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Kathleen comes to ADOTAS with almost a decade of writing experience at consumer and business publications. Most recently, she was an editor at First Magazine. Before that, she was an editor at The New York Sun and Thomson Financial’s Investment Management Weekly.

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Inside Video Professor (part 2): Building a Brand

Written on
May 21st 2008
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by Kathleen  |
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ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — The Video Professor has been in business for more than two decades and more than 10 million people have received training through their service. We’ve been taking an indepth look at the Video Professor business hoping to discover what makes a product work online, and what stirs the appreciation and controversy of consumers.


In part 2 of our 4 part series, ADOTAS’s Publisher Robert Regular sat down with the CEO and founder of Video Professor, (the professor himself), John Scherer to find out more about his professed business philosophy (and to see if it can really be this simple): “Show up, do the best job possible and meet the customers’ needs.”

ADOTAS: I am Bob Regular – Publisher of Adotas. We’ve had an opportunity to sit down with John Scherer of Video Professor and try to find out what exactly makes Video Professor successful.

John, a lot of our readers are hoping or budding entrepreneurs in e-commerce, both offline and online, they’re really working on the online side of the business primarily. They’re looking to have successful products and services, generate leads, generate conversions online and you’re one of the dominate online products that are really successful. Maybe you can tell us a little about how you managed to establish the brand and build the customer experience.

JOHN SCHERER: Well for us, as you know, we’ve been around about 21 years now and we have been on television since 1990. So driving all that television, driving our brand to the public, or to the consumer so they can see what Video Professor is all about, having sold on television for years, it was a natural progression for us to go from television to online. It’s literally millions and millions and millions, multi-millions, in advertising that we spent to develop that brand. It’s getting that name, that name has to be identified somehow. Somehow online for people to get their name out there, if they haven’t been on television, they need to drive their name out there and get it recognized.

ADOTAS: Would you say that you’re recognition for the company is primarily you personally or the actual Video Professor brand, or it’s fairly balanced?

JOHN SCHERER: You know, it’s fairly balanced and the reason why I’d say that is because when I run into people or they recognize me, some people call me John Scherer, some people call me Video Professor, and it’s a mix. So they know, they associate me with the company and they know the company and surprisingly, they know my name. I don’t know, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised after doing it all these years. You’ve got to have something to identify with and we have actually the two things: the name, the company name, and me, because I did the commercials.

ADOTAS: So why you? Why go out in front personally?

JOHN SCHERER: That was an easy decision…we didn’t have any money! So we couldn’t. And I knew the product better than anyone so we couldn’t bring in talent and pay talent to do the commercials. I never wanted to do the commercials, we started out in infomercials. We started that way and it was myself and then we had a celebrity and we’d do an infomercial and that worked well. But then we went to the 60’s and the 120’s and we had talent doing them for awhile and then everybody said, “Why don’t you try it?” And I said, “Okay, I’ll try it,” and I said, “But I can’t read a teleprompter, so I just have to speak and then you edit it together.” So that’s why it was me. I never set out to do all this.

ADOTAS: What was the first reaction when you went out there personally and did this?

JOHN SCHERER: Well, it actually was good. I’ll tell you what happened first though, is QBC. I was on QBC live and we did that and it worked well and that’s why people in my company said, “Why don’t you do commercials?…why don’t you try that?” And the reaction was good and I think the consumers want to hear from the owner, from the CEO, the founder of that company.

ADOTAS: Do you think it plays as well on the Internet?

JOHN SCHERER: Yes, I think it does. And I think that because of people we do business with that say, “We want you, you’re a brand name, we want to do business with you” because of having the brand name and so it will sell better, it will convert better than things that aren’t recognized.

ADOTAS: What a lot of our readers talk about is how important it is to maintain a good experience with the customer. So how would you advise them to do that?

JOHN SCHERER: You got to have a great product. When we went out the door and we started doing the free offer, we couldn’t do that, we couldn’t be this successful with it if it was a bad product. I mean, it doesn’t take long for people to go “that thing didn’t teach me anything, that’s garbage.” It teaches; and it teaches well and quickly. So that we said we have to do. We’re really here for the customer, we’re here to teach them and everybody in this company is very sincere about the learning for our customer. We truly want them to learn, and marketing to the consumer, you got to care about them because they know whether you care or not…they truly do know.

ADOTAS: So of the positive experiences that I read online, people really are learning, people really appreciate the product, they really improved from using the products; however there is the segment of people that are very unhappy, feel they got over-billed, under-billed, wrongly-billed, whatever…and there’s always that segment. Can you respond to that?

JOHN SCHERER: Always, always.

ADOTAS: And that segments always the loudest?

JOHN SCHERER: They will because the people that are so happy are the ones that I run into on the street or something and so I’ve had people hug me! I don’t get that negative. I don’t hear that, but I read it online, I can read that. We had an article done one time in a newspaper – and it was a very positive article, but he said, “Ya, but they get their share of complaints, blah, blah, blah.” And so we, the guy, the article, we sent him…we looked up who he was talking about, he contacted those people and heard their side of it. He just took a little extra time and we sent him what really happened. We sent him all the records, so he saw what really happened. He called them up – he said, “You know, here, I’m going to send you this. Here it is.” In fact, one was from television. He said, “I’m going to send you your recording.” The person said, “Oh I guess I was wrong.” I guess I was wrong? But you went on the Internet and you wrote something negative about us…and you guess you were wrong? So, we want everybody to be satisfied and I would tell the young entrepreneurs starting out and trying to develop, when that happens to them, just keep moving. As long as they know in their heart they’re doing the right thing by the customer…that’s all you can do. When you sell over 10 million products out there, and you got a handful of the negative…I mean 10 million, that’s a lot, and then you have probably twice that that have used the product, maybe 30 million that have used our product, and you got a handle of those – it’s just so, so small … and any business will have them.



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Reader Comments.

I heard the professor laid off 40 people yesterday including their VP who handles all CPA Marketing. Must not be doing quite so well if that is happening. Adotas, when will you stop glorifying this company and realize that these are the biggest crooks out there. The FTC came down on Columbia House this month. I am sure this is the next company in the crossfire as their business model is dispicable and business practices horrendous.

Posted by twistedsister | 5:41 pm on June 2, 2008.

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