April 2009 – Case Study: DRTV Success is in the Air

Hunter Fan selects Cesari Direct to create a long-form campaign for its Argenus Air Sterilizer that highlights the product’s features and, hopefully, blows away the competition.

By Pat Cauley

Given the state of the economy and media, many industry leaders advise staying away from long-form campaigns and high price-point items. Yet, a current campaign from the Hunter Fan Company for its Argenus Air Sterilizer has defied those odds on both counts. Electronic Retailer wanted to take a more in-depth look at the product and campaign to see what it takes to break through this economy’s glass ceiling.

The Argenus Air Sterilizer features exclusive technology that kills over 99.9 percent of airborne particulates.

If you’re a baby boomer, chances are you’re probably familiar with the Hunter Fan brand. The company has been in business since 1886. But, with a strong foothold on the fan market and an ever-growing Gen X and Y consumer base, Hunter Fan knew it needed to shift and revamp its strategy, especially as it looked to expand its product offerings beyond traditional fans. Enter Jim Gallman, senior vice president of home comfort and brand marketing for the Hunter Fan Company, the man responsible for refreshing the brand’s image.

“My primary responsibility when I was hired was brand marketing. One of the things we had to do was position the brand for the future. We had a heritage brand with a number of positive attributes, among them high-quality, durability and reliability,” says Gallman. However, when it came to younger audiences, there was less familiarity with the brand. Thus, from a visual standpoint, Gallman worked to modernize the company’s look for all packaging, web and elsewhere, creating consistency across all consumer touch points. After thorough testing, they revamped their entire logo using a vibrant green color across their various touch points that resonated well with younger consumers. With the brand revamp completed, Argenus was further legitimized to tackle new challenges and varying products.

THE PRODUCT

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average indoor air in most homes can be five to 100 times more polluted than outside air. What does a fan company know about air sterilization? Actually, a lot more than you may think! As a consumer watches the long-form infomercial and hears testimonials and substantiation from scientists, that answer turns out to be everything. “It’s really more of a system. When cleaning air, there are three things you need to do: move, capture and kill. You need to [circulate] enough air inside a room to make sure you’re cleaning the entire volume of the room, and it needs to be done on a consistent enough basis that you’re cleaning the air as people are coming in and out of the room,” says Gallman. The Argenus Air Sterilizer can change a large room’s air five or six times per hour. In a smaller room, that number can be up to 25 times per hour.

“Air movement is our heritage. We know how to move air really well and quietly and so we excel in that area. Secondly, you have to know how to capture. Our filtration captures 99.9 percent of particulates. But, what really makes it unique is an exclusive technology we have that essentially kills over 99.9 percent of the particulates in the air,” says Gallman.

THE CAMPAIGN

With the product ready to roll, it was time to figure out how to market it. Seattle-based Cesari Direct, a full-service direct response marketing company, created a series of long-form informational programming that educated viewers on how the polluted air inside their homes could actually be sterilized by using the Argenus Air Sterilizer.

“While Hunter Fan has been around since 1886, we needed to convey that the Argenus wasn’t really a fan at all,” says Ron Lynch, Cesari Direct’s chief creative director. At a time when creative is more important than ever, it obviously had a lot of other elements to convey, as well. In conjunction with its agency, Cesari Direct, Hunter Fan ran a test in Q4 of 2008 and examined its results before the recent full nationwide launch of the DRTV program in Q1. The Q4 test worked to get a representative sample geographically. “We started this project back in November ‘07 and the economy wasn’t anywhere near the forefront of our mind. It was more about building the value for a consumer to purchase the product. As the economy changed, we certainly have made sure that we backed down the hatch with our financial exposure on the model,” says Tim O’Brien, vice president of business development for Cesari Direct. The agency tested a variety of different offers in an effort to determine the consumer threshold for the product’s pricing. However, one thing Cesari was always sure about was the need to make this a long-form campaign. “For this particular product, if it wasn’t long form, people would have inadvertently assumed this was just another air purifier device. But, Hunter Fan is really pioneering a new category right now in air sterilization and we all knew–it was unanimous. We needed the half hour to educate consumers about this category and explain the technology in the device so that consumers could be adequately informed about the differences with Argenus,” says O’Brien. Yet, once the case was made to consumers, would they be willing to pay nearly $600? “With this type of economy, you always have some concern going in with higher price points, but as we’ve gone in and tweaked the messaging–as you do with any kind of DRTV-type program–we’re very happy with the results we’re seeing,” says Gallman. Consequently, it’s not just a matter of consumers being willing to pay, but also if they literally are able to. “We’ve been very proactive as far as monitoring customers’ payment history and making sure that we’re appropriately converting people as much as possible to an upfront one-pay and monitoring everything on the backend of the campaign from a fraud standpoint,” says O’Brien. Converting to one-pay is the main goal for the call center agents–as everyone knows that when offering multi-pay at a time like this, declined cards down the line are always a concern. “Part of the call center agents’ sales training on the product included offering the consumer a deeper discount if they were willing to buy the item with one payment,” says O’Brien.

LESSONS LEARNED

The 2008 program not only rendered significant, consistent cash flow to “self fund” future additional advertising, but it also positioned Argenus for an aggressive expansion in the second quarter of 2009. “This is a form of advertising that allows you to tweak and change your campaign, honing in and optimizing the message. You don’t have that in other forms of advertising. The degree to which we were able to tweak and change things in the beginning was very helpful,” says Gallman. In managing the television creative, online site and call center scripting process, Cesari has been able to steer Hunter Fan on a clear course for Argenus. “One key lesson they had was an “ah-ha” moment around the synergy of online and DRTV in how we drastically lowered their cost per click and really helped add on incremental online sales for them. They’re really excited about the awareness that the DRTV spot has created and how that has spilled over to online, and how it’s helped make the performance of their online campaign work logistically with the TV campaign,” says O’Brien. Hunter Fan is currently planning to have the campaign run through its fiscal year, closely following the metrics. With additional plans to expand into retail, the Argenus story illustrates how a well-thought out long-form campaign is a key ingredient for consumer awareness with a product and brand. And as its visibility continues to balloon by the day, it’s a good thing that the brand’s already positioned for the future.