Retailer Got the Motivation Message; Now He’s Selling It
Right alongside May Co. and Trader Joe’s in the La Jolla Village Square is a business that 10 years ago might have been associated with stores that sold incense, beads and thongs.
But the Motivational Tapes Center on the upper level of the shopping center is anything but that. With its wood trim, mirrored glass, gray-blue carpet and neat rows of shelves, the store strives for respectability. Shoppers enter to the lulling sound of waves breaking against some distant shore.
It’s a stress-reducing tape, said Encinitas resident Jim Shott, who owns the store with his wife, Mary Ann. In addition, the store sells tapes to boost self-esteem, motivational tapes for sales people, tapes that help people lose weight or stop procrastinating. The store also sells self-hypnosis tapes and those with subliminal messages to stop smoking.
On one wall is an inspirational saying, Shott’s favorite, that reads: “Remember the road to success is always under construction.” The 58-year-old former consulting engineer said the success of the store is an indication that self-help has gone respectable.
“There used to be a stigma attached to self-help products because people didn’t want to admit they needed them,” Shott said. “It’s no longer considered a sign of weakness but one of strength to take care of yourself. . . . A lot of people want to make changes in their lives, and the tapes provide them with a relatively easy method for getting started,” he said.
Individual tapes start at about $9.95, but the store’s No. 1 personal growth seller, “Personal Power” by Anthony Robbins costs $180. The 24 cassettes offer a 30-day program in “personal growth and achievement,” Shott said.
The store also stocks Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends And Influence People;” Harvey MacKay’s “Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive,” and “Beware The Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt.” A browse through the stacks also turns up the “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” by Wess Roberts, and “Nice Guys Finish Rich” by Jim Hansberger.
The store also carries a line of tapes for children, including “Be True to Yourself” and “No More Nightmares,” said Shott, who says he sells about 40 to 50 tapes a day and 200 to 300 a week.
Tapes are becoming more popular because they are convenient: people can listen to them repeatedly and often as they commute to work, Shott said. And tapes may be more effective in changing behavior than books, Shott said, because it takes 19-21 repetitions of a positive idea to replace a negative idea and few people will read a book 19-21 times, Shott said.
Shott opened the store in the mall nearly two years ago, but he’s been in the business of making and selling tapes for 12 years. He fell into the business while he was still working as an engineering consultant.
With a physics degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Shott first worked as an engineer for General Motors and then in the aerospace industry.
He was working as an industrial consultant, doing on-site balancing of turboprop airplane propellers when he was invited by a friend to attend a church meeting of the Rev. Terry Cole-Whittaker, then the leader of the La Jolla Church of Religious Science, who went on to become a highly visible proponent of positive thinking.
“I really enjoyed listening to her, but they had a terrible sound system,” Shott said. “They had purchased a duplicator for recording the services and selling copies of the services. Just because of my electronics background, I started doing the recording and doing the duplication of tapes for them as a volunteer.”
As the demand for tapes grew, the church decided to get out of the recording business, and Shott bought its equipment and continued to record the services and sell the tapes.
“When I bought the equipment, I decided I needed some place to keep it, so I found a small storefront in Pacific Beach on Cass Street,” Shott said. The space was about 400 square feet.
Then, “since I had a storefront, I thought I might as well have a product to sell. I had listened to motivational tapes and was interested in them, but they were something you bought by mail order. When I started 12 years ago, you couldn’t buy them in a retail store. There weren’t any anywhere.”
He started out retailing the business and motivational tapes sold by Nightingale-Conant, a large, mail-order distributor, and self-hypnosis tapes by Potentials Unlimited. As the business grew, and more tapes came on the market, Shott moved the store into a 1,500-square-foot space on Garnet Avenue.
“At that location, I expanded into recording keynote speakers for conventions, and we still do that,” he said. About 90% of his business is made of repeat customers or referred customers. They range in age from the mid-20s to mid-40s, with a “good mix between male and female customers,” he said.
Along with the hundreds of tapes supplied by Nightingale-Conant, Simon & Schuster and other distributors, the store also carries his own line of subliminal tapes, Shott said.
His Dynamic Motivational Tapes deal with topics ranging from how to stop procrastinating to releasing stress and tension. The subliminal message on the stress release tape is embedded in the roar of the waves or blended with the sounds of music and nature.
The subliminal persuasion technique first hit America’s collective consciousness in 1956 when a marketing man reportedly flashed “Eat Popcorn and Drink Coke” on a movie screen at a drive-in. The subliminal message reportedly led to a substantial increase in popcorn and soft-drink sales.
Many experts dispute the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion in changing behavior. But Shott says he does not find the tapes to be a hard sell.
Because the information is presented subliminally, “your intellect doesn’t get in the way; you don’t argue with the information,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in (subliminal persuasion), because the information goes directly to the subconscious.”
“It will work as long as it is something you would consciously support,” he said. “As an example, if you were a smoker and you did not want to quit, listening to a stop-smoking tape would not have any effect. However, if you are a smoker and you would really like to quit, it will work.”
The message embedded on the tape is also written on the information card that accompanies each tape. “We do not sell any subliminal tapes without a copy of the spoken-word script,” Shott said. “The customer knows the exact message his subconscious mind will be receiving.
“We guarantee everything,” he said. “On an audiotape, if you can’t stand the person’s voice on the tape, or it doesn’t work, bring it back.”
But his is not a business that spends much time on negatives. “I just love my customers,” he said, “because they’re either a motivated person or they want to be.”
