Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.  You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.  ~Steuart Henderson Britt

The history of the toothpick is fascinating.

After visiting the Union Oyster House in Boston, I became aware of the distinguished ascent of this little tiny bit of wood. Names and dates and events are chronicled above (see link). What I was struck by is the marketing genius.

A man wants to sell people a stick that they can use to clean food out of their teeth. People already knew how to use these sticks because they could whittle them themselves. So the master of marketing did a few critical things:

• Got a streamlined product
• And got people taking about it

Magnificent Marketing

A Harvard man’s word…
It took some time for toothpicks to catch on and for a new business owner they weren’t catching on fast enough. So he hired some Harvard students to dine at the Union Oyster House and then as the legends of history go, ‘loudly ask for toothpicks’ after the meal was through.

Soon it became a matter of saving face for ‘America’s Oldest Restaurant’ to provide toothpicks to the patrons.

Brilliant? Or icky?
It depends on how you define success. We still use commercial, mass-produced toothpicks to this day. They have become a part of our common collection of artifacts. They work, they endured, it wasn’t a snake oil, and no one forced people to buy them.

Generating buzz is part of successful marketing. Having a viable product to back it up is essential. Our methods for creating buzz abound but all point back to the same source: the INTERNET. Companies want consumers to say, send, and post good things about their products on all online outlets. They send products to consumers for review. The provide forums and comments sections and online chats right alongside their ordering platforms. Ratings systems and recommendation avenues are meant to give us a sense of security: other people buy this product, use it, and recommend it, I can too.

Just like the Harvard guys!

Did the Harvard guys believe in the product? Who knows? Does everyone who posts a comment, good or bad, on a website, blog, community forum or social media platform mean what they say (or were they hired for their opinion?)

We can’t know for sure. What you CAN know is this:  if you are the business owner, the product seller, the keynote speaker, the online advertiser, or the next-greatest-invention provider, YOU KNOW IF YOU have integrity and truth in your sales and marketing strategies.

Real buzz is better buzz. Today’s consumers can see strait through anything else.