Sidebar: Remixing Johnnie Walker

How do you blaze new trails with an old brand? First you listen -- closely and informally -- to find out why people don't buy as much of the product as you'd like them to. Then you devise a new product that reflects what people have told you. Finally, you tout the virtues of that product by using the same technique that helped reveal the old product's shortcomings. "A lot of our work is about letting consumers discover something on their own," explains Danny Robinson, cofounder and chief creative officer of Vigilante. "Ultimately, if consumers think that a product is worthy, they'll champion it for you. And their word has clout. Your word on a bunch of napkins or posters doesn't."

That's what Vigilante did when one of its clients, Schieffelin and Somerset, a large distiller that makes Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch whiskey, faced a strategic problem: Young people weren't bellying up to the bar for the Johnnie Walker brand. Instead of holding focus groups, conducting in-depth interviews, or distributing surveys, Vigilante organized an event that was cosponsored by Johnnie Walker and Hugo Boss. Vigilante then deployed its "Street Spies" to work the crowd and do what they do best -- listen.

The first discovery: Johnnie Walker was too harsh for young people's taste. "Women found the scotch too strong," explains Marc Stephenson Strachan, Vigilante's other cofounder. "Men felt that if they drank more than one, they'd be out for the night. People wanted a mixable drink -- specifically, one that was red and sweet. Of course, connoisseurs of scotch consider it blasphemous to mix scotch with anything but water. But right on the spot, we worked with a few bartenders to create a new drink."

That impromptu experimentation resulted in the Johnnie Blaze -- a concoction of scotch and pineapple juice, with a touch of grenadine for color. In an early test at one bar, seven cases of scotch were consumed in two hours. (The standard is two cases.) Vigilante knew that it was onto something. But rather than propose a splashy launch, it kept the drink underground, nudging the buzz. "We never promoted the Johnnie Blaze in any traditional manner," Strachan says. "We talked it up in clubs. We sent bottles of scotch, with the drink's recipe attached, to influential people in the entertainment and fashion industries. Consumers aren't stupid. We couldn't put ads in newspapers and expect people to walk into clubs and say, 'Hit me with a Blaze.' We had to reach them at points of fusion and ask them to help us build the drink's popularity."

Sidebar: Prescription for Empathy

Vigilante beat out five other agencies to win the business of AmeriGroup corp., an HMO that provides care mostly to inner-city residents. Vigilante didn't win because of a clever campaign to help AmeriGroup communicate with customers. It won because it helped AmeriGroup understand its customers. Specifically, it helped the client understand that its market was defined not by race but by attitudes that grow out of poverty.

Vigilante relied on a methodology that it calls "UNITE" (urban intelligence through empathy). To find out how AmeriGroup's customers think about medical care, agency staffers visited the neighborhoods and homes of various ethnic groups -- African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Polish-Americans -- in Chicago and in New York City. What the staffers heard was sobering: For many folks, medical care was so far down the list of priorities -- so far below more-pressing goals, such as making ends meet and staying safe -- that they gave little thought to health care.

Then, at a meeting with AmeriGroup, Vigilante staffers placed first-aid kits around the room, noting that the contents (aspirin, a few Band-Aids, dried chicken soup, a garlic clove wrapped in cheesecloth, Robitussin, tea bags, and Tiger Balm) represented the "health-care plan" that many of the company's patients relied on. It was a small example of an important principle: If you want a company to understand its customers, don't tell its executives about your research findings -- show them the real world. Says Danny Robinson: "The way you help marketers understand their customers -- especially marketers who don't spend a lot of time in the markets that they're focusing on -- is by showing them what happens there."

That's why, after discussing the first-aid kits, Vigilante showed AmeriGroup's marketing team several taped interviews from its neighborhood visits. "Some of the homes that we visited didn't even have electricity for our cameraman to use," explains Robinson. "We asked one woman, 'When you think about your kids' future, what do you think about?' She just looked at us. Her silence conveyed more about how hard her life was and what her priorities were than any graphs or statistics could possibly show. Most of the time, it's not enough to sit in a room and intellectualize about markets. Empathy lets you go beyond the question 'Why should I be doing this?' to the only question that really matters: 'How do I actually do it?' "