How Honest Tea Brews Buzz Online

We recently spoke with Jesse Merrill, director of marketing at Honest Tea, about the company’s word-of-mouth and grassroots approach to marketing. Interesting stuff. Here’s a snippet:

We’ve begun to tap into the social media space to stay personally connected to several thousand consumers in real time. It’s a great way to capture consumer insights on new product launches and strategic partnerships. So it certainly has given us a cost-effective way to achieve that personal connection.

We’re trying to leverage as much as we can without investing a large amount of financial capital. We’re building the community, creating the interactive dynamic with our consumers and collecting some market research. Once we measure the results, if we can track some of this back to sales on a smaller scale, then at that point we’ll really ramp it up and invest more financially.

We launched a Facebook page about a year ago and are very active on Twitter. We currently have 10 field marketing teams who are out there sampling, connecting with several large-scale and small-scale events. We have a lot of retail demos and guerrilla activity in place, so all of our field marketers are actively sending tweets to update consumers about scheduled events.

They’ll tweet, “Hey, we’re gonna be at the DMB show next week. Come get a free sample of Honest Tea.” We can run scavenger hunts or contests: “Find the guy wearing the Honest Tea shirt and you will win five cases of free Honest Tea!” We definitely use it as a vehicle for contests, as well.

eMarketer Total Access subscribers can read the whole thing here.