COLUMN ONE : Profiting Off the Frightened : Preoccupation with safety has fueled a booming industry. But those who reap riches by selling security stand accused of manipulating emotions as often as they are praised for devising solutions.
For James E. Winner Jr., crime--and the fear it spawns--most assuredly pays.
Over the years, Winner has sold women’s clothing, chemicals and keyboard organs. But it took a steel steering-wheel lock, designed to prevent car theft, to make his fortune.
The lock--shaped something like a police nightstick and called, appropriately, the Club--first came on the market in 1986. It was distributed by Winner and a secretary from this fraying steel town in the hills north of Pittsburgh. Now, 14 million Clubs and what seems like an equal number of “I’m- not- an- actor- I’m- a- police- officer” ads later, he conducts business from the highest floor of a four-story building with a huge rooftop sign that reads “The Winner.”
These days, he employs 250. His firm, Winner International, was named to Inc. magazine’s latest list of the fastest-growing companies in America. And his core product is so well-known that David Letterman drew hoots and applause when he drove off in a Club-equipped golf cart during a TV skit last month.
Golf carts, in fact, may be the only vehicles for which Winner doesn’t try to sell protection. He offers the Truck Club, the Boat Club, even the Bike Club. And with the FBI reporting more random murders than ever and with fright growing faster than violence itself, Winner is moving into the personal safety field: Pepper spray. Carry-along alarms. An electronic device aimed at carjackers.
Jim Winner is an expert at reading a national psyche preoccupied with crime. While he is an acknowledged master, many others are mining the same surge of emotion that has Americans scrambling for safety in a society on the edge. From bulletproof wall treatments to Doberman-In-A-Can chemical sprays, the security industry is booming: about $300 million annually in sales of non-lethal weapons and $6 billion for alarms. Some estimates of the total spent by the frightened go as high as $50 billion.
“There’s also no doubt that this is a big untapped market,” says Rosemarie Kitchin, an automotive public relations expert, in the trade journal Aftermarket Business. Analysts expect growth of 30% to 50% over the next decade.
Even cellular phones and pagers are being touted as safety devices (just call for help if attacked). Mortgage companies include circulars about alarm systems in the envelope with the monthly payment coupon. Drugstore chains hold protection-theme sales.
At the intersection of fear and commerce, cause and effect are difficult to separate. As do politicians and the media, businesses that deal in the fallout from crime stand accused of manipulating emotions as often as they are praised for putting forth solutions.
The cautionary voices come from academics and consumer advocates. The majority of offerings on the crowded market, priced anywhere from $30 to $3,000, are “largely a waste of money,” says USC criminologist Marcus Felson. He believes that the most effective crime prevention is building design and neighborliness. Another free weapon is common sense: locking doors, strengthening your fist by gripping your keys between each finger, requesting a parking lot escort at night.
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Still, he knows the public is responding to the entrepreneurs’ pitches. “Salesmen aren’t going to bother selling something if nobody’s going to buy it,” he said.
Such receptivity is relatively new. Fred Benford can recall the 1980s when he was executive vice president for an auto-alarm company whose ads showed police arresting a car thief. Informal surveys and the reaction of buyers for national store chains quickly turned up “a negative reaction,” Benford said. “They were saying ‘I don’t believe it.’ ‘It’s not going to happen to me.’ ‘You’re trying to scare me.’ ”
Today, Benford is general manager of 100+ Motoring Accessories, a new security products division of Anaheim-based Coyote Enterprises--which until recent years was devoted to the sale of lugs and lug nuts.
Benford has discovered that “Fear sells. They say, ‘I am scared.’ ” The packaging for one of his company’s alarms shows a thief running away from a car. Another box, he said, pictures “a man--it probably should be a woman--pressing a panic alarm that sounds to scare away somebody standing near the car.”
Sensing riches to be reaped, inventors are besieging Dewey Stokes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, to review their creations for endorsement. Stokes often finds himself at once appalled and amused.
“One guy,” he said, laughing, “wanted us to endorse an electric field he could put around a car. If someone got too close, they’d get a shock.” (Thumbs down from Stokes.)
Winner’s son and vice president of sales, James B. Winner, worries that the respectability of the industry as a whole could be endangered by the rush. “There are a lot of inferior products out there,” he said, “and a lot of patent infringement.”
The usefulness of the Club itself has been a controversial question. Company spokesman Tom McCartney noted that the product has undergone several design changes as thieves find its vulnerabilities. The steel is now tempered to a higher standard, for example, to better withstand an assault by Freon, a gas that made the metal brittle enough to shatter.
Even so, Consumer Reports magazine notes “we could easily slice through the steering wheel and slip the lock off like a ring from a finger.” Consumer reporter David Horowitz calls the Club “useful as a deterrent,” though he adds that “if a professional really wants your car, if he’s filling an order, it won’t stop him. Nothing will.”
What is not in question is the elder Winner’s talent for tapping into fear.
Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey “did so much for us” as a spokesman, Winner said, “because he would say, ‘You may live in an area that’s safe but I bet you drive to the city sometime. I bet you go to the ballgame sometime.’ ” In essence, he gave people something to be afraid of.
Winner’s ads for the Door Club--a removable barrier said to withstand more than a ton of force--do not feature a burglar attempting to enter an empty house, by far the most common trespassing situation. Instead, a family cowers in the living room as an attacker slams against the door.
The son of a local dairy farmer, Jim Winner, 65, grew up six miles from here in a valley far removed from the urban hotbeds of crime.
In 1986, his Cadillac was stolen from the lot of the small hotel he owned. Winner says the theft reminded him of his days as a soldier in Korea, when he was ordered to secure Jeeps with a padlock and chain every time he parked. Based on that memory, he says, an Ohio mechanic named Charles Johnson built prototypes of various Club concepts until one worked.
In federal court in Akron last year, Johnson told a different story, claiming that he was the true inventor of the Club. After a jury sided with Johnson but before a judgment was reached, Winner agreed to pay a settlement of $10.5 million.
Now Winner is free to continue his marketing barrage.
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“Somebody told me, ‘Jim, you ought to get ahold of Connie Francis,’ ” he said recently, hands clasped together prayerfully as he sat at the head of a conference table. “Remember the Connie Francis case?” The actress won a settlement of nearly $1.5 million from the Long Island motel where she was raped in 1974.
“That’s a great idea,” Winner mused. “Connie Francis for the Door Club.”
If stimulating fear is one key part of the equation, cultivating a reputation for expertise and authority is the flip side. Winner, recalling the old Bayer aspirin commercials that boasted “Nine out of 10 doctors agree . . . ,” decided he would use police to sell the Club. His first recruit, Sharon policeman Jack Klaric, became a star of sorts and got stopped on the street for autographs. Klaric’s testimonial was scripted and he was paid a fee.
The national Fraternal Order of Police also endorsed the Club. Winner has made donations to the organization but says they were unrelated to the testimonial. A Los Angeles police officer who endorsed the Club was given “a small distributorship” after his retirement, Winner said.
More than 20 cities also have started Community CarWatch campaigns--coordinated by CarWatch of America out of Winner’s Sharon address. Police hold seminars to raise awareness about auto theft and the Club is sold at a discount by community groups.
The project began in 1992 when Othal Brand, the mayor of McAllen, Tex., wrote to Winner requesting Clubs to sell in his city of 90,000, which had been hit by a 73% increase in car thefts. “I heard about the Club through their people; I’m not sure what they were doing here,” Brand said. “We worked out a deal with them.”
Winner sold 21,000 Clubs in McAllen in 1993. Auto theft dropped by 50%. “We worked on law enforcement as well, but we can attribute most of it to (the Club),” Brand said. “It is not absolutely theft-proof, but it is effective. The Club makes it a little bit harder.” He added an unsolicited comment: “I didn’t get paid.”
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The project’s success inspired Winner to survey 1,000 police criminal prevention officers to see if they would be interested in an education program that is, in the words of company spokesman McCartney, “built around the Club.” Cities from Irondequoit, N.Y., to Huntington Park have signed on.
Sharon, population 20,000, is not involved in CarWatch. But here on the banks of the Shenango River, the town is a showcase for Winner’s marketing savvy.
Six cars, including a bright-red 1977 Corvette, hang upside down in the Quaker Steak and Lube restaurant on Chestnut Street. They all sport Clubs, courtesy of Winner.
On the ground floor of The Winner Building is a women’s clothing store--a Winner-owned venture that donates its profits to charity. Near the pianist, by a rack of velvet and rhinestone cocktail dresses, stands a display of Clubs in designer colors and a rack of Club pepper spray.
Each guest room of the local Winner-owned Radisson Hotel is protected by a Door Club. Ditto at Tara, an antebellum-themed resort nearby which he also owns.
Winner’s ambitions, of course, extend far beyond his hometown. He can see it all: Door Clubs in the Chicago Housing Authority’s crime-wracked high-rise housing projects. A device to protect car stereos (“We really worked on this but have found nothing that’s aesthetically acceptable. We could activate a pepper spray that would stop ‘em cold.”). Clubs on rental cars. Clubs at new-car lots.
“In five years,” Winner said, “I want to be a $1-billion company”--up from $150 million today. “And it’s doable,” he said.
The primary markets for the Club have been in California and in the East Coast megalopolises. But as crime and awareness of crime spread to the second-tier cities, the Winners see great potential for sales surges across the nation.
For three years, Jim Winner had his eye on the newspaper accounts and television attention devoted to carjackings. Now, he’s come up with a way, he thinks, to combat this new breed of crime.
Next month, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Winner plans to introduce the Wizard, which will cost several hundred dollars and need professional installation.
He had a hard time containing his glee when he described it. “It’s electronic, you carry it with you away from your keys,” Winner said. “If you get carjacked, your car is running and you just get out. It requires no effort on your part.
“You get 20 feet away, and the car goes a mile or two down the road, and then starts shutting down, like it’s running out of gas. You’re not around when it happens. We can make the doors lock, so the carjacker’s in there.”
His face reddened and he leaned forward. “We can make the lights start blinking on and off! We can make the horn start honking!”
Voila. Jim Winner smiled proudly.
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