Marketing

How has Karen gone about marketing her natural skincare products?

Cathy Buntting: In terms of marketing here in New Zealand, I know that your product was only launched earlier this year [in July 2006], wasn’t it? So you’re still very new. How does a new business start out getting known?

Karen Farley: Well, we did start this year and in about June we launched the product.

Now, I did mention before, a huge advertising budget that a certain company has. If we’re dealing with companies that have five million dollars to use on advertising - you see them advertised on the TV all the time, or whatever… billboards - that’s a huge amount of money.

Luckily, with the magazine [which Karen used to run], we had over twenty thousand subscribers at some point, and with the different things that we’d been involved in the magazine, we had about a hundred thousand people that we could tap into. So we actually used that resource as a way of marketing the product through direct marketing

Direct marketing is basically when you go straight to the person, so you’re by-passing any sort of third party. You’re not going to advertising [companies] and hoping that someone’s going to walk down the street [and sell your product]; you go right to the horse’s mouth.

Direct marketing would be by phone, by letter, knocking on their door … any of those things where you’re going direct to the person you’re wanting to purchase [the product from you]. Maybe we’ll stay that way.