THE ANATOMY OF BUZZ
How to Create Word-of-Mouth Marketing
by Emanuel Rosen
Doubleday, 303 pp.
What do Beanie Babies and Birkenstocks, hip-hop and Hotmail, PalmPilots and PowerBars all have in common? Emanuel Rosen sets out to answer this and other marketing questions in The Anatomy of Buzz. With spacious layout and annual report style summarizing, The Anatomy of Buzz addresses numerous marketing trends, while enabling readers to imagine they are the CEOs of their own private dot.com Idahos.
Rosen’s research hones in on one rock-solid equation: good buzz depends on a good product. He is cagey enough to allow an out for those unfortunate hacks that make a living flogging lousy product. It goes like this: "In order to generate positive buzz, your product needs to exceed the expectations of the people you’re trying to reach." Simple enough – Survivor II need only be as "good" or better than the original. Then Rosen writes, "Am I offering something new?" Situate Survivor II in the Australian Outback and suddenly soap opera gibberish diced with horoscope-like psychological platitudes has a nation holding its shallow breath. Word-of-mouth does not discern. Yet can it be manufactured?
This is the compelling question that Rosen raises. In the early ’80s, when a couple of Berkeley-based runners first toyed with the idea of an energy bar, what vital steps did they take to allow the company (PowerBar) to surpass sales of $100 million in 1997? Rosen believes their "grassroots seeding efforts," combined with a fortuitous Tour de France clip on CBS is the reason PowerBar succeeded. He does give a nod toward the cloud of unknowing that often enfolds successful marketing campaigns. Try 10 different things and expect two to work really well, goes the logic.
The concluding Buzz Workshop chapter is a run-down of all the questions Rosen has raised over the course of the book. He summarizes: "Does my product enhance the lives of people who use it?" and, "Are your customers talking to one another?" If Dave Eggers had written his introduction, it might go: "If you don’t have time to read the whole book, start on page 248. It will seem a lot shorter that way."
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