“Brains Over Bucks.”

Street Fighter slugs it out in sales
Kevin Johnson

   For an appliance store promotion, Jeffrey Slutsky once gave away free half gallons of ice cream to potential refrigerator buyers.
   The hitch: to keep the ice cream from melting, customers had to rush home, preventing comparison shopping at a nearby Sears store.
   Slutsky, founder of 4 year old Retail Marketing Institutee Inc., specializes in this kind of low cost tactic, which he calls "Street fighting."
   Last month, he began promooting Cable Saver, a cable TV version of a shopper newspaper. Slutsky says New York businessman Barry Sillverstein, owner of the Columbus, Ohio cable company, hopes to take it national in a year.
   Other marketing ploys: a rock concert open only to holders of the service's discount card ("gets the kiddies upset if their parents don't subscribe").
   Not all of his ideas work, however. Once, for "Bourbon Cowboy" night at a nightclub, Slutsky, 28, stage an artificial cow chipthrowing con test. But the brown foam chips looked so real, nobody wanted to touch them.    Slutsky, whose book, Streetfighting, recently was published, says he tries "to get people to apply streetfighting methods to problems in their businesses."
   Slutsky has held about 60 half-day seminars for trade associations this year, sales groups and mom and pop businesses.
   But clients must know when to use Slutsky methods. A real estate agent in Forte Wayne, Ind., who wanted to impress his first customer "picked up his as yet unconnected phone and started talking up the deal of a lifetime," Slutsky recounts. "Then he hung up and said 'Yes'? The "customer" said, "'I'm here to hook up the phone.'"
   "At least (the agent's) heart was in the right place," Slutsky says.