Once Is Not Enough

Why the marketing genius who made Perrier a household word has fizzled as a small-business consultant.

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TO BRUCE NEVINS, IT WAS JUST another day in the limelight. Nineteen seventy-nine had been a good year for him, and he had become a regular on the media circuit, profiled in newspapers, mentioned in gossip columns, interviewed on radio and television. With his polished good looks, he had both the appearance and the demeanor of a celebrity. Now he found himself in the studios of KABC Radio in Los Angeles, waiting to go on the air to talk once more about the things that had made him famous.

Comfortable as he was in this setting, he was by no means a typical talk-show guest. He was not plugging a movie; he had written no books. Rather, his fame came from water -- a particular kind of water, one that bubbled up out of the ground in Vergeze, France. There it was put in attractive green bottles and shipped to the United States. It was called Perrier.

Thanks largely to the efforts of Nevins, Perrier had become the toast of the American leisure class. A new generation of health-conscious, upwardly mobile young professionals were drinking it by the truckload, convinced that it was as special as the marketing campaign suggested. Admittedly, other carbonated waters cost less, but they lacked Perrier's natural minerals and its unique taste, or so the faithful claimed.

There were skeptics, however, and one of them happened to be KABC Radio's Michael Jackson, the host of the popular talk show on which Nevins was about to appear. Jackson was so skeptical, in fact, that he had planned a little surprise for his guest. Soon after the show began, he challenged Nevins to a blind taste test. If Perrier were truly distinctive, Jackson suggested, Nevins of all people should be able to taste the difference. Taken aback, Nevins agreed to give it a whirl.

Jackson proceeded to place seven paper cups on the table -- six filled with club soda, one with Perrier. Nevins tried them all and chose one. Wrong, said Jackson; that was club soda. Nevins picked another. Wrong again. A third choice. Wrong once more. In all, it took him five tries to pick out the water from France -- a result that gave Jackson no end of satisfaction.

Nevins, for his part, took the episode in stride. After all, the water was only part of Perrier's appeal. "It's hard to tell the difference between seltzer, Perrier, and club soda," he admits, "but in a restaurant, they don't just bring you a glass of water; they bring you a bottle. As a customer, you respond to the shape of that bottle, the feel of it in your hand, the design of the label. There's something to that, a panache. It becomes something you can identify with."

The water, in other words, was a commodity. The genius was in the marketing.

Marketing is hot these days, and its popularity has spawned a new breed of consultant, the professional "marketeer." Scores of them can be found roaming the business landscape, offering their services to companies, especially small ones, that lack the in-house expertise to win the battle for shelf space in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Many of these specialists come with hefty credentials. Seasoned veterans of such consumer product giants as Beatrice, Dart & Kraft, and Pillsbury, they tell war stories of big-time marketing campaigns for products ranging from Prestone Anti-Freeze to Green Giant vegetables. Some have been spun loose in corporate restructurings and cutbacks. Others have simply decided to strike out on their own. Whatever their reasons for leaving the Fortune 500, their backgrounds suggest a level of real-world marketing experience that would impress even the most hard-bitten of small-company presidents.

And perhaps the most impressive of the lot is Bruce Nevins.

Nevins is an acknowledged master of product positioning, a reputation built largely on his success with Perrier in the late 1970s. Since then, he has done a nice job of positioning himself as well. A 49-year-old bachelor, he drives around in a white Jaguar XJS and is often spotted at trendy watering holes in the company of beautiful women, including Shelley Hack, of "Charlie's Angels" fame, and Margaret Trudeau, the estranged wife of the former Canadian prime minister. When he is not traveling, he lives in an elegant rooftop apartment just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. On summer weekends, he can usually be found at his house in East Hampton.

Nevins came to his present position via a circuitous route. A West Point graduate, he spent four years in the service -- one year as a Green Beret in Southeast Asia. He then enrolled in the Stanford Business School and took an immediate liking to advertising and marketing. After business school, he did a two-year stint with Benton & Bowles Inc., the Manhattan advertising agency, before moving on to Levi Strauss as merchandising manager for international operations. Seeing growth opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region, where the company was doing less than $1 million in sales, Nevins set up shop in Hong Kong. By the time he returned to California in 1973 to become Levi's head of corporate planning and new business development, international sales overall, which had been a mere $10 million, had soared to $400 million.

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