NEW YORK — Liz Claiborne and Dockers are traversing an alternative marketing path as two of the first three clients at the Hispanic Bzz Channel, a network for word-of-mouth campaigns, which went live Monday.
Liz Claiborne is seeking a buzz boost for Soul by Curve for Women and Soul by Curve for Men, ahead of their September launches, while Dockers is trying to trigger talk about head-to-toe dressing in its men’s casualwear, said David Balter, chief executive officer of BzzAgent, a network of 92,000 people who share their views about products and services with others, including friends, co-workers and family members. Cadbury Schweppes is the third brand participating in the new project.
“[Hispanics] tend to rely more on each other than on advertising information,” Balter said of the decision to launch an Hispanic word-of-mouth network. In laying plans for an eventual global buzz channel, BzzAgent realized it already had 5,000 agents of Hispanic origin and decided to capitalize on the group’s presence, he recounted.
Those players in the Hispanic channel, known as Latino bzz agents, register online at http://hispanic.bzzagent.com if they’d like to experience any of those products. If they subsequently communicate about those items with others, they report online to BzzAgent about those exchanges. BzzAgent, in turn, will analyze and relay that information to Liz Claiborne, Dockers or Cadbury Schweppes.
The products are provided for free; the agents are not paid for talking about them and are asked to disclose their participation in a buzz marketing program.
Typically, BzzAgent programs run for 12 weeks, as the company has found word-of-mouth about a particular product tends to taper off after that period. A 12-week effort with 1,000 agents participating costs $95,000 for a client seeking word-of-mouth, Balter said.
The bilingual network can be viewed online either in Spanish or English via a toggle button. Based on the rate at which agents are joining the Hispanic Bzz Channel, Balter projected the group’s population will reach 15,000 by December.
Vanesa Kolodziej-Guerra, a bilingual Argentine Hispanic marketing specialist, has been named director of the Hispanic Bzz Channel.
BzzAgent campaigns using 1,000 agents typically draw those participants in just one hour, Balter said, but he anticipated efforts of that scale mounted at the Hispanic Bzz Channel will take a few days to get off the ground, as they will be drawing from a smaller pool of players.
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Nearly three-quarters, or 70 percent, of the company’s 92,000 bzz agents are women.
BzzAgent claims 60 clients, including Ralph Lauren, Fila, DuPont, the Independent Film Channel and Anheuser-Busch.