol spray designed to thicken the hair and cover up bald spots. “I told him, ‘It will make you look good. When you’ve got to do the scene, you shampoo it out.’ ” At this point, the average salesman would have stopped. The story was an aside, no more. We had been discussing the Showtime Rotisserie, and on the counter behind us was a Showtime cooking a chicken and next to it a Showtime cooking baby-back ribs, and on the table in front of him Ron’s pasta maker was working, and he was frying some garlic so that we could have a little lunch. But now that he had told me about |
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