That’s how my mother knew she wanted color-coded storage containers, and thousands of other viewers knew they wanted perfume they couldn’t smell. The answer is that you tell a story-a story about the viewer, and the product’s place in her life.
#Qvc callcenter tv#
Video: Megan McArdle explains how QVC manages to sell perfume on TV After all, as Peter asked, how do you sell perfume on TV? After a moment, however, her pitch started to make sense. The perfume in question reminds me less of God than of grandmothers and old dresser drawers. “It’s good if you’re especially prayerful.”Įven I found it hard to explain where this was coming from. An earnest young woman was extolling the many varieties of Philosophy perfume. The night before we went on the tour, my fiancé flipped on QVC in the hotel room. Oh, and they have to convince you that you want to buy a product you can’t touch or see up close. They must deal with a steady stream of spokespeople and customer call-ins. They must master the details of dozens of products, and talk about them while monitoring a split screen that shows both the current shot and the next one. QVC hosts are not just preternaturally peppy people who can talk about anything-although they are that. They’re the only ones who manage to look life-size.Ī QVC host receives six months of training, and when you watch a broadcast close up, you can understand why. Only the hosts, talking merrily to thin air, seem able to overcome all that empty space. The vastness dwarfs the stagehands and models. Beneath crisscrossing strips of lights and cameras, 17 sets nestle next to each other-a sort of Potemkin villa. Even though you already knew those rooms aren’t real, a walk into the cavernous QVC studio space still comes as a shock. QVC cultivates an air of intimacy many of its sets are designed to look like rooms in a home. For $75 you can take the “All Access Tour” of its vast facility, which spans a lot the size of 15 football fields. To appreciate QVC’s consummate skill in separating its customers from their money, you have to travel to its headquarters, tucked behind an obscure office park outside Philadelphia. Does it mean we’re getting back on our feet? Or does it mean that we’re still in way over our heads, unable to pull ourselves out of our obsessive overspending? But it’s less clear what that says about the health and sanity of the American consumer. That’s good news for closet fans like me, who furtively watch its broadcasts without ever really buying. In February, Liberty Media, QVC’s parent company, announced that the network’s operating income in the fourth quarter of 2009 was up about a third from its dismal 2008 level. Consumer credit problems and falling sales in 2008 and early 2009 forced QVC to lay off staff, close a call center, and cut inventories. Naturally, a company this closely tied to the decades-long American consumer boom has been hit hard by the recession. The company’s allure is so powerful that Marlon Brando reportedly sought to become one of its celebrity presenters during his final, cash-strapped, obese, and depressed years. QVC’s merchandising power has nurtured blockbuster brands like Spanx body shapers-and whole sub-industries that help entrepreneurs get their products onto the shopping network (or at least claim to). Since then, QVC-it stands for “Quality, Value, Convenience”-has become one of America’s largest jewelry retailers and a leading importer of Irish goods, and has earned other superlatives too numerous to elaborate. Founded by the same man who started the Franklin Mint, the company began broadcasting on November 24, 1986, when it sold $7,400 worth of merchandise. This power to turn the most resistant foe into a QVC shopper has made the network one of the most effective retailing machines ever invented. Now that we each had a color-coded personal set, my mother explained, the McArdle women would never again tussle over the Tupperware. Somehow, though, our family came to own three jumbo sets of Lock and Lock storage containers, in Kiwi, Fuchsia, and Coral-one for each of us, and one for my sister. “You want me to buy something from the television?” Her tone suggested icy Thanksgiving dinners and rewritten wills.Īnd to be fair, 30 minutes later, she had not bought any flatware. While researching this article-that is, watching QVC in earnest-I made the mistake of suggesting to my television-hating mother that she should tune in to a presentation of some Reed & Barton flatware, which she’d wanted to buy for a cousin’s wedding gift. And-odds are-has it at a price you can’t resist. You are a discriminating shopper, a person of real substance, a unique snowflake. You are not one of those people, trying to plug your gaping inner emptiness with cut-rate consumer goods.
Y ou may not know it yet, but you want to buy something from QVC.
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