The Buzz Factory

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The collages are put together by a team of Tattools after the brand audit is done and there's all this rich, lively information to stomp around in and decode. The audit is the first of three formal phases of a typical (to the extent that typical and Tattoo can be used in the same sentence) project, studded with nontraditional proprietary techniques designed to get a bead on a brand. To tap into street buzz, for instance, Tattools hang out on sidewalks and videotape what passersby have to say about a certain brand. Each interview lasts about 10 minutes and captures the inchoate images that leap to mind when people think of Rollerblade or Armani or Time.

All that early work is aimed at teasing out what customers think and especially how they feel, what pictures they carry around in their heads, and whether the brand in question is keeping its promises.

One of Tattoo's special talents is to make close customer contact look easy and natural. A project for a famous clothing retailer involved burrowing through the closets of total strangers and getting them to do little on-camera show-and-tells about their wardrobes.

In one of those closet excavations, a woman explains why this jacket works and why she loves that blouse and how she feels when she wears them. It's hard to imagine anything more quotidian than what's happening in this video, but you can't take your eyes off it. The chance to talk about the stuff in her closet energizes this woman (Tattoo would never diminish her by calling her a "subject"), and there's no way that dry-as-dust market-share statistics can capture that.

John Hansen, the former ThermoLase CEO, agrees that Tattoo's methods can be offbeat but says also that they're supereffective. "I've seen my share of focus groups and quantitative studies, but Tattoo helps you understand exactly what's driving your customers," he says. "Tattoo will find a way to communicate your message so that your customer will hear you."

Even so, Hansen says it took a little convincing to get him to believe that to hair-removal customers, the aesthetics of the process are every bit as important as a satiny-smooth result. Based on Tattoo's recommendations, ThermoLase downplayed its laser technology (too sci-fi) and instead showcased hair zapping as part of a peaceful, painless personal-care ritual performed by licensed practitioners in a refined, elegant setting. Now, that was something women wanted to talk about, and they did, in detailed articles in Vogue and Cosmetic Surgery Times.

Tattoo does what it does by "living the brand," Marwah says, really getting under its skin, learning every inch of it from the inside out. It's a process that takes considerable time and talent, and one for which there are no Cliffs Notes. There's more to it than a string of projects and a trademarked approach, and Mother Jones's Jeffrey Klein thinks he knows what it is. "There's some kind of magic inside of Vishwa," he says. "He can evoke an emotional experience. He's a person from the future--his sensory reception is not like the ordinary person's." For Mother Jones, a magazine with limited funds, that kind of ultrasensitivity is worth a lot. Nobody else can pull it off, according to Klein, a conclusion he'd reached long before Mother Jones and Tattoo got together for a recent all-day confab that took place on a chilly day with everybody sitting around in a yurt in Marin County. "He had us think about why we were really there, and to imagine our future and be true to what we stand for," says Klein.

Marwah has a rather classical marketing background, which surprises me. He taught marketing in the doctoral program at the University of Michigan while he was getting his M.B.A. After stints as media planner at Leo Burnett, associate media director at Chiat/Day, and director of account planning at Fallon McElligott, a Minneapolis advertising agency, Marwah declared his independence and started Tattoo. "We thought we'd be nimble and work on real modest problems," he says, "but we got pulled into some really exciting, high-profile things." Like, for instance, helping Martha Stewart the Person become Martha Stewart the Brand, or deciphering what Sears stands for in the consumer's mind, or helping to launch InStyle magazine from a microscopic germ of an idea. The founder is kind of in awe of his company's success. But if there's one thing Marwah knows, it's how to psych out a brand.

To say that tattoo's been working on an enormous project for Monsanto Co. is not strictly accurate: Tattoo is more or less macerated in Monsanto. Even though Monsanto's most visible businesses are probably Equal and NutraSweet, Tattoo is working on the product that generates a good percentage of Monsanto's income: Roundup, the biggest-selling herbicide in the world.

Let's just put a round number on that. This weed killer is a billion-dollar brand in the States, which puts it on a par with, say, Marlboro. It's a perfect Tattoo project because Roundup's U.S. patent runs out in 2000. (It's already off-patent virtually everywhere else.) So now Roundup, with a little help from a certain San Francisco marketing firm, is going to make the move from commodity chemical to big-time brand.

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