Marketing the New Venture 227Promotion. Promotion consists of the methods and techniques that ventures use to
communicate with customers and with other stakeholders. The purposes of promotion
are to inform and persuade. Included in the promotional mix are advertising, personal
selling, sales promotion, publicity, and public relations. Each of these activities has dis-Making Your Product a TV Star
Doug Krentz’s wife thought it sounded like a
great opportunity. “I don’t care if you have to
call in sick and fake a broken leg, but you’re
going to Virginia on Monday,” she told him.
She wanted him to attend a trade show in
Arlington sponsored by QVC, the home-shop-
ping network, for potential vendors. Krentz,
an avid mountain biker, had invented a
portable pressure jet washer called The
Dirtworker. Powered from a car’s cigarette
lighter, it could be used to clean bikes, sports
gear, beach chairs, and other items before
loading them into a car.
Over 450 inventors, designers, and manu-
facturers joined Krentz at the QVC Product
Search event (www.qvcproductsearch.com) in
January 2005. That forum was one of more
than ten sponsored by the retailer at locations
around the country that year. Each aspiring
supplier had ten minutes to pitch his or her
product to a QVC product specialist for a no-
cost evaluation, and an opportunity to learn
something about marketing.
Every week QVC offers some 250 new
products in a TV market that reaches 160 mil-
lion homes worldwide. The most fortunate
entrepreneurs from each forum were chosen
to offer their products on air and to receive a
$20,000-25,000 initial purchase order from
the television retailer.
“We’re always looking for new and innova-
tive products to bring to our discerning cus-
tomers,” explains Marilyn Montross, QVC’s
director of vendor relations. The company
(www.qvc.com) has sponsored product
searches since 1995. Generally they are on
the lookout for products that can be visually
demonstrated effectively (like high-tech
blenders), that make life easier (like the robot
vacuums), or that solve some common prob-
lem (like laundry stains). The products must
appeal to a broad audience (most QVC view-
ers are women, but they also buy for men),
have unique features, and retail for $15 or
more. QVC does not sell firearms, furs, or
tobacco products, and will not feature a prod-
uct that involves any type of sweepstakes or
questionnaire.
In 2006 QVC joined forces with Count-Me-
In, a non-profit organization, and OPEN, the
American Express program for small busi-
ness, to sponsor the Make Mine a $Million
business program. The three sponsors are
focusing on women entrepreneurs because
statistics show that, while almost 11 million
businesses in the United States are owned
by women, only 3 percent have annual sales
of more than $1 million.
Best-selling products discovered by QVC
during the 2005 product search include a
choke-free body harness for small dogs,
scented soy candles, a heart-shaped silver
pendant that is also a bell, and a cookbook
written by a 92-year-old author. Doug
Krentz’s Dirtworker is not on the list, but his
product will soon be available on the Internet
(www.dirtworker.com).
SOURCE: Adapted from Rachael King, “The Big Pitch,”
Business Week SmallBiz,Spring 2005: 58-64; “QVC Is
Calling All Entrepreneurs,” The Business Journal,April 17,- Retrieved from the Web July 6, 2006,
http://www.business-journal.com/archives.20060417QVC
Auditions.asp, http://www.qvc.com, http://www.qvcproductsearch.com,
and http://www.dirtworker.com.
STREET STORY 6.1