Little Earth cofounder Ava DeMarco says that "donating products is great because it gets your company's name out, and"--here's the voice of a with-it business owner--"it can be expensed."
A big honking wave of positive buzz can't be beat, but bad buzz can breed incredible operational problems. When that happens, company owners have to switch from an igniter mind-set to an extinguisher mind-set. America Online teetered (but didn't fall) when it promised a service it couldn't deliver. Intel's flawed Pentium chip had every tech expert going for a while there, but it recovered nicely--so well, in fact, that CEO Andy Grove landed gracefully on the cover of Time last December as Man of the Year. And Johnson & Johnson's superb response to its Tylenol crisis virtually defines corporate responsibility.
For some, though, bad buzz can mean wipe-out city, or pretty close to it. In October 1996 the worst kind of crisis erupted at Odwalla, the California fresh-juice company. Outbreaks of E. coli infection were linked to its unpasteurized apple-based drinks, and the overwhelming buzz was that the company was gone for good. There was no way this West Coast favorite could win back the public's trust, or that's how the buzz was running.
To its credit, Odwalla acted quickly and with compassion, skill, and honesty: it voluntarily recalled products, fixed the problem, and made hefty investments in safety. It also covered all medical expenses for people who had become ill from drinking an Odwalla product. Through an 800 number, a new Web site, and daily in-store updates, Odwalla kept information flowing. Sales plummeted by 90% after the recall, but today, at $53 million, they're just about back to where they were before the crisis.
The way to love anything, the English journalist and author G.K. Chesterton once said, is to realize that it might be lost. A keen anxiety about fading youth has sent people of a certain age clamoring for newfangled life-extending nutrients like melatonin (cures jet lag), saw palmetto extract (shrinks an enlarged prostate), bilberry extract (regenerates the retina), and SAMe (combats aging and depression). The fear of being on the verge of extinction can be very good for buzz.
Scarcity even helps to explain the mania for Beanie Babies, those pint-sized understuffed avatars of buzz. If you've ever once been the object of that squinchy stare of Squealer the Pig or Patti the Platypus, you know all too well how loopy it makes you feel, especially if there happens to be a kid collector nearby. Yet Ty Inc., the suburban Chicago company that produces Beanies, does no advertising. All the same, from 1996 to 1997, Ty's sales were out of this world, growing more than 2,000%. They've climbed higher since, and the company's growth is projected to be even more dramatic this year.
Ty has an ingenious custom of "retiring" a number of its plushy critters every year. As any collector will tell you, the rarer something is, the more valuable it becomes. Super-hard-to-find retirees can fetch more than $1,000 each; few things can get Beanie devotees off their butts faster than, say, the breaking news that Bumble the Bee is about to buzz off (and it did, in 1996). The company keeps such a snug lid on which special Beanie is about to be yanked that grown-up fanciers have built their own complexly structured networks aimed at tapping into early Beanie Baby buzz. Ty's own Web site averages more than 20,000 hits every day. That's smart marketing--is it ever!--but it's also basic psychology. People go nutso for what they cannot have: Brownies. Butter. Beanie Babies.
Certain controversial situations are a kiln for buzz: agitated debates (abortion, flag burning, medical marijuana); touchy subjects (adultery, ethics). The collision of strongly held points of view is talk radio's stock in trade: Dr. Laura stands for moral character, and the devil take the hindmost.
Great teachers have always used the collision of strongly held points of view to full advantage; so have great preachers. Josh Hunt is a Baptist missionary's kid who grew up to be a pastor himself. In his line of work, he knew that more people gave up on traditional church services than flocked to them. The problem, Hunt figured, was profound boredom. "Too many churches make people yawn," he says. There had to be a better way to do church.
There was. Hunt, as associate pastor, wanted what he now calls a Wow! church, and he thought one way to get it was to "leave people dangling a little bit," to leave something to the imagination, "the way Jesus did." So Hunt advocated sermons that intentionally left things open to interpretation, a clever and engaging tactic that's old as the hills, and it worked: it ignited buzz because it gave people something to talk about, a reason to come back the next Sunday and renew the debate. If every question is answered, what's to discuss? "The teachings of Jesus beg explanation," Hunt says. "Whatever else he was, Jesus was a master of buzz." Even as other churches withered, the congregation at Hunt's church in Las Cruces, N. Mex., tripled over 11 years.
Knowing that style is as important as substance, Hunt reinterpreted the look and feel of church. He started a popular Saturday-evening service. To accompany certain services, Hunt chose jazzed-up music that had been written within the past 10 years--music that people liked and remembered, hummed and talked about. He treated guests respectfully and never embarrassed newcomers the way so many other churches did (albeit inadvertently) by making them stand and introduce themselves to the assembled throng. The choicest parking was reserved for visitors.
