This chapter features studies of three companies—PowerBar, Women.com, and Yomega—showing how each has spread the word about its products using both traditional and non-traditional marketing. Here's the PowerBar case study:

The idea for PowerBar originated in 1983. Marathon runner Brian Maxwell had been leading in a race by over a minute at the twenty-mile mark when stomach problems caused him to fall back; he ended up finishing seventh. The disappointment of that race was also the beginning of a long search for a new food for athletes that would be easy to digest, low in fat, tasty, and nutritious. In their Berkeley kitchen, Maxwell and his girlfriend, Jennifer Biddulph (they have since married), started cooking. With the help of a third friend, and after some initial trial runs that Maxwell once described as "horrible glop," they came up with something pretty close to what we know today as PowerBar.

Fourteen years later, in 1997, the company's sales passed the $100 million mark. But when the first PowerBars came off the production line, they didn't immediately become the talk of the town. Spreading the word took a tremendous effort. How did a small company from Berkeley convince the world to start eating energy bars?

How the Product Creates Buzz
It definitely wasn't the taste that made people recommend PowerBar product to their friends. "It was like brussels sprouts or spinach," one athlete described the early bars. You don't like it, but you know it's good for you. The initial buzz among serious athletes can be traced to that: Endurance athletes are always on the lookout for anything that will give them that extra edge. When one of their fellow athletes—Maxwell is a world-class marathon runner—came up with a solution, they started buzzing about it.

An energy bar is also a highly visible product. PowerBars are usually consumed in public and thus advertise themselves. The first person on a team to pull a bar out of his or her pocket, tear off the shiny wrapper, and eat the strange-looking thing inside immediately found himself or herself answering questions from his or her teammates: "What's that?" "How does it taste?" "Does it really work?"

What They Did to Stimulate Buzz
The single most important factor that launched buzz about PowerBar was the company's grassroots seeding efforts. When the product was first being formulated, Maxwell and Biddulph went out to San Francisco Bay Area running, cycling, and triathlon events and bombarded athletes with questions. How much did they exercise? What did they eat before they exercised and before they competed? How did people feel their food affected them? Maxwell estimates that they talked with about twelve hundred people during the development stage. Then, when the product was ready, they sent these athletes a little box containing five bars and a follow-up survey. The hundreds of people who responded and ordered started telling their teammates and friends about the new product. Buzz blossomed, first in the San Francisco Bay Area. The buzz grew as Maxwell and Biddulph set up their table and started handing out bars at different sporting events in an ever-expanding geographic area.

Although they didn't call it "viral marketing" their next move could be best described this way. To stimulate word of mouth in other parts of the country, the company sent a letter to its existing customers offering to send five PowerBars on their behalf to anyone in the United States for just three dollars to cover shipping costs. "We would even put a note in, [such as] ÔTo Charlie from Amy in San Francisco,'" Maxwell says. When Charlie in Boston got that package, he would usually call Amy in San Francisco to find out more about the bars. Again—excellent response resulted with additional word of mouth in new clusters.

Working with network hubs was another key element of PowerBar's marketing. Maxwell and Biddulph put a tremendous emphasis on their relationships with regular hubs—coaches and leading athletes. We're not talking Michael Jordan here, and that's part of why this program is so powerful. Currently around twenty-five hundred athletes are part of the "PowerBar Team Elite" program. Most of them approach the company to seek sponsorship. Once accepted, an athlete or a team gets an allotment of gear and product. A built-in incentive encourages participants to broadcast their affiliation with PowerBar: Athletes earn money when their picture appears in the media, with the amount of compensation depending on the amount of exposure the athlete gets.

How Traditional Marketing Tools Have Helped Buzz
Public relations jump-started buzz early on. Maxwell got a call one day from the captain of the 7-Eleven cycling team that was about to leave for the Tour de France. The team needed about a thousand bars. Giving so many bars away wasn't a trivial thing—the young company was selling only about eight hundred bars a month at the time—but Maxwell agreed. In return, the captain of the team promised to try get some publicity. On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks later, when everyone in America who was interested in cycling was watching the Tour de France on CBS, the PowerBar founders got their payoff in the form of a three-minute television segment. While French riders were shown eating ham and cheese sandwiches, the American team could be seen munching on a new fuel: PowerBar. This broadcast was the fountain that fed thousands of additional streams of buzz. "Have you tried it?" "How does it taste?" "Does it really work?"

Distribution channels were key to spreading the word early on. At first PowerBar sold mostly direct and through only one store in Berkeley. Shortly after the CBS broadcast, an independent bicycle rep called and offered to add the product to his line. Teaming up with another well-connected individual took the company to the next level. "Within about two or three months he had us in about three hundred bicycle shops," Maxwell recalls. Since bicycle shops often employ biking enthusiasts who have their own networks, this accelerated adoption among cyclists even further. The independent representative also helped them expand to other parts of the country. "And again it was sort of a networking thing there, because the guy we had in Northern California knew his counterparts in Southern California and people in other parts of the country," Maxwell says.

As competitors emerged and the product category started to become mainstream, distribution has become even more important, as it is for any consumer product. Today you can find PowerBars everywhere.

This switch to mainstream required some changes. The first was in product formulation. In the early 1990s PowerBar responded to pressure to improve the taste and consistency of the product. Serious athletes would eat almost anything to improve their performance, but to appeal to health buffs, kids, seniors, and busy people, the product would need to taste better and have a better texture.

Another change was the need for more attention to brand-name recognition. Although PowerBar had the support of thousands of network hubs in different sport niches, the people at the company felt that to appeal to wider circles they needed a big name to endorse the product. This was a challenge "The American public is very sophisticated," says Maxwell "We all know that top athletes are paid to endorse products. We all see the athletes wearing Reebok one year and Nike the next year, and we know that they got paid more." In 1995 the company chose San Francisco 49er quarterback Steve Young as a spokesman. Young is known as someone who endorses only products he uses, and he seems to be in this for the long run. Young has appeared in the company's ads since 1995, and in 1999 he joined PowerBar's board of directors.

The company still pays a lot of attention to its grassroots seeding efforts, sponsoring hundreds of events every year. Seeding is still key. A few years ago I attended a talk that Maxwell gave in San Francisco. It had nothing to do with sports, but a table with sample products was set up at the entrance. It seems that the guy can't go anywhere without leaving a trail of seeds behind.