Buzz Without Bucks

Shelby Coffey, a shy, blond 10-year-old in suburban Atlanta, loves BellyWashers. Really. There are 45 of the cartoon-character juice bottles in a place of honor on a shelf above her desk. There's a scarce Sylvester, a rare Blossom, and the much sought-after green Power Ranger.

But Shelby is more than just a collector. With 15 young friends, she has organized a BellyWashers club to do community-service projects. They visit children's hospitals to pass out BellyWashers at Christmas, clean city parks under a BellyWashers banner, and donate proceeds of their yard sales to disadvantaged children. Over the past year, Shelby has amassed a five-inch-thick binder of pictures and newspaper clippings documenting her work on behalf of the brand. Local TV stations have filmed her good deeds. The kicker: She does it all for free. "It's been lots of fun," says the fifth grader.

Shelby is a buzz machine, the sort of hyperdevoted customer that marketers dreams of. As traditional media channels fragment and consumers zap commercials quicker than you can say TiVo, more companies are looking to harness the power of buzz. "Word of mouth has superseded any form of paid advertising, in terms of influence," says Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide and author of Buzz: Harness the Power of Influence and Create Demand (John Wiley, 2003). Personal recommendations, she says, have become far more reliable and authentic than conventional hype.

Agencies such as Salzman's once looked out for trendsetters, the folks thought to be key influencers in others' purchasing decisions. But Salzman, who has spent decades on the cool-hunting beat, now says that that's a mistake. Those people, whom she calls "alphas," may be the first to start trends, but they're not especially good at sharing information. "They're often introspective and socially alienated," she says.

More important are people whom Salzman calls "bees." These folks aren't satisfied just knowing the next cool thing. They live to spread the news -- and others listen to them. "Bees are the critical link between the genesis of a trend and its ultimate incarnation in the world of the mainstream consumer," Salzman explains. Harness their power, she says, and watch the news spread, from cell phone to email to Weblog to cash register.

It's a subtle and imperfect art, dictated by changing tastes and the vagaries of human networks. If done right, though, marketing by buzz doesn't just work well, it works well for less money. Compared with most traditional marketing channels, spreading the word by word of mouth can bring enormous exposure for just a modest investment. In this game, the company with the best buzz -- not the biggest bucks -- wins.

In Zone Brands Inc., the Atlanta-based company behind BellyWashers, is a classic example. It has nurtured buzz and buzz meisters from the beginning, mostly because it's had to. A startup taking on giants in a fiercely competitive trade, it has never had the budget to sustain traditional mass marketing.

BellyWashers were born on a whim. Jim Scott and Richard Williams, fraternity brothers at the University of Georgia, launched In Zone in 1997 to manufacture plastic housewares such as water bottles, sippy cups, and "Bubba Kegs," a favorite with college kids. One day, in an idle moment, Scott, a gregarious guy with a subtle Southern drawl, cut the head off a doll and stuck it atop a sports-drink bottle. He instantly resolved to go into the beverage business -- and he soon struck a deal to put Scooby-Doo on bottle tops and peddle the drinks off a cart at nearby Six Flags for $4 a pop.

Today, Scott leans back in his cheerfully taste-free office -- red-and-lime concrete walls and a giant cardboard cutout of Scooby-Doo skulking behind the computer. "We had figured out what children want from the drinking experience, and it was very simple: fun." His business model: Lock up the rights to sell popular cartoon characters on beverage bottles. Make them cool enough and change them often enough so that kids will be motivated to collect them. Decorate the product with games and trivia. Launch a Web site where they can swap information and sign up for email blasts about new products. Goose the drink with vitamins to keep parents happy. How could it fail?

For one thing, it could run out of cash. "Every week or two, Richard would come by my office and say, 'Jim, I need $20,000 more by the end of the day so that we can keep going,' " Scott recalls. With little to spend on marketing, In Zone at first relied on the power of licensing and packaging to create brand awareness. "In Zone had no experience in the beverage category, but they studied the candy, juice, and toy industries and stole ideas everywhere, then pulled it all together," says Ken Bernhardt, professor of marketing at Georgia State University.