He does not use focus groups. What would be the point? What focus group would have given a thumbs up for a commercial that includes the phrase "total heinous garbage"?
"Heinous" and "garbage" are words that Dell Schanze likes. Also sentences like "I have kicked the snot out of all my competitors."
"Hey, this is Super Dell from Towww-tally Awwwwwesome Computers," his voice squawks and squeaks across the airwaves. Here is Schanze singing a doo-wop song that ends with the line "You'll get yourself some quality and not a piece of pooh." Here he is on TV hopping around the screen, reciting a chant that begins "The wonderful thing about Tiggers" and ends with "I don't know where this is going."
Schanze, you may not be surprised to learn, makes his own commercials. In this way he's Utah's latest incarnation of Mr. Mac, if you can picture Mr. Mac as a hyperactive seventh-grade boy who sells computers instead of two-pants suits.
Like Mr. Mac and the Gadgets Guy and T. ("Thaaank Yewwww!") Buff and Duane Brown before him — and like his own competitor/sidekick Dan "The Laptop Man" Young — Schanze makes the kind of commercials we all love to hate.
Every market has one: the retailer who stacks 'em deep and sells 'em cheap, who gets your attention by getting in your face, or by reciting his lines like a robot. Even if you don't want to buy a computer or a suit or a new Chevy, you can't avoid these people, especially when, as in Schanze's case, their advertising budget is $50,000 a month.
More often than not, they turn out to be merely a blip on the local advertising radar — out of business after several months or years. But sometimes, as with "Mr. Mac" Christensen, their longevity on the airwaves enables them to evolve into local pop culture icons.
Although the people who make "real" ads complain that he's doing it all wrong, Schanze is, as KALL radio sales manager Keith Pasker says, "laughing all the way to the bank." This winter, four years after airing his first commercial, he is opening his seventh computer store and has plans to go regional, then national and then, as he puts it, to achieve "world domination."
Part Bill Gates and part "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," the 31-year-old Schanze sells between $2 million and $3 million worth of computers a month to customers he addresses as "dude."
Sure ads like Schanze's are tacky, says Susen Sawatzki, publisher of "adnews" in Salt Lake City. But people are sometimes wary of slick, sophisticated ads. "Research-based ads put us on guard," she explains. "We tend to admire people who are more organic, who communicate without technique. We tend to question it less . . . . We might take tacky, because we think it's honest."
Off-the-wall ads like Schanze's "cut through the clutter," says Joel Morris, owner of MediaMax, a media buying company. The downside of acting like a clown, though is "a credibility issue with potential customers," Morris cautions.
But the slapstick and the "I'll sell you a computer for $100 less than anybody else" shtick is only part of his message, says Schanze. "I've got to be the most loving, caring person on the planet," he says, as evidenced, he says, by his lifetime guarantee on all the computers he sells. The computers are built using only the best components, he says, unlike the "total heinous garbage" of his competitors.
He has received legal notices from Micron, Gateway, Dell and most of the other computer companies and stores he has dissed in his ads. Also from Warner Bros., which argued that Super Dell is a take off of Superman. "Whatever," says Schanze, who actually got the nickname when he rode his motorcycle off a cliff in Big Cottonwood canyon.
At first, says Pasker, KALL and KNRS got a lot of complaints about Schanze's ads. Now there is only the occasional complaint — "just if he uses a word that's somewhat questionable," Pasker explains. Oh, yes, and also a few complaints after he did a radio spot "about his mother breast-feeding him."
Pasker met Schanze for the first time when he went to talk to him about doing his first radio commercial. "He was off-the-wall at the meeting," Pasker remembers. "So I said (the ads) had to be cash-in-advance."
Schanze knows how he comes across.. "A lot of people think I'm the most obnoxious person on the planet. But I still love myself." "On the planet" is a favorite Schanze phrase, as in "Nobody taught me how to do my own radio ads, and they've become the most successful on the planet."
Schanze spent his early years in Ithaca, N.Y., and moved with his family to Utah County when he was 12. After two years at Timpview High, he dropped out.
High school was mundane and boring, he explains. So he took the high school equivalency exam and entered Utah Valley Community College at age 16, then dropped out when that got boring, too. "Schools teach you to think like someone else," he argues. "I'm smarter than the teachers. I think I'm the smartest person in the world."
Although he never earned a college degree, he did get a black belt in karate. Here's what his black belt gives you, he says, that 50 Ph.D.s can't: the ability to love and appreciate yourself "no matter what people think of you." At Totally Awesome Computers, he now pays for all his employees to study karate.
At 17, he managed his own karate studio in California. Later he managed, then bought, a packaging and shipping store in the Salt Lake Valley. "One day I set a computer on the counter" — a computer he had built himself — and someone bought it. Then other people asked for his computers. "I started thinking, if I can sell five computers to people who just want to mail a package . . . "
His goal, he says, is to make all his employees millionaires and to be "the most influential person on the planet." Way more influential than Bill Gates, he says. "Bill Gates is lame (another favorite expression), and I'm going to fire him." Bill Gates doesn't love his customers, he says.
"Once I take over the U.S. computer market, I'll probably switch to the car market," he says.
He wants to become influential, he says, "so God has more effective people working for him. The more powerful I make myself, the more powerful servant I am to my Heavenly Father."
Meanwhile, he is trying to stop using the word "freakin' " in his ads, he says. Also the word "retard "and the word "sucks," he adds ruefully, even though "it's the 100 percent most perfect word when you're talking to 30-year-olds."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com