380 ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Buzz, Have You Heard
The event was a lavish mock wedding, fea-
turing food from a top Beverly Hills caterer.
The groom, played by California beverage
distributor Tony Haralambos, wore a top hat
when he marched into his company’s confer-
ence room. His sales reps chuckled when
they spotted the white-veiled “bride,” because
that role was played by the charismatic
founder of Glacéau enriched water products,
J. Darius Bikoff.
Haralambos was on the verge of dropping
Glacéau products from his inventory when
Bikoff began actively courting him. He flew
Haralambos to New York and put him up at
the swank Four Seasons hotel. Then Bikoff
took him on a tour of New York City area bev-
erage distributors to demonstrate how
Glacéau products were selling there. “In my
head, I’m comparing my market and their
market and picturing what I could be doing,”
says Haralambos. “The dollar signs started
becoming visible.” When Bikoff proposed ter-
minating his relationships with all other dis-
tributors in Haralambos’s area and devoting
all Glacéau’s business to him, the marriage
was sealed. The mock wedding was Bikoff’s
way of kicking off a strategy he hoped would
win the California market.
Bikoff was trying to lose 30 pounds when
he came up with the idea of enriched water
products. Reasoning that processing
removed much of the nutritional value from
the foods he was eating, Bikoff decided to
experiment with adding vitamin C and other
minerals to bottled water. “If I put these back
in, I figured I’d feel better and have more
energy,” he says. Bikoff hired a food scien-
tist, a flavorist, a microbiologist, and a dieti-
cian to get the potions right.
Apparently it worked. Much of Bikoff’s
energy today is put into the flashy but effec-
tive marketing techniques known as“buzzmarketing.” His company has a fleet of
vans called Glacéau Tasting Vehicles, or
GTVs, that tour the country. At some loca-
tions the public is invited to play Spin the
Bottle to win a free bottle of one of the com-
pany’s three product lines. At other locations
the company sets up hydrology booths where
servers explain the benefits of Glacéau prod-
ucts, attracting tasters with humorous signs.
“The goal with products is to give people a
great story to tell, so they can tell two friends,
and they tell two friends, and so on,” says
Mark Hughes, author of a book on buzzmar-
keting.
One of the keys to generating buzzmar-
keting is being different. That’s why Bikoff
insists his products should be displayed with
bottled water, not sports drinks or soft drinks,
and he designs his jewel-colored bottles and
hip packaging to make his products look very
different from other bottled waters. Even the
Glacéau name and the drink names—vitam-
inwater, fruitwater, and smartwater—set the
products apart. It also doesn’t hurt that the
grape-flavored vitamin water was co-created
and endorsed by rap star 50 Cent.
Glacéau faces tough competition. “Coke,
Pepsi and Cadbury (owner of 7 Up, Dr
Pepper, and others) with their bottling net-
works can get into almost every venue in the
country,” says John Sicher, editor and pub-
lisher of Beverage Digest. Even such logical
placements for Glacéau products as the
Whole Foods grocery chain are uphill battles.
“We’ve only got a limited amount of shelf
space,” says Penny Abbenante, Whole
Foods’ national grocery buyer. “There’s got
to be a unique slant to their product.”
Bikoff has managed to develop his brand
into $350 million in sales thanks to both a
unique product and a unique marketing
approach. Three years after the mock wed-DISCUSSION CASE