The conventional way to publicize the Vacu-Vin would have been to send samples and a press release throughout the media, then follow up with a phone call. But Ochman didn't even put a press kit together. Instead, she targeted a much more specific group, organizing a luncheon and wine tasting for New York City's top 20 sommeliers and wine writers, sampling vintage wines first uncorked, then resealed with the Vacu-Vin.
If they hadn't liked the product, Lemme would have had a second failure on his hands. But they loved it. Wine drinkers are a trendy lot: word of mouth in New York's best cellars combined with the enthusiastic endorsement of the most influential of the trade press pushed sales to $5 million over the first year. Within six months, Lemme had the number-one gift item in Bloomingdale's, and he'd added 25 manufacturers' reps and 150 distributors to help meet the demand. Suddenly the press was clamoring to find out about his product; stories in The Wine Spectator and Wine & Spirits were followed by write-ups in Good Housekeeping, Playboy, and USA Today.
Lemme, not surprisingly, calls himself "an advocate of PR from the word go." But what impressed him as much as the effect of that one wine-tasting session is how Ochman targeted other small audiences with subsequent PR projects to help him begin to transform an interesting marketing coup into a real company.
Ochman started with a customer newsletter, Vacu-Vine, sent to all 175 distributors. Ochman ghosted a column for Lemme in each issue, then filled the pages with tips for success, honors for top performers, and a welcome to new members of the fold. "It ties them into my company," Lemme says. "There's something more than just the standard supplier/distributor relationship now; there's a pride factor.'
Then Ochman turned her attention to helping Lemme find the answers to his management fears. She arranged for him to be named keynote speaker at a small-business conference in Cincinnati, then helped him write what would be his first speech. Besides the catharsis of telling the story of how his earlier failure turned to the Vacu-Vin success, his moment in the spotlight introduced him to a network of fellow small-company executives he could talk to about planning, financing, and his dreams of an eventual IPO. The network expanded further still after Ochman placed the story of the rags-to-riches speech in the New Haven Register and The Hartford Courant business sections, prompting one local banker to call Lemme with personal congratulations.
"All of a sudden I'm a celebrity," Lemme marvels. "It's amazing -- I've got banks calling me. Believe me, banks don't usually call asking for your business.'
* * *
What do a new pig, a perpetual light bulb, and the Watergate paper shredder have in common?
* New Pig Corp.'s transformation from a regional service company with 150 customers to an international export company with some 30,000 customers can be traced in local business journals and scores of newspapers, in national magazines like Inc., Fortune, and Forbes, and on TV broadcasts coast to coast, "thanks," Don Beaver says, "to a strange name and an odd product that was good for the press.'
* Kevin Keating told the story of the DioLight bulb to more than 300 radio interviewers, The New York Times, Cable News Network, and on UPI -- and got $150,000 from a would-be investor the day after his story appeared in the Times.
* Michael Falco's Watergate, Piranha, and Brute paper shredders have been a media fixture for much of the past decade; received favorable play in The New York Times and Newsday; labeled a status symbol for the '80s in The Wall Street Journal; paired with Richard Nixon in People -- while sales have climbed from less than $200,000 to $5 million.
If you guessed all three men were lucky, you'd be only partly right. All three stepped into the media spotlight, then stayed there far longer than their allotted time. And all three saw sales soar. But what's important is how they did it. For all of them the press was the last messenger targeted, approached only after they had built a network and reputation inside their industry. They used not press releases, but the same one-on-one strategy they'd practiced all along. Nothing else would have worked so well, or probably even worked at all.
Small companies that pitch their stories to a reporter any other way are likely to get the brush-off, or be relegated to the oddball filler slot. If some Gyro Gearloose from Michigan had called CNN with a tale of perpetual light he wouldn't have been able to get past the network switchboard. But Keating had backup for his DioLight bulb -- journal articles and applications stories.
The media are like any customer that way. They'd rather buy from a credible source. They're impressed by experts. And they follow the pack, turning for advice to the same people to whom your customers turn. If The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal wants to write a story on shredders it'll call one of a half-dozen security trade journals -- and probably be referred to Michael Falco.
That's no accident. Falco has worked nearly two decades building his reputation with the trade editors. The mass-media relations came last in his plan, after he had developed the Shredex Inc. dealer and customer bases and courted the security and business-to-business marketing magazines. So by the time he started talking to reporters he knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to say it well.
Like Lee Iacocca, who perfected the role, Falco, Beaver, and Keating all head and speak for their companies. But lacking the Chrysler Corp. chairman's TV and bookstore visibility and marketing budget, they have to take advantage of their size. So they handle the press personally, the same way they've practiced serving other key audiences, the way they'd serve their customers, if they could. Beaver circulates comfortably among the journalists at business conventions, talking with a reporter from USA Today or a New York City book editor. Falco stays in touch by letter. "When I see someone do a story on security or shredding, I'll write and offer my two cents' worth -- maybe they'll do a follow-up." Other times he'll generate his own hook, creating a collector's item like the Dragons Teeth, shipped to China to be hand-painted then shipped back home -- "that only sold 75 units a year, but it gave me tremendous exposure.'
