The Ultimate Shopper Promotional Kit: Opportunities Made Canadian Moneysaver Feature Clippings How Canada's worst-selling title of 1988 got media coverage in 100-plus markets in 3 months Last updated 07/05

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Shortly after I released The Ultimate Shopper's predecessor, SuperThrift, I ran into a fellow named Dale Ennis who ran a relatively successful personal finance magazine called The Canadian MoneySaver. He had a wide range of talented people providing articles in exchange for professional listings and small ads (in fact these were the only ads he ran in the MoneySaver), and you'd know many of these names instantly today. He wanted a consumer column which, promotion hound that I was, I gladly provided

. From 1986 through 1988 I was a semi-regular contributor and sold small numbers of books, very small in fact. According to Dale, he felt guilty about using my material because I was profiting less from my efforts than any of his other contributors. We tried all manner of tricks to boost interest but it never quite clicked. Still, this is an excellent example of how I was able to exploit a market for serious publicity which I wouldn't normally be able to access. This file includes the only two clippings I kept from that period. Most of the articles were copied from or very similar to articles published in other forms or other media.

The ad I received in return for these articles appeared on the Personal Finance Library page in the back of the magazine slammed in with books by eleven other authors. Here is how the copy read, and admittedly it's not the best:

        ---------------   THE ULTIMATE SHOPPER (1987)
        |             |   by Steve Winter
        |             |   $9.95 (paperback) 192 pages
        |    Book     |
        |    cover    |       Steve provides a comprehensive 10-point
        |    shot     |   money-saving program designed to suit every
        |             |   consumer.  Also included: group buying,
        |             |   garage sales, how to deal in classified in-
        |             |   formation, the cost of keeping in touch and
        ---------------   maximizing your home entertainment investment.

As many newsletter publishers will do, Dale acted as distributor for the books and it was he who took the orders, not me. It's a nice deal if you can get it, but it turned out to be yet another time and energy pit for me.

The following was a larger, quarter-page ad run in the magazine before Dale began offering all his writers' books from the MoneySaver's back pages. This sort of publicity was selling books by the hundred for his other contributors. I counted maybe a couple of dozen sales in total for the three or four issues in which it ran/.

    _____________________________________________________________________
    |                                                                   |
    |       T H E         U L T I M A T E         S H O P P E R         |
    |                                                                   |
    |   ============================================================    |
    |                                                                   |
    |   Today efficiency is at least as important as dollar value.      |
    |   Author Steve Winter recognizes the changing needs of            |
    |   consumers, and THE ULTIMATE SHOPPER represents the cutting      |
    |   edge of modern consumer technique.  Here's just some of         |
    |   what's inside:                                                  |
    |    -ten simple strategies for increasing value and decreasing     |
    |     time and effort in all your shopping                          |
    |    -a simple project that actually insures your insurance         |
    |    -detailed advice on placing accurate values on your            |
    |     priorities                                                    |
    |    -hundreds of "computer-age household hints"                    |
    |    -NO budget advice, NO coupon tips, and NO penny-pincher's      |
    |     puffery                                                       |
    |    - ** a one-year satisfaction guarantee **                      |
    |   -------------------------------------------------------------   |
    |                                                                   |
    |         "THE  ULTIMATE  SHOPPER":  THE  MODERN  WAY  TO           |
    |         SAVE  TIME  AND  EFFORT  ON  ALL  YOUR  SHOPPING          |
    |                                                                   |
    |   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -   |
    |                      SPECIAL OFFER: Save $1 off the retail        |
    |     A  UNIQUE        price and get a bonus collection of money-   |
    |                      saving ideas!  Only $8.95 postpaid.          |
    |     APPROACH                                                      |
    |                      NAME______________________________________   |
    |    TO SPENDING       ADDRESS___________________________________   |
    |                      CITY______________________PROV____________   |
    |    AND SAVING        POSTAL CODE___________                       |
    |                                                                   |
    |    Living Skill Books, 1497-1/2 Queen St. W-71, Toronto M6R-1A3   |
    |                                                                   |
    +-------------------------------------------------------------------+

If you're like 99 out of 100 Canadians, you're a self-taught shopper and darn proud of it. You probably think there's not much more you can do with your budget without making serious adjustments to your shopping style, and chances are that those adjustments wouldn't be worth the effort anyway.

A small survey I conducted, combined with my experience meeting hundreds of shoppers across Canada this past year, has convinced me that Canadians are very confident in their shopping expertise. And in most cases, they have good reason to be.

You see, almost no one is ever taught how to shop. My high school was one of a select few to offer a consumer education course, but all we really got was budgeting guidelines, an understanding of advertising and marketing techniques and what amounted to consumer advocacy issues. Home economics courses rarely deal with marketplace strategy and tactics, instead concentrating on how to get the most from what we've already spent. Consumer advocates tell us how to shop for quality and how to fight back against a bad deal, but not necessarily how to get the best deal.

We usually have to learn marketplace strategy and tactics on our own. And because we teach ourselves, we not only develop some rather strange attitudes about how others shop, we also tend to think we can't get much better.

One of the most startling discoveries I made this past summer involved the common perception of common sense. Most shoppers are exceptionally good at a few things. They falsely assume that it's nothing special and that everyone else s just as good.

Here's an example. Most people think of comparison shopping for groceries as an extraordinarily tedious and time-consuming task, requiring careful examination of every supermarket flyer, hours of coupon-clipping and the mathematical mind of an IBM mainframe. And most people spend a lot of time comparison shopping.

In reality, truly expert comparison shoppers spend very little time on the task. They know in advance what constitutes an excellent price on a given item. All that's needed is to check the flyers for someone offering that item at that price. Sure, it may be a nickel cheaper at another store or in another size, but if it takes you five minutes to figure that out, you've just valued your time at 60 cents an hour.

It's unfortunate that most of those who comparison shop the quick way believe they're no good at it, because what we commonly call "good" comparison shopping has never been compared with this more effective strategy.

Another good example is marketplace negotiation. Most Canadians simply wouldn't dream of dickering anywhere but at garage sales, flea markets, car dealerships or real estate agencies. But this will come as quite a surprise to those of us who have been negotiating as a matter of course on everything from repair bills to furniture at the big chain stores, and walking away with discounts most of us never knew could be had.

Sadly, no one challenges our idea of what makes a good shopper. Left to our own devices, we seem to do surprisingly well, but there are always improvements we could and would make if only we knew what they were.

Happily, we live in the Information Age, where no facet of human life is left untouched by researchers and the media. I have no doubt that our shopping skills will be challenged more and more in the years to come.

And even more happily, only a lucky few will listen. After all, if everyone started to negotiate with retailers, sticker prices would have to rise to accommodate this new attitude. If everyone became "expert" comparison shoppers, we could see the end of the independent grocer.

But because these changes are unlikely, there will be advantages to be had in the years to come for those of us willing to believe that our shopping skills can indeed be improved.

All we really need is a slight shift in attitude. We've got to stop believing we're the hotshot shoppers we claim to be. If we can manage this trick, the rewards of humility will be substantial.

--30--

The trend is clear. The youth of today are more conservative and more downright materialistic than any generation in recent memory. It's hard to say whether this new spirit is driven by greed and fuelled by the media or driven by need and fuelled by severe career insecurity. Whatever the case, the massive appeal of get-rich-quick schemes indicates a real need. People are lining up in droves to learn about the newest million-dollar ideas and they seem to believe the machinery for exploiting them is at arm's length.

As a direct marketer, I run across big dreamers and big winners on practically a daily basis. The dreamers, as you might expect, tend to come and go. The winners always seem to stick around. And it's the rare occasion when I encounter someone who has graduated beyond the dreaming stage.

The difference between the two groups can be stated in a trite fashion. The winners have beaten the number's game. Plain and simple, they got lucky. But that's not the whole story, only a superficial overview.

It's my belief that every Joe Cossman TV lecture and Ed Beckley one-hour commercial should come with a disclaimer to be aired at every commercial break:

"NOTICE: The odds of achieving the successes depicted here are directly proportionate to the skills of the entrepreneur."

So what does luck have to do with skill? Well, while it's true that talent tends to make its own luck, there will always be a few people who get rich and still do everything wrong, and perhaps a few more highly capable people who never rise from the red.

What I'm basically saying is this. Your chances of becoming highly successful in one venture are probably the same as they'd be in any other. Sure, mail order is everyman's road to riches, but by the same token so is medical supply wholesaling or executive washroom design consulting. The dreamers will fall by the wayside and those who care enough to develop their skills will succeed.

This is not to say that the "easy success" stories are lies or impossible to achieve. If you know the rules of the game you play, success is easy, because it's a simple matter of following the prescribed steps. It's only when we think we know betterthan the experts or can't reconcile our morals or lifestyles with the steps we know we must take that the road to success gets rocky. And it's because so many of us fall prey to those demons that success seems easier for those who do make it. The competition simply disqualifies itself.

And that's the problem I have with the dream merchants. Most of them don't seem to have realized that this message must be drilled into their students with perhaps more force than the fundamentals of the business opportunity itself. Most of them talk openly about their personal histories, and it's often plain that their experiences have afforded them lessons, skills and drives that most of their students don't possess and may need years to develop. They seem too close to themselves to notice this fact, and their students seem too overwhelmed by dreams of wealth to discover this problem until they're in neck-deep. (Fortunately, life-or-death commitment to success, a hard reality for all too many of the dream academy graduates, will often produce the kinds of changes these people need to complete their success equation.)

Personally, I have nothing against the dream merchants. They seem to stimulate entrepreneurial spirit that reaches far beyond their own field, and at a time when more and more of us must become entrepreneurs if we expect to have any kind of career security, this is a most beneficial service.

But I wish more people were aware that mail order, investing and real estate are not the easy roads to riches, and in fact for most people these careers are a pretty tough sled. I also wish the dream merchants were a little less modest about their own talents, because the surest way to duplicate someone's success is to eat, sleep and breathe everything in the same way as that person.

In the final analysis, Joe Cossman and Ed Beckley are not like you and me, but it is possible to become like them.

--30--

The ol' Akai has just about had the bun. It's time to buy a new cassette deck. Simple enough. After all, what could change on cassette decks in ten years?

That depends on whether you'll settle for Dolby/ANRS or whether you've got to have Dolby C or dbx. Or whether you want real-time or wind-tally counters. Or whether you need direct CD interface. Or whether you need a double-deck, and if so do you need hi-speed dubbing.

Come to think of it, maybe it would be easier to get a tune-up for the Akai and wait for DAT. Dee ay WHAT?

For the foreseeable future, any purchase of consumer electronics, from stereos to TVs to microwave ovens and computers, will be a risky proposition. Operating formats, features, "software" and quality are literally obsolete before they hit the shelves, and there's no escaping this problem.

Fortunately, there are ways to deal with it. Once the shopper understands the concept of value curves, industry standard formats and technological thresholds, relatively astute buying decisions can be made in practically any field of consumer electronics.

The value curve is a simple mathematical function of the price of new technology. For example, microwave ovens haven't gone up in price in real terms since they were introdced.

The cost of developing technology and tooling up for manufacturing it were passed on to the consumer over the first few years on the shelf, but as demand rose production rose in turn, and prices either ignored inflation or went down. As new manufacturers copied the technology, bypassing development costs, they created less expensive versions and prices dropped again. We're now at the point where a full-feature microwave costs less than a basic unit cost 15 years ago - substantially less if you take inflation into account.

Basically, the value curve peaks at the introduction of a new product, drops steadily over several years, drops more slowly over the next few years, and finally reaches a point where it should keep pace with inflation. You've mastered the value curve when you can decide whether an extra 20 to 50 percent is fair payment for buying at an early stage in the cycle.

The only real blunder you can make in buying consumer electronics is ignoring industry-standard formats. If you bought an 8-track car stereo in the last eight years, you know exactly what I mean.

Current industry standards include IBM-compatible computer hardware and software, VHS video equipment, cassettes (now more popular worldwide than LPs) and the standard-sized A, AA, C and D-sized nickel-cadmium batteries, among many others.

The key to determining whether a new format such as the compact disk will be the industry standard for any length of time (and will therefore receive continued support from manufacturers) is to wait for the initial reaction to a better format. There's every possibility that digital audio tape (DAT) could make CDs as obsolete as 8-tracks, and once a format is obsolete, research into improvements in that format ceases. We may see this phenomenon in Beta video very soon, but LP records are expected to survive for at least a decade.

The technological threshold is quite simple to grasp. All we really need to know at this time is the degree of dependence a certain item has on microchips. The more dependent it is, the more likely it is to be improved before you're finished reading this article, and the more likely it will drop in price. Unfortunately, other manufactured goods may use no microchips but still be reliant on robotics in their manufacturee and therefore vulnerable to price cuts, but that risk is negligible compared to the risk of obsolesence. Anything reliant on microchips probably hasn't come close to the threshold of technological advance and is in serious peril of becoming obsolete.

But many products have neared the threshold. Loudspeakers haven't improved dramatically in 15 years and neither have amplifiers. They were already as close to perfect as the human ear could reasonably expect. Such products aren't prone to sudden price drops.

These guidelines won't tell you which models to buy, but hopefully they'll give you a better idea whether the state-of-the-art will be kind to your senses AND your pocketbook, and more important, whether they'll stay that way.

--30--