http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101777.html?sub=AR (registration may be required)
Arthur Schiff, who died of lung cancer last week in Coral Springs, Fla., at 66, was a businessman who ran his own marketing company for 23 years. And his passing, like the man himself, was altogether quiet, with not a single newspaper noting his death.
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...decided to market a line of kitchen knives, perhaps the most prosaic and conventional product it had yet tried to sell. Worse, the knives had a dull brand name: Quikut. As Schiff later recalled, in a self-promotional piece he wrote for the company he started in 1983, he couldn't get excited about writing a commercial for knives. "I went to sleep that night, still wrestling with the problem," he wrote, in typically fervid style. "And then it happened! I bolted out of bed at three o'clock in the morning and yelled, 'Eureka! I've got it. Ginsu!' I wrote the bizarre word down on a piece of paper and went back to sleep. When I got up again four hours later, the paper was still there and that strange word was still on it. I stuffed it into my shirt pocket and headed off to work."
The name was nonsense, but highly useful nonsense. "Ginsu" carried a whiff of Japanese precision, a suggestion of samurai swords and Benihana steakhouses. The partners decided to run with it, hiring a local Japanese exchange student to appear as a chef. The first and most famous Ginsu ad began with a hand karate-chopping a two-by-four board. "In Japan," began Schiff's copy, "the hand can be used like a knife. But this method doesn't work with a tomato" (cut to a hand squashing a tomato). As Schiff recalled: "By giving that set of knives a Japanese identity, I somehow managed to convince people that no matter how many knives they already owned, these were something special. Of course, I neglected to mention that the knives were manufactured in Fremont, Ohio."
A Ginsu knife could cut anything; the famous ad shows the cutlery tearing through a tin can, a radiator hose and, of course, a tomato. After all that -- "But wait, there's more!" -- Dial offered to throw several smaller versions of the knife "at no extra cost," thereby enhancing the sales proposition. The "there's more!" addendum, a clever piece of consumer psychology, is now a staple feature of most direct-response ads.
