Buzzmarketing

get people to talk about your staff

Mark Hughes

Portfolio
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York,
New York 10014, U.S.A.

Chapter 1

out-think versus out-spend

Conventional advertising leads to conventional results. It

doesnt achieve breakaway growth. Plus, it takes a big-buck
marketing budget to afford it.
The only way for hot start-ups to grow profitably is with
buzzmarketing.
Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, 10
times more effective than TV and print advertising.
Buzzmarketing captures the attention of consumers and the
media to the point where talking about your brand or
company becomes entertaining, fascinating and newsworthy.
Buzz starts conversations.

conventional versus unconventional

In the traditional marketing model, the marketing team

creates a message, purchases media and sees the message
delivered to the customer whether business customer or
consumer.
In the buzzmarketing model, the consumer tells 2 friends,
those 2 tell 2 friends and so on, creating buzz. The idea is to
give people something to talk about.

to be or not to bea buzzmarketer

More than 23.000 new products are introduced each year in

America.
Of every product introduced each year in the consumer
packaged goods industry, 70% fail.
Of all small businesses started in America, 80% fail within the
first five years.
Buzzmarketing can make you the exception.

six secrets

Buzz basics:

1. Push the six buttons of buzz

2. Capture media
3. Advertise for attention
Buzz leadership: 4. Climb buzz Everest
5. Discover creativity
6. Police your product

Chapter 2

a brand literally on the map

Half.com is an eBay-style virtual marketplace for buyers and

sellers of books, movies, music and video games, but with
the retail look and feel of Amazon.
It is also one of the greatest publicity coups in history
according to Times magazine.

influencing influencers

The brand became popular because of the marketing teams

decision to rename one of the towns with the name Half in it
after the site that was about to be launched: Half.com.
The chosen town was Halfway, Oregon.
The story captured media attention even before the council
had approved the renaming, creating hostility among the
residents.
After a series of public hearings with the town influencers that
gave the marketing team the chance to explain, face-to-face,
all the benefits that all the publicity would bring to their town,
the council voted for the chanching of the name.

conclusion

Within 6 months, the company was sold to eBay. The price

tag was $300 million.
In less than a year, with a budget one-tenth the size of their
competitors, Half.com became one of the most trafficked
retail sites on the Internet.
In less than 3 years, it grew from 0 to 8 million registered
users.

Chapter 3

push the six buttons of buzz

Speaking face-to-face gives you what tons of marketers are

trying to get every day: attention. Face-to-face attention
competes with no other media.
Another secret of word-of-mouth is credibility. People you
hear from about a new brand are not being paid to pitch the
item and so you give them full credibility.
In addition to face-to-face attention, audio stimulus stays with
you longer, providing superior memory retrieval. Given the
right context of attention, audio stimuli can be far superior to
visual.

tell a friend

Word-of-mouth is more important today than at any time in

the past, for 4 reasons:
1. The ad clutter is rising to intolerable levels in America.
2. Traditional forms of media are rising in cost,
compounding the issue of clutter.
3. Weve been lied to so many times with advertising, it
seems like the only messages we trust these days come
from regular people like you and me.
4. Technology is accelerating word-of-mouth.

start a conversation

These 6 things push peoples buttons and start

conversations: 1. The taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humor)
2. The unusual
3. The outrageous
4. The hilarious
5. The remarkable
6. The secrets (both kept and revealed)

Chapter 4

brands before their time

In the 1970s, the market share for low-calorie brands tallied a

minuscule 0.3% of all beer consumed. Heavy beer drinkers
accounted for 85% of the consumption and they didnt want a
low-calorie beer. It was considered sissy.
Piels introduced Trommers Red Letter in 1964 and
Rheingold introduced Gablingers in 1967, but they both
yanked it off the shelves within weeks because of lousy
sales. Others, too, littered the beer industrys low-calorie
cemetery.

its Miller time

In 1973, the Miller Brewing Company of Milwaukee decided

to dive into the market with a brand called Lite.
10 years later, Miller Lite ranked as number 2 selling beer in
America, second only to Budweiser.
Before Lite was launched, Miller ranked down at number 6
among all beer companies in America.
At the time, Miller was selling its lead brand, High Life, as
The Champagne of Bottled Beer, even though 80% of beer
was consumed by blue collar workers.
In 1969, Philip Morris bought Miller Brewing Company.

the right insight

After Philip Morris acquired Miller Brewing Company, High Life

was repositioned as a blue collar beer.
Philip Morris continued acquiring more beer companies for
distribution efficiency, taking a special interest in one of the
new brands Lite, from Meister Brau.
A new recipe was created and ad agency McCann-Erickson
was charged with discovering if Lite could become a successful
national seller.
75 people who were drinking Gablinger's light beer were
interviewed revealing that heavy beer drinkers had no interest
in low calories. The light beer didn't fill them up.

the right environment

Nationwide, restaurants and bars accounted for 25% of beer

consumption in the U.S.
Restaurants and bars in Anderson, Indiana accounted for 75%
and Schlitz Light was the third best-selling beer in the town's
market.
Light beer was not heavily advertised in Anderson, but the blue
collar workers created their own positioning for it as less filling.
Given the right ad the Lite comercials featured former
celebrities and athletes who were just regular guys drinking
beer in a bar Miller Lite took off on its journey to the second
best-selling beer in America.

Chapter 5

green for Greenfield

Buzz is for individual entrepreneurs and professionals with a

solo or small-group practice, as well.

When Uri Geller became famous for his spoon-bending trick

in 1970s, Jeff Greenfield began performing the same trick,
though still a teen, and was written up in the preeminent
trade publication Magical Arts Journal.

He studied to become a chiropractor at a college in Los

Angeles paying his expenses as the youngest magician at
an exclusive club nestled in the Hollywood Hills, the Magic
Castle.

starting out

On graduating from chiropractic college, he moved from Los

Angeles to the suburban Boston hometown and Greenfield
Family Chiropractor was born with a shingle and a phone.

Most chiropractors in the Boston area had 2 ways of building

their business: yellow pages and the crooked spine pens
with the doctors name and telephone number.

At first, he attracted the patients without health insurance, the

patients no one wanted, charging them in the form of wordof-mouth.

the 2 demands

Besides the word-of-mouth promise, he prescribed a

schedule based on the patient, in order to get him healed as
quickly as possible.

To patients, this was nothing short of a miracle.

Every week he gave his patients 4 very nontraditional

business cards, with an inspirational saying on the other side.

His tiny practice that had begun with down and out folks
began to explode.

time for a real doctors office

While the typical chiropractor office was seeing 30 patients a

day per chiropractor, Dr. Jeff was seeing 125 to 150 patients
a day.
It was time to get a real doctors office.
He began booking people for a free dinner a a local
restaurant in exchange for a chance to tell them about his
practice. With a subject of interest, he grabbed 100% of their
attention.
Every Monday and Tuesday night, Dr. Jeff would perform.
95% of people who showed up scheduled a tour, and 70% of
those who toured became patients.

conclusion

The story of Greenfield Family Chiropractic is the story of

how a multimillion-dollar business was built with a focus on
getting consumers attention one person at a time not
millions of ad exposures at a time.

Chapter 6
American Idol

Simon Fuller, Simon Cowell and American Idols production

company, Fremantle Media, were enjoying success in the
UK, South Africa and Poland with a version called Pop Idol.

Hollywood executives showed little interest in signing the Idol

show for the American television.

It took Mike Darnell, head dude of reality programming at

Fox, for the Idol to arrive on American shores.

before the broadcast

The show itself cultivated a built-in audience before it even

aired not by using mass-market ads, but by connecting
one-on-one with thousands of people auditioning, and also
by going on the air in the summer when fewer new shows
are launched so that they had less competition for viewers.

after the broadcast

In America, most of the people in the television industry

sugarcoat the truth.

Enter Simon Cowell, the cocreator of Idol. On the air, hes a

man who knows that controversy generates buzz and thus
higher ratings.

But thats not all. Besides capturing peoples attention,

pushing their buttons and giving them something to talk
about at the watercooler the next day, the one thing that
separates American Idol from so many of the other reality
shows is honesty.

rulled by secrecy

At around 2:00 A.M. after every Tuesday night Idol

performance, four people know the secret of whos won.

Secrecy begs speculation and speculation leads to buzz.

short messaging service

Its January 2003, season 2 of American Idol and the

audience is given the opportunity, for the first time, to cast
votes by text message. American Idol taught America how to
text.

In 2003, 7.5 million text votes were sent in to the show and
33% of those people had never before sent a text message
in their lives.

According to technology research firm InStat/MDR, overall

U.S. text message volume rose from 11.9 billion messages in
2003 to a projected 30.2 billion in 2004.

power to the people

Interactivity is about getting your audience, reader or

consumer involved and interacting with your product; moving
them out of the role of passive observer.

Empowered interactivity takes that one step further by giving

the user a reason to be invested in your brand or product.

American Idol made empowered interactivity a key driver,

transforming the show into a fans show.

Chapter 7
capture media

The media has been called the fourth estate to keep

politicians and corporate America in check.

Media shares the 2 critical components of word-of-mouth

marketing: attention and credibility.

Roughly 6 times as many people read the average news

article versus the average advertisment.

In order to capture media attention, youve got to give it

something to write about.

frequency

The 5 most frequently written news stories are the following:

1. The David-and-Goliath story
2. The unusual or outrageous story
3. The controversy story
4. The celebrity story
5. Whats already hot in the media

Chapter 8
Apple Mac attack

The best-selling computer in 1982 was the Commodore 64.

Apple turned that around with a new product and a

memorable TV comercial.

The original intention was to air the comercial January 1,

1984, on all the TV College Bowl games. But, as the expense
proved too costly for Apple, they settled on launching their
new product, Macintosh, on what, at the time, was a cheaper
media alternative: Super Bowl.

big brother

In December 1983, the final version of what has come to be

called the 1984 commercial was ready and screened for
Apples Board of directors. They hated it.

They took the decision to sell all the airtime bought for the
Super Bowl and abandon the 1984 comercial.

However, the last 60 seconds of airtime were kept and the

1984 commercial aired January 22, 1984.

People requested that their station run it again so they could

take another look.

key ingredients

Apple didnt have any more money to air the spot again, so
that the commercial was replayed on networks and local TV
stations time and time again.

The 1984 commercial had 4 key ingredients of buzz:

1. Hot topic in the media
2. Controversy
3. David vs. Goliath
4. The unusual

payoff

Back in 1984, the Super Bowl was not known as an event to

showcase a new ad campaign.

Apple played its hand so well that the Super Bowl became
Americas number-one advertising event.

Chapter 9
ClearPlay

A ClearPlay-enabled DVD player can be programmed by the

user to filter out certain content.
At the time of its launching, the market place was already
crowded with shoulder-to-shoulder competitors such as:
CleanFlicks, MovieMask, Movie Shield Box and Clean Films.
Studying a decade of film industry, Consulting firm Paul Kagen
Associates found that 3% of theatrical feature films accounted
for 50% of the entire movie industry's profits. And those films
were G-rated. R-rated movies represented only 12% of the
industry of the industry's profits. In 2003, the figure was 81%.

filtered

After starting the company in 1997, ClearPlay negociated a

deal with Sanyo, which had agreed to make their next DVD
player with the ClearPlay standard.
ClearPlay management had been courting investors and
courting Wal-Mart at the same time.
63% of Americans were interested or very interested in the
ability to filter out certain content from movies.
On September 20, 2002, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese
and 12 other directors represented by the Hollywood-based
Director's Guild of America (DGA) were about to sue every
player in the filtering industry for copyright infringement.

down by law

Sanyo's lawyers got nervous at the thought it would be named

in the suit. No DVD players with ClearPlay functionality would
be made by Sanyo.
ClearPlay made the decision to take the lead role and fight the
entire entertainment industry.
The media picked up the story and focused on the little guy
fighting back.

fighting back

ClearPlay launched a defensive campaign.

After that, it hired a PR firm to push this message and the
press paid attention. As the PR firm leveraged this message
again and again, it gained ink in the Wall Street Journal,
Forbes, USA Today and Time.
ClearPlay CEO Bill Aho found himself being called new titles
on the Internet (such as the most hated man in Hollywood or
Chief Hore), which only added more controversy to both sides
of the story and more prime media fodder.

mainstream

May 2004. ClearPlay CEO Bill Aho testifies for the Congress,
getting even more press coverage.
HR 4586, introduced in June 2004, was essentialy a
congressional bill that would exempt ClearPlay's technology of
filtering for private home viewing from any claims of copyright
violation.
Wal-Mart began selling the first ClearPlay-enabled DVD
players in 2004 and continues carrying the product line.
Industry experts anticipate that by 2008, ClearPlay will be
standard in more then 50% of home DVD players produced.

revenue

8 million households subscribe to On Demad services; by

2010, On Demand could be as popular as HBO, in perhaps as
many as 30 million households.
ClearPlay is looking at a scenario in which customers might
see it easily worthwhile to pay $2 or $3 a month for the ability
to filter the programming you could be looking at a company
going from an idea to doing $1 billion a year in revenues.

Chapter 10
advertise for attention

Viewers zap more than 63% of TV ads.

Some 25% of all TV time is ad related.

When a TV commercial comes on, 92% of us change the

chanel, mute the commercial, ignore the commercial or divert
our attention to something else.

The more advertising in a given medium, the less effective

each advertisement. More clutter, less impact.

maxim 1: balance your media diet to maximize

attention

You can achieve much greater impact by bringing balance to

your media diet the types of media youre using for
advertising.

The brands with a balanced media diet spent 76% less on

advertising to achieve the same dollar per awareness point.

Advertisers are gradually breaking their habit from heavy TV

dependency.

maxim 2: use clutter-free media to capture attention

Traditional media (TV, print and radio) may play a role in your
marketing mix but, with a free-clutter media you can reap
100% mind share.
In 1925, Burma Shave spent $200 placing roadside signs
along Midwest highways advertising their product. They
spread all across the nation, becoming an American
landmark in advertising and garnering enormous coverage.
Half.com put an attractive offer on peanut bags using a
humorous edge: Youll go nuts over our prices or printed
messages on urinal screens: Dont piss away half your
money, head to Half.com.

fortune teller

96% of all fortune-cookie messages get read and 67% of

them get read aloud. Half.com put ads for their company
inside fortune cookies, reaching more people than Time
magazine before you can capture market share, you need
to capture mind share.

maxim 3: take off the shine

BuddyGopher is a program that allows people to customize

their AOL Instant Messenger away messages. The first 4
months got BuddyGopher 13,000 users, 150,000 registered
screen names and 9 million posted away messages each
month.

Nick Gray, the developer of BuddyGopher went to extremes

to make the posters advertising for the program look like
absolut shit on purpose. Using the PhotoShop software
program, he designed an almost horrid-looking color poster
and had 20 printed for $7.

maxim 4: turn your traditional media buys into buzz to

capture attention

Instead of handful of commercials, produce lots of different

commercials.

When it comes to TV, currently your product will often be

thrown in at no charge if youre advertising fairly regularly on
a particular show.

The key, however, is to get your product written into the script
and become integral, meaningful part of the show. Recall
AT&T Wireless text messaging on American Idol, or the way
Absolut became focus of an entire episode on Sex an the
City.

Chapter 11
Britney buzz

Larry Rudolph first met Britney Spears when she was 13

years old.
The man who is undoubtedly behind the buzz of one of the
worlds most well-known music artists turned her away, but
asked her mother to keep in touch periodically.
She was no singing-in-the-shower teen who walked in off the
street. Britney had spent summers in New York City at the
Off-Broadway Dance Center and the Professional Arts
School. At age 10, she added off-Broadway actress to her
resume and at 11 became a television perfomer for 2 years
as a Mouseketter on the Mickey Mouse Club.

delivering

Rudolph knew that a 13 year old solo pop star wasnt going to
make it in 1995. Pop music was pretty much out of favor.
New Kids On The Block had saturated the market 2 years
earlier and their audience of 8 to 13 year old were turning into
mid-teens and looking for cooler, edgier sounds.
It wasnt until June 1997, when pop was coming back, that
Larry Rudolph saw the opportunity for a wide-open market for
a white, female, solo pop artist.
Britney Spears has sold over 55 million records and has been
dubbed by Forbes magazine as the worlds most powerful
celebrity.

Chapter 12
climb buzz Everest

Buzz Everest represents achieving the pinacle of buzz

transforming your brand by doing things no one else has
been able to do.
In the early 1960s, Rit dye was a powedered product used
primarly by older women to color things like drapes and
furniture coverings.
The dye was sold through supermarkets, craft stores and
chains like Whoolwoths.
Its market share was abysmal compared to the leading
brand. But it sold for about 49 cents and cost only 7 cents to
make.

maxim 1: find your buzz Everest and climb it!

Cataloging all the possible uses for dye, one of the

researchers found that it was used in Africa and India to
decorate and imprint clothing.
The brand manager, Don Price, decided he would bring the
tye-dye process to America.
In the early 1960s, psychedelic colors were becoming the
rage and the hippies could actually be a market segment
interested in using psychedelic dyes to tye-dye their
individualistic garb.
In New York City, Greenwich Village was the area for opinion
leaders and influencers of the hippie movement.

eye-catching tye-dye

Don found artists willing to experiment with the tye-dye

process and so, the tye-dye became confined to a small
circle of users that wasnt expanding.
He invited several fashion editors to Greenwich Village
hoping to have them mention tye-dye in their articles as the
next fashion trend.
At about this time, a musical gathering was about to take
place in rural Woodstock, New York. Tye-dye T-shirts lined a
loft space the size of a football field, hanging from
crisscrossed clotheslines, taking up every inch of space. The
idea caught on big.

bona fide

Tye-dye became a symbol of antiestablishmentarianism.

Right after Woodstock, sales of Rit dye began to increase,

reversing the prior trend but not skyrocketing.

Don pitched a tye-dye fashion line to designers in New York

City. He was rejected by 23 designers, but found one who
saw the possibilities: Halston.

Shortly afterward, Halston used the tye-dye motif in many of

his department store boutiques and tye-dye took off as a
bona fide fashion.

maxim 2: take the risk

The traditional path is risk-free, but it will produce average

results, average market share and average profits. Unless
you climb buzz Everest, you may never know what you
missed.

Chapter 13
war of the colas

In the 1970s, Coca-Colas market share was 37% greater

than Pepsis.
The prediction that, by 1990, Pepsi would be an insignificant
factor in the soft drink business fired up the Pepsi Challenge
Pepsis own buzz Everest, which, from 1975 to 1983, was
one of the most memorable marketing campaigns in history.
Cokes market share lead over Pepsi narrowed from 37 to
10%.
The observation that lead to the Pepsi Challenge was that, in
a series of focus group sessions launched by Pepsi, people
would choose Pepsi over Coca-Cola 70% of the time.

the Challenge

In a vacant storefront at a Dallas shopping mall, the

Challenge was set up with a waiting room and a taste-test
room. 500 taste tests were filmed and, ultimately, about ten
were used as TV commercials.
When Pepsi brought its Challenge to Los Angeles, it woke
Coke up with a shake.
Instead of ignoring the Challenge ads, Coke ignited Pepsi
embers into a full-fledged forest fire, criticizing the scientific
process that Pepsi used in the Challenge.
Thanks to Coke, what had been a buzz for Pepsi morphed
into a roar.

Chapter 14
discover creativity

Our built up immunity to most of advertisings clutter and lack

of believability and to its mediocrity support George Lois
statement that 85% of all advertising is invisible.

Creativity is a very deliberate process.

Being a creative leader in the world of buzz requires you to

be open and honest because buzz and word-of-mouth
marketing only work when they are absolutely believable.

7 maxims for discovering buzz creativity

Maxim 1: be courageous - demand creativity of yourself.

Maxim 2: define the problemdumb the strategy.

Maxim 3: understand your consumers firsthand.

Maxim 4: swing the bat often.

Maxim 5: initiate competition.

Maxim 6: pay attention to names and words.

Maxim 7: create content, not ads.

Chapter 15
Mustang bang

Between 1961 and 1964, 2 out of 3 Americans looking for a

car didnt even consider a Ford.
The launch of the Mustang on April 17, 1964, would change
that perception forever and ignite one of the most amazing
business turnarounds in history.
The seeds of buzz were sewn with the Walter Mitty ads (the
brand was positioned as class for the mass) and the
marketing campaign that launched the Mustang created
national hysteria.
Rather than simply launch the Mustang campaign, Ford
teased the debut.

revealed

Newspaper ads in Americas top 60 markets advertised

upcoming TV commercials.

For the first time, Ford bought all the TV advertising time
between 9.30 and 10.00 P.M. on a Thursday night to saturate
America with the first announcement of the new car.

Soon after the first TV announcements, the country was

blanketed with 15,500 billboards announcing that the secret
was out.

video didnt kill the radio star

The company also unleashed the most innovative radio

advertising campaign of its kind. Ford employed the top 200
DJs in America that would come to Detroit, test drive the car
on Fords proving grounds before the launch and write their
own copy for the 60 second ad, talking about their Mustang
test drive.

In the first several months, 4 million people swarmed into

Ford dealerships.

Both Time and Newsweek featured Ford on their covers

during the week of launch.

buzz + ad

Print ads for the Mustang scored an almost unheard 95%

readership.

When buzz and advertising coincide, the impact of

advertising is 6 to 10 times more effective.

In less than 150 days, Mustang sold 100,000 cars. In its first
year, it sold more than 418,000 cars and could have sold
more if capacity allowed. Before its second anniversary,
Mustang sold more than 1 million cars, capturing 5% of the
entire car market with just one model.

Chapter 16
police your product

Policing your product is the lifeblood of buzz.

Negative word-of-mouth spreads much faster than positive

buzz.

For every single complaint you get, there are 26 more

unhappy customers who never bother to complain. On
average, those 26 you never heard from will tell 16 other
people about your awful product. So, for every 23 unhappy
customers who take the time to complain to you, your
company will have 10.000 enemies who didnt bother to write
or call.

guidelines

Maxim 1: dont ignore your instincts.

Maxim 2: get your leaders on the front lines to police your

product.

Maxim 3: survey, survey, survey.

Maxim 4: motivate your employeeswith buzz!