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&For an appliance-store promotion, Jeffrey Slutsky once gave away free half-gal- eons of ice cream to potential refrigerator buyers. &The hitch: to keep the ice cream from melting, custom- ers had to rush home, pre- venting comparison shop- ping at a nearby Sears store. &Slutsky, founder of 4-year- old Retail Marketing Insti- tutee Inc., specializes in this kind of low-cost tactic, which he calls "Streetfighting." &Last month, he began pro- mooting Cable Saver, a cable- TV version of a shopper newspaper. Slutsky says New York businessman Barry Sill- verstein, owner of the Co- lumbus, Ohio cable compa- ny, hopes to take it national in a year. &Other marketing ploys: a rock concert open only to holders of the service's dis- count card ("gets the kiddies upset if their parents don't subscribe"). &Not all of his ideas work, however. Once, for "Bourbon Cowboy" night at a nightclub, Slutsky, 28, stage an artifi- cial cow chip-throwing con- test. But the brown foam chips looked so real, nobody wanted to touch them. |
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&Slutsky, whose book, Streetfighting, recently was published, says he tries "to get people to apply street- fighting methods to problems in their businesses." &Slutsky has held about 60 half-day seminars for trade associations this year, sales groups and mom and pop businesses. He charges for a 30-min- utes sales speech. RMI will bill an estimated this year, he says. &But clients must know |
when to use Slutsky math- ods. A real estate agent in Forte Wayne, Ind., who want- ed to impress his first cus- tomer "picked up his as-yet- unconnected phone and started talking up the deal of a lifetime," Slutsky recounts. "Then he hung up and said 'Yes'? The "customer" said, "'I'm here to hook up the phone.'" "At least (the agent's) heart was in the right place," Slutsky says. -Kevin Johnson | |