Case Study: Bringing an Innovative Product to Market

Biolife just may have invented a better bandage. The question is how to spread the word -- without breaking the bank.

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THE PROBLEM: Biolife just may have invented a better Band-Aid. But what's the best way to let the world know?

When it comes to the hurdles that every start-up faces, five-year-old Biolife has already cleared a few. Its sole product, Quick Relief, or QR, a patented powder that stops bleeding within seconds, is unlike anything else out there and has impressed several hard-to-impress gatekeepers, including Wal-Mart, the nation's largest retailer, and CVS Stores, the drugstore chain. Both have already given QR valuable shelf space in several thousand stores. Plus, the head athletic trainer of the Los Angles Lakers has been seen using QR on national TV. But the hard part of CEO Doug Goodman's job is really just beginning: Now he needs to figure out the best way to convince the world to give QR a try.

Last summer, after attracting interest from CVS, Biolife's owners and senior managers, many of whom had spent years working for companies like Procter & Gamble and Pepsi, began a series of fierce debates. While everyone agreed that QR was a unique product with huge potential, they couldn't agree on the best way to market it. The five owners and seven managers, including Goodman, quickly split into two camps: One favored advertising, the other sampling. The 12 execs would pile into the conference room at the Sarasota, Fla., company and argue for hours. "There was a real polarity there," says Goodman of the series of tense meetings that stretched on for several months. Charlie Entenmann, who was Biolife's main financial backer and had built the successful Entenmann's baked goods company from a small family business, thought that advertising made more sense now that Biolife was entering the mass market. But Goodman believed that the company needed to build its credibility first if it truly hoped to go mass market.

Doing both really wasn't an option. Unlike P&G, where Goodman had spent 10 years as a brand manager, Biolife, which rang up $1.5 million in sales last year, didn't have unlimited resources. An experiment late last year of marketing on the cheap -- handing out coupons for $1 off a box of QR to 147,000 CVS customers -- had failed miserably. "People looked at the product and said they didn't trust it," says Goodman. "We had no credibility."

It was back in 1999 that Jim Patterson and John Alf Thompson had first developed QR. The two men were longtime research scientists who had formed Biolife hoping to discover a new way to purify water. They never solved that puzzle, but one day, while working in the lab, Patterson either pricked his finger accidentally or sliced it on purpose -- the story has changed several times, Goodman concedes -- leading to the discovery of QR, a patented combination of resin and salt, the two components Patterson had been experimenting with at the time.

As Goodman pressed his case during those meetings, he reminded the others in the room that Biolife had already been very successful at sampling. In 2002, the company had sent some samples of QR to Gary Vitti, the head trainer for the Lakers. After testing it for several weeks during the off-season, Vitti used QR one day during a regular-season game, prompting the on-air announcers to wonder why Vitti was sprinkling pepper on one of his players. QR was never mentioned by name, but it was the product's first appearance on TV, and it started to create some buzz for the company, at least among sports fans.

Wooing Vitti made sense, Goodman says, because the product is especially useful to the NBA, which allows only a 30-second time-out to stop a player from bleeding.

The problem was making sure that the sample didn't wind up in the trash. Vitti estimates that he gets around 100 requests a week from "different snake oil salesmen" hoping to get him to try out their magic potion on Shaq & Co. But there was something about QR that managed to catch his attention. At the time, he was using another product that neither he nor the players were particularly crazy about because it stung and left dark stains on the skin. "I gave this a try and I was really surprised," says Vitti. "This one popped out because it was so different."

In fact, Vitti liked the product so much that he now has a part-time job selling QR to other trainers at the professional and college level. Goodman estimates that as many as 75% of the teams in the National Hockey League and NBA use QR regularly.

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