Got Buzz? You better.

Whether you're a small business owner or an executive at a major corporation, you need to know how to get three to ten times more bang for your marketing dollar. Mark Hughes will give you the six secrets of getting people to talk about your product or service, based on his real-world experience with major companies. And he shares plenty of fun stories to illustrate them, from the birth of Lite beer to the rise of American Idol.

Remember Half.com? Back in the days of the dotcom boom, the discount retail Web site drew headlines when it persuaded the town of Halfway, Ore., to change its name to Half.com for a year. The stunt helped the company gain millions of customers and position itself to be bought out by eBay for a handsome premium. Hughes, the brain behind Half.com's marketing ploy, extols the virtues of "buzz marketing," his name for the idea that companies can dramatically boost sales by attracting publicity and fueling widespread word-of-mouth. In this book, Hughes lays out the "principles" of buzz marketing, offering a list of dos and don'ts, plus numerous examples of businesses that outshined competitors by creating buzz. Anyone familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point will grasp the logic underlying some of Hughes's ideas. He advocates getting the attention of people who can spread the gospel about your product. This approach, he says, is not only more effective than traditional advertising, but far cheaper. Hughes's tales of companies that successfully harnessed buzz are the strongest part of the book, covering businesses as diverse as Pepsi, Ben and Jerry's and Rit Dye, which revived itself by sparking the tie-dye craze in the 1960s. How valuable readers find some of his other case studies will depend on whether they agree that Britney Spears and American Idol represent "great products" marketed shrewdly. Hughes, who worked for PepsiCo and Pep Boys before joining Half.com, now runs a consulting firm that teaches companies about buzz marketing, which no doubt explains why his writing sometimes seems as subtle as a PowerPoint presentation and as gung-ho as an infomercial. Still, Hughes's ideas are provocative and should interest business professionals frustrated with same-again advertising campaigns.

preface to the paperback edition introduction

1 Evading the Stampede

2 Renaming a Town

3 The First Secret--Push the Six Buttons of Buzz

4 Miller Lite：A Brand Before Its Time

5 Starting Up from Scratch--Green for Greenfield

6 American ldo|

7 The Second Secret--Capture Media

8 Apple Mac Attack：What Few Know

9 ClearPlay：Courts．Controversy,and Clamor

1O The Third Secret--Advertise for Attention

11 Building Britney Buzz

12 The Fourth Secret--Climb Buzz Everest

13 War of the Colas：A Story Behind the Story

14 The Fifth Secret--Discover Creativity

15 Mustang Bang

16 The Sixth Secret--Police Your Product

Afterword

acknowledgments

notes

index