Chapter 4
Buzz, Evangelistas, and Customer Shows

In this chapter we look at shows that use spokespeople—from hired enthusiasts to recruited customers to totally independent brand evangelists. These types of shows are increasingly important as consumers become less influenced by advertising and more reliant on face-to-face and peer recommendations. But when it comes to word of mouth, it's important to recognize that the show is not entirely in your hands, and that the wrong behavior can quickly spread the wrong buzz.

One brand which has used this approach successfully is Vespa. Vespa is an icon brand. The cool Italian fashion and laid-back riding experience of these legendary scooters is the kind of product experience that speaks for itself and gets customers to speak on its behalf. When Piaggio USA was preparing to bring the brand back to the United States after a nearly 20-year absence, they knew the key to success for the Vespa's return would be word of mouth.

To get customers to look at the stylish machines in action, the corporate marketing department first sent out street teams of beautiful people scootering around the fashionable streets of its key target markets. The show was meant to match the essence of the Vespa—it was all about looking good and being stylish. However, the show got some less than flattering press when it was alleged that the Vespa riders were flirting with customers over lattes and talking up the brand while disguised as everyday sexy café patrons.

Piaggio USA moved on to other approaches to relaunch the brand, but one California dealership, Vespa Riverside, decided to try street teams from a markedly different angle. "I don't hire models, I hire enthusiasts," says Ken Stansbury, Riverside's general/marketing manager. And the enthusiasts are trained through a rigorous boot camp that includes reading texts from the recent Marketing Warfare, back to Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. The Riverside street teams are sent out not to be seen on their bikes, but to meet targeted leads face-to-face and talk to them about the brand. The teams are clearly identified by their Vespa dickey shirts and carry fliers with information about the dealership and upcoming test rides where customers can get a feel for a Vespa themselves. Rather than focusing on cool coffee shops and trendy young consumers, Riverside's street teams go where the purchasing power is. Yes, tattoo parlors get a visit, but more time is spent at doctors' and dentists' offices, talking to staff who can realistically afford the sticker price. The street teams don't even ride Vespas if they are targeting neighborhoods like East San Bernardino where customers are spread far apart and likely to be met indoors. Each rider carries with them a folder with business cards and notes on the leads they talk to. Back at the dealership, maps are drawn up with pins inserted to track each street team's progress across Southern California's inland empire.

"This is Navy SEAL marketing," says Stansbury. "There's a lot of reconnaissance involved, and the debriefing after each mission is intense." So far, results have been strong, with Riverside garnering press locally and in the L.A. Times, and sales leading the more established dealers in the region.

Meanwhile, co-branded street teams are being deployed by Piaggio USA's corporate marketing department, in conjunction with lifestyle brands like Armani Exchange, Skecher's, and Orbit chewing gum. Piaggio USA provides Vespas for the spokespeople who are handing out or talking up the partners' brands in urban markets, and local Vespa dealers join the team to spread the word about their own brand.

Figure 4-1. Vespa's loyal evangelists spread the buzz about the brand at rallies and group rides. Photo courtesy of Piaggio USA.

Yet, the greatest customer involvement has been generated by Vespa group rides, rallies, and owners clubs. The Houston dealership has organized "La Femme de Vespa," a riders group of women in their 40s and 50s who get together to go out, ride, and have coffee. In San Francisco, large Vespa rallies can be seen riding up and down the fabulous local hills, and riders come from as far away as Europe for the annual traveling AmerVespa rally. These events, and smaller ones, have often grown out of owners clubs that predated Vespa's recent return to the U.S. Vintage Vespa owners kept the brand alive for almost two decades while they had to go as far as Italy to get replacement parts for repairs, and now they've helped to form the core of a growing brand community whose enthusiasm is attracting new customers.

It's clearly been working: U.S. Vespa sales grew from 64 units per month in early 2001 to 1,000 per month by the end of the following year.¹⁰

Street Team Shows

A great interactive show that focuses on word of mouth is street teams. Like Vespa's, these teams use hired spokespeople: not celebrity endorsers with golf clubs in hand as they pose with your product on television, but ordinary-seeming people who meet with customers at street level to talk to them face to face.

The first rule of street teams should be: always disclose. Under the moniker of "stealth marketing," there have been campaigns recently that used undercover spokespeople to pose as average consumers and act out a script to lure unaware customers. Sony and Ericsson received angry feedback for a ploy that hired actors to pose as tourists and ask passersby to take a picture of them with (surprise!) a Sony-Ericsson cell-phone camera. Microsoft tried to imitate Apple's "Switch" ad campaign with a story on their web site of a woman who had enthusiastically switched from Apple to Windows—but who was later found out to be a Microsoft PR staffer. Customers aren't stupid. Attempts to build brand equity by deceit only discredit marketing in general, and your brand in particular. Instead, build an honest enthusiasm among customers, then see what you can do with it.

A branded street team lacks the element of surprise, but it more than makes up for it with the ability to communicate deeply. "If you put a good-looking woman in a bar with your gadget, guys are going to talk to her, so why not put a Sony logo on her clothes somewhere?" asks Drew Neisser of Renegade Marketing. If consumers know they're speaking to a company representative, they are likely to ask more serious questions about a product. That kind of conversation and interaction is exactly what street teams are great for. "A body can answer questions in a way advertising can't," says Stansbury, who does street-teaming himself with his Vespas. On a recent trip to Palm Springs he found himself mobbed by young club goers early Sunday morning, just out from their all-night parties and eager to ask him questions about his scooter.

Figure 4-2. Kids climb inside the Panasonic Rescue Vehicle to play with the latest in electronic games and gadgets. Photo courtesy of Renegade Marketing.

Neisser ran a street-team show for Panasonic in 2002 as part of a campaign to "Save Your Summer!" They turned three ambulances into Panasonic Rescue Vehicles that toured six major urban markets to engage young electronics lovers in conversation and to change their perception of the brand by showing off Panasonic's latest technology to prove they weren't just producing commodities. Inside each ambulance was a gaming and gadget testing room; outside, teams in EMS-like outfits wowed kids with demonstrations. One device was the size of a matchbox with a video camera, MP3 player, and digital camera in one; another was a miniature printer the same size. Rescue team members would take a kid's picture, print it out for them, and then put both devices back in their pocket—Wow!

GoGorilla Media put on a street-team show for Nescafé at the 2002 Winter Olympics to promote the launch of their Frothé beverage line. Street teamers wandered through the chilly outdoor crowds dispensing warm cups of Frothé from special thermos-like backpacks. At the same time, they answered questions about the product and handed out Frothé-branded maps of the Olympic grounds and events. The impact of the show was enhanced by the projection of a four-story-tall image of a steaming cup with Frothé's tag line, seen by thousands on the entrance wall as they arrived and exited from the awards ceremony. The story of the street teams was picked up in several national papers, and back at the Olympics the crowds were grateful for the warm pick-me-up.

"This kind of marketing is not new," observes Ken Stansbury. "Going out and showing your wares—in ancient times people did it with their pottery, in pre-Civil War people would hand out samples of their feed to farmers to try." Everything old is new again in show business.

Recruiting Evangelistas

Rather than sending their own trained team of staff out to spread the word about a product, companies sometimes get customers themselves to do the talking. You probably know the type of person buzz marketers always look for. They are the kind of consumer who is extremely resistant to advertising messages. But they are also passionate evangelists for the brands they love based on their experiences, and on recommendations from other evangelists. They are always arriving at a house or party with enthusiastic news of a new kind of oatmeal they discovered, or an affordable wine they got on a great tip from a friend. They are social and gregarious as well, so their recommendations are always circulated among a large network of friends and acquaintances.

We call these noncelebrity endorsers evangelistas—guerrillas of buzz, in the trenches, spreading the good word about your scooter, your movie, your car, your shoes. The enthusiasm of a small group of evangelistas can, if conditions are right, spark a chain reaction of word of mouth that will create broad interest in a new product at a fraction the cost of a traditional media campaign. Even though evangelistas have always been free spirits, choosing to endorse on the basis of what captures their imagination, companies have also come up with some novel strategies for recruiting them, and in some cases even organizing them. Using actual customers leaves a company with less control over the show, but gives greater legitimacy to their spokespeople.

Historically, the use of evangelistas has its roots in the music industry, where they have been used for years to promote bands without major recording contracts. Music street teams are kids recruited not with money but by the lure of free CDs, t-shirts, and concert tickets with backstage passes to see the band. Fans willingly join for the bands they discover and are enthusiastic about. Their job then is simply to spread the word about their favorite band—and spread its free promotional give-aways—at concerts, online, and among friends. Originally this was done ad hoc by the band members, their friends, and the groupies they managed to garner at their initial performances. Nowadays, up-and-coming metal bands like Taproot and Disturbed work with professional street-teaming firms like StreetWise, which recruit evangelistas and hook them up with the client bands whose music they like.

More recently, consumer packaged goods companies have taken to putting on shows with recruited evangelistas. For example, ConAgra Foods recruited 250 moms in 12 cities to be evangelistas for their Hebrew National hot dogs. These PTA presidents and community leaders of diverse ethnic groups promoted this all-American food at the grass roots level by forming Mom Squads that traveled around in Hebrew National SUVs, hosting back-yard hot dog roasts in their neighborhoods and handing out product coupons.

In other cases, companies have simply engaged in product seeding—giving out or loaning free samples to individuals they think will influence a targeted customer group. Calvin Klein is seeding its new Crave men's fragrance, Ford launched its Focus car with loans to trendsetting customers, and PowerBar built its sports bar brand by enlisting serious subprofessional athletes to promote and consume them. Aiming for a different audience, the Hasbro toy company recruited 1600 fourth- and fifth-grade children to act as evangelistas for the release of their POX handheld game. Their training was simple: the junior secret agents were given this hot new game for free and instructed to enjoy it, show it off to their friends, and thus generate interest and envy among game-loving peers.

One of the keys to successful evangelistas is finding the right customers to spread the word. They need to be enthusiastic about the product, but they also need to be well connected socially to communicate with and influence the right groups of people. Who your evangelistas will be depends on what you're selling and whom it will appeal to. Finding the right influencers to recruit as evangelistas may take some research. Reebok interviewed 1,000 women in Canada in order to identify 90 key influencers who received free pairs of its new U-Shuffle DMX women's shoes.

One of our favorite shows that has recruited customers to speak up for a product was the broadcast coupon promoted in TV ads trumpeting the arrival of Burger King's Chicken Whopper sandwich. The ads showed various customers clucking happily over the new sandwich and ended with a daring promise: if you clucked like a chicken at the counter when you ordered it, you'd get 50 cents off your Chicken Whopper. Soon you had Burger King customers all over America crowing like barnyard fowl at the counters of their restaurant, letting everyone within earshot know that they wanted this new sandwich, by God, and they wanted their discount. Not only that, Burger King had invented the best new system of tracking advertising impact since the Nielsen Company.

Customer Shows

Often the buzz for certain brands does not come from companies at all. Brand evangelistas also operate independently, sponsoring and endorsing the things that they love among friends. Sometimes they even go beyond just talking about their passionate enthusiasms and actually put on a show. We call these shows customer shows because they are truly of, for, and by the customer. Customer shows can be any of the types of show business that we've seen so far: live events, playspaces, rabbits, or street teams. What distinguishes these shows is that they originate with customers but are a show about a company's business or brand.

Examples include fan web sites like the Apple rumor sites that helped fuel the buzz for the new iMac, spontaneous rumors or word-of-mouth buzz (like the Altoids oral sex rumor), customer social gatherings (like the vintage Vespa owners group rides), or fan-created shrines to a brand (there are lots of smaller and more eccentric Coca-Cola museums in America besides the company's official one).

Customer shows are not only the hobby-horses of fans with free time; they can also be viable commercial enterprises run by outside parties targeting the communities interested in your brand. Independent user-group events are essential to communication with technology customers, like the annual Focus event that J.D. Edwards used to stage its Corridors of Chaos live show, or the Mac Expo where Apple launched its new iMac.

But some of the most passionate customer communities can be found at customer shows with little commercial or professional purpose. The extraordinarily devoted customers of Harley-Davidson put on fantastic shows for the motorcycle brand at rallies across America, a vital tradition where Harley lovers from all walks of life come together to ride and share their love for the bikes. Picturesque small towns like Westwego, Louisiana; Killington, Vermont; and Hannibal, Missouri, are suddenly transformed each year into meeting grounds for Harley riders when the regional rally comes to town. The largest such event is held in a tiny town called Sturgis—a rally that attracts 200,000 to 600,000 riders every August to make a pilgrimage to the remote Black Hills of South Dakota. You can show up for the rally on any other brand of motorcycle, we've been told—just don't expect to get out alive.

Of course the Harley-Davidson Company works hard to nurture its rider community. Sponsored by local Harley dealers, the Harley Owner's Groups (H.O.G.s, after the traditional name for the bike) boast 600,000 members at over 900 chapters worldwide. These local chapters host events ranging from Saturday hot dog bike rallies to dealer events that draw hundreds of members to their local dealership for the unveiling of the newest model. H.O.G. members are often very active in their community, participating in group events every month or more. (An Orlando dealership even boasts Harley-themed wedding services, for the truly hog-wild couple.)

A newer example of a customer show is cropping up in the unlikely field of plastic surgery: the botox party. Botox is the botulism-derived toxin that can be injected into your face, temporarily paralysing your muscles and thus removing frown lines and crow's-feet. This only lasts for a few months, though; after that a repeat treatment is needed. The recent craze for botox arose when the FDA approved its use for standard wrinkle-removal and gave authority for just about any cosmetician to inject it into your face. Immediately, botox became a way of taking care of yourself—akin to getting a facial or a manicure—for large numbers of customers. As the sting of serious medicine was taken out of this fashionable self-poisoning, consumers decided they wanted to get together socially to enjoy the experience. After all, the doctor's office does not provide the same experience as going with your friends to get your nails or hair done.

Enter the botox party. These parties are instigated by the customers, who host them at their own homes. Think of them as a Tupperware party for a confused age. In the posh pads of the Hamptons and Manhattan's Upper East Side, the well-to-do have started hosting parties at which women and men gather to share the experience of being botoxed together. Party guests spend most of the time gaily socializing and nibbling on finger food. One by one, each steps out to take their turn in a private room where a doctor waits with a needle. After a few pricks and warnings about bruising, the guest returns to the group for a shared laugh, and another quaff of Pellegrino. Not a soul in the room is frowning—because they can't! It's a new kind of initiation ritual and surely a new watermark in customer show business. The more intimate and personal a consumer product, it seems, the more likely it is that consumers will want to connect and bond over it.

Customer shows are extremely important for companies for several reasons. Seeing a show created by their most involved customers can be one of the best ways for companies to learn about their own brand. Customer shows are also some of the best experiences for cultivating customer-to-customer communication. Although the company loses direct control of the communication in these cases, the information exchanged often has greater legitimacy and influence on customers than company-crafted information.

Customer shows complete the Show Business Brand Relationship Model that we first saw in the Introduction, by providing the arrow that allows a customer to build the brand by creating a show, just as company personnel do in other shows (see Figure 4-3). In fact, in customer shows, the company relates to and experiences the brand from the show just like the rest of the audience.

Figure 4-3. Show Business Brand Relationship Model for customer shows.

As audiences gain more independence in how they think about brands, and as they remain increasingly skeptical about corporate communications, customer shows are a crucial tool for every company that relies on a strong brand relationship with its customers. Companies like Harley-Davidson, Apple, and Vespa succeed by knowing how to encourage and support exceptionally loyal followers and by supporting the shows they put on.

When Customer Shows Go Bad

Of course, not everything companies learn about their brands from customers is good news. Sometimes customer shows can be nightmares for companies. Think about organized boycotts and the "sucks" web sites (chasebanksucks.com, ticketmastersucks.com) where customers post their complaints. Companies need to know how to respond not only to positive customer feedback, but to negative as well.

Coca-Cola launched a $150 million promotional campaign (its largest ever) to promote reading to kids through a broad variety of events and messages, all centered around the characters of the popular children's book and film, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The initiatives taking place in almost 40 countries over three years include television ads, sweepstakes, charitable contributions, trip contests, and donations of more than a million books to classrooms and children's centers. The show also includes Story Traveler trucks, which travel nationwide promoting Reading is Fundamental Programs, the Harry Potter books, and, in more subdued designed elements, Coca-Cola. Sounds like a great show.

But not all the customers are biting (or drinking). Some parents and consumer organizations, like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have been made queasy by this syrupy concoction of altruistic charity, Hollywood blockbuster promotion, and soft-selling of soda. Chiding Coke for using the beloved character of Harry to push "liquid candy" to kids, they have even put up a web site called SaveHarry.com, which urges visitors to share concerns with each other, mobilize in their schools, and tell author J.K. Rowling to take back her young sorcerer from the grasp of the soft drink giant.

Have you ever gotten a free trial CD in the mail from America Online? How about five or six? One a month, in a cardboard sheath? Or a metal box with no way to recycle it? After years of direct marketing that must have overflowed a landfill the size of Silicon Valley, a group of consumers finally got sick of AOL's blind blizzard of promotion and decided to put on a protest show. It has been running on the Web, with a site called nomoreaolcds.com, where those who have had enough can link up with each other and ship their stashes of unwanted discs to a special repository. Top contributors are listed on the humorous web site (over 3,000 sent in by Robotroonie in Germany), and when the total reaches 1 million CDs, the site's organizers say they plan to dump the entire pile on the doorstep of the company's headquarters. Given that they've already started to attract some media attention, that show could be a big hit.

It looks like the world's largest media giant may be listening, however. Jonathan Miller, brought in as AOL's CEO at the end of 2002, has said he plans on cutting back the lavish spending on mailings that pursue an ever-dwindling number of new online users. His alternative? Improve services to retain existing customers, and aim to raise profits by shaving costs.

Clearly, businesses need to know not just how to put on their own shows, but how they want to handle shows that the customer puts up in response. How you respond to a bad customer show may do a lot to determine its effect. Here are a few ideas:

• Co-opt your enemies. Listen to your critics, invite them in to see things from your side, and see if you can find a way to answer their needs. Even if you aren't able to satisfy a demand, the fact that you were open to meeting may make a difference in their perception of you.
• Learn from them. You may not be able to answer all your customers' requests, but if more companies looked at the postings on their "sucks" sites as report cards from customer experience consultants, they could use the lessons learned for real competitive advantage.
• Don't forget it's their brand, too. If you want a brand to succeed, you have to pay attention to what customers feel about it. If the way they see it and you see it are not aligned, you need to start paying more attention to what they have to say.
• Get feedback before you launch a big show. If you're starting a $150 million promotional campaign and charitable sponsorship, do some focus groups with the people who are emotionally vested in either you or your partner. You want to know if people will perceive your show as a great part of your company or as a crass attempt to sanctify yourself.
• Respect your audience. Don't try to win them over by deceptive shows.

In short, don't neglect your audience. In the end, all shows are about your audience and what speaks to them—whether they are shows put on by your customers themselves, by your hand-picked evangelistas, or by your own staff.

Lessons Learned

We've seen three models for shows that engage customers by talking directly to them, or having them talk to each other—shows that help to break the boundaries between customer and company, between audience and show creators:

• Company street teams—like Vespa Riverside's dickey-shirted corps or the Panasonic Rescue Vehicles—that take your brand and your products to the customer to answer questions and build excitement
• Recruited evangelistas—like Hebrew National Hot Dogs's Mom Squads or Burger King's Chicken Whopper cluckers—that you recruit to spread their enthusiasm on behalf of your brand
• Customer shows—like the Harley and Vespa bike rallies or computer user-group events—that customers themselves create around your brand and their shared experience of it

Each of these types of shows can deliver a great experience—amusing, surprising, boundary-breaking, and value-creating—to customers in a way that builds interest and attachment to your products, services, or brand. To deliver the right experience, be sure to:

• Engage your customers. Talk to them; don't just expect them to see your product drive by and fall in love with it. Add an element of "wow" to the conversation you're initiating: a cool product demonstration, a rabbit (like the giant Nescafé projection), something funny. "Don't just tell me, show me."
• Give your customer a chance to get involved at the show—try your gadget, ride your scooter—or invite them to an event where they can get involved.
• Be real: let them know who you are (no posing) so customers will expect to really learn something from talking to you.
• Understand that the more personal a product, the stronger the feelings your customers may have and want to share about it.
• Accept that you're going to lose some control, but gain authenticity, when your customer gets involved in a show or takes the reins entirely.
• Remember that customer shows are your best research tool and opportunity to learn what your brand means to your customer, where you're measuring up, and where you're not.

The types of shows we have discussed in the last four chapters—live shows, immersionary space shows, invented and reinvented media, and buzz-building shows—all provide powerful tools to engage an audience. Many companies or marketers are content to attempt one type of show business as part of their communications efforts.

But why settle for putting on just one of these types of shows? Since they work toward the same goal, why not try to combine a few for greater impact?

In the next chapter we'll see how to do that and how to integrate the message of a variety of different shows in order to maximize their total impact.