Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PR...

Anthony Lemme knew what he had when he started Source Intermarketing Corp. As the exclusive U.S. licensee for the Vacu-Vin, a $20 pump resealer for wine bottles, he had a product priced at one-fourth to one-fifth the competition's. But he had worries, too: limited resources and experience, plus the memory of one failed start-up immediately behind him. So he turned to an agency even before he'd signed his license agreement, hiring B. L. Ochman Associates to handle the marketing while he concentrated on production, shipping, and the search for finance.

Ochman helped Lemme shape the company, introducing him to the people who designed his packaging and manufactured his product. She helped him to expand his market to such stores as Zabar's and Bloomingdale's as well as conventional wine and spirits distributors. Then she convinced him to gamble the company.

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.''

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