Scrummie

The dog days of summer, San Francisco. If you happened to be wrapping up a busy week with friends at a local hot spot, you may have been witness to the following scene. A beautiful woman dressed in black, approaches a patron and whispers in his ear, “Save me. She slips a business card into his pocket and walks out of the bar. On the card is a phone number. Not hers, but one for an information suspense thriller game called Majestic.

The woman, it turned out, was not some relationship-hungry happy hour customer but one of 40 card-dropping operatives hired by Ammo, a San Francisco- based marketing company, to help generate publicity for the game. But the men who got the cards didn’t know that, and motivated by what was no doubt pure chivalric impulse, 60 percent of them called the number.

This tale, of course, sums up both the promise and perils of buzz marketing. Buzz, viral, street, stealth, or guerilla marketing- call it what you will, the use of the alternative tactics to spread word-of-mouth buzz about products is raging. According to a May 2001 report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co., 67 percent of U.S consumer-goods sales now are influenced by word of mouth. In the past couple of years, it has gone from being a fringe marketing strategy favored by small shops to a mainstay of the Fortune 500. Virtually every major U.S brand- from the staid (Ford, General Electric, Volvo) to the hip (Nike, Tommy Hilfiger,Palm) is dabbling in some form of the practice, according to McKinsey associate principal Renee Dye. Ans as buzz about buzz campaigns spreads; the competition is on to make campaigns more and more attention-getting.