Diet guru Anne Collins knows how to grab attention, with her curious adverts and top-ranking website. Iva Pocock reports
Anyone with international marketing experience will tell you that localising your product is essential for success. Selling weekend breaks that are perfect for "your olds' might work in Australia, but "your parents" would be a better phrase for an Irish market. But using "no sex" to sell dieting classes in west Cork? Weight loss consultant Anne Collins claims her advertising is appropriate for her target market.
" 'No sex' has become a bit of a joke down here. I write a weekly column for the Southern Star, and I'm frequently being told I'm always talking about sex," explains Collins.
While her ads may be utterly bemusing to a non-Southern Star reader (does she mean that there's no sex in her classes or that dieting requires no sex?) she says they are designed to "bring a smile to people's faces".
"Straight away this is a good thing when it comes to weight loss", she says.
Making people smile and feel good about themselves is key to Collins's approach to dieting. Two years ago, she decided to bring her feel-good philosophy and substantial experience in helping people to lose weight beyond Cork to an international market by constructing a website: www.annecollins .com.
With references to "cookies", "candies" and "butts", it is aimed primarily at the US market, but conscious that "the US is very PC", she says, "there is no mention of sex". The site includes 1,200 pages of free information and the option to buy a diet plan online.
There are US, UK, Irish, Australian and Canadian versions available, which, she says, "include more than 80 recipes for main meals, tips on shopping and eating out, motivation tips, health and exercises for the body".
The diet plan package includes a 256-day helpline. "I spend 50 per cent of my time on line answering clients' questions," Collins says. For example, one day she had queries from a Canadian lumberjack, a 25-year-old Chilean man, a young Australian man who was 100lb overweight and a US mother of three who weighed 25 stone.
"They want emotional support", says Collins. "Mostly they want me to say it's OK, you can do it."
She says the reason so many diets fail is because people are hungry: "The big thing is to get people to eat more", she says, and encourages them to focus on a low-fat diet rather than low carbohydrates, which leads to hunger pangs.
ALTHOUGH she has no professional qualification and is not a dietician, Collins says her diet plan is "perfectly suitable for people who have eating disorders because it is a sensible diet which is good for everyone".
Dr Helen Quirke, of the Medical Centre in Skibbereen, agrees, saying she and her colleagues are happy to recommend Collins's diet to their patients because "it's very sensible with a good calorie intake and low fat content". She adds that she "could say the same about Weight Watchers".
Collins's website is currently ranked ninth out of 6 million sites on the Internet if searching for "diet" on www.google.com. The same search doesn't rank the Weight Watchers site in the top 60. She reckons the overall quality of information, the number of links from the site and the number of people who want to link to her site are the reasons her site scores so well.
Internet trainer and consultant Mark O'Sullivan doesn't entirely agree. "Being highly ranked by a search engine is not an endorsement of a site's quality. From reading the www.annecollins.com site, it is clear it has been tailor made for being picked up by search engines," explains O'Sullivan. "But it is also friendly, accessible and easy to load."