Katie Williams Muscles Way into S. Korea with the AbSlide

Katie Williams Muscles Way into S. Korea with the AbSlide
By Will Cruz
DM News, July 23, 2001

Katie Williams Worldwide Television saw an increase of nearly sixty fold in AbSlide sales in South Korea midway through a DRTV campaign after it increased brand awareness around the product and partnered with two major Korean shopping channels. Williams, Santa Monica, CA, began marketing the AbSlide in South Korea in February. The company sold 600,000 units before the campaign concluded this month.

A few months into the campaign, however, Katie Williams was seeing a 0.5 percent response rate, said Priya Ghai, co-president of Williams.

‘Williams was selling 2,000 units per month through March through local media outlets, Ghai said. Halfway through the campaign, Williams decided to build more awareness for it by partnering with two undisclosed cable shopping channels, she said.

In 2000, there were 2 million households with televisions, and 13.9 percent of them were cable subscribers. A In addition to the cable partnerships, Williams began branding the product, Ghai said. Co-president Anthony Lujan began appearing on the 18-minute spots t ' and familiarizing the audience with the ' product by taking it apart to prove its authenticity, she said.

“We made consumers trust our products by literally dissecting them on air. 'There are a lot of copycats in the international market, so we needed to endorse our products to gain a level of trust with our audience" Ghai said. "In fact., that's one of the reasons why we stopped the campaign. There’s just no way around it." After the partnerships and branding efforts. Williams began selling 120,000 units per month. Ghai said.

By comparison, Sylmark, with which Williams has an exclusive international agreement, sold about 3 million products in the United States last year. Ghai said.