FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
10/01/2008
10/01/2008
Contact: Fern Marcya Edison
845-679-6319
845-679-6319
The Accidental Business - How Two Veteran Marketing Guys Created a Flourishing E Commerce Enterprise While Trying to Save the Planet - Tappening Campaign Succeeds in Both Impact and Profitability In Less than One Year
(October 1, 2008 – New York, NY) Only ten months after the launch of Tappening—“the campaign to make tap water cool”—bottled water sales are declining in the U.S. and Tappening has, almost accidentally, become a very profitable business venture.In November 2007, public relations veteran Eric Yaverbaum, president of Ericho Communications (www.erichopr.com) and advertising veteran Mark DiMassimo, founding partner of DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO) (www.digobrands.com) created Tappening, a campaign and website (www.tappening.com) designed to educate the public about the massive and unnecessary waste of fossil fuels and resultant stress on the environment caused by the bottled water industry, and to encourage people to drink tap water whenever possible.
Tappening’s highly chronicled and trafficked website (with over 4½ million page views to date) features thousands of articles on the bottled water versus tap water debate, as well as a National Tap Water Quality Database. “We believed we could use our advertising and public relations abilities to un-sell bottled water hype,” DiMassimo explains. “What bottled water has is a brand, and that’s what we aimed to create for tap water.” (Tappening’s 2nd provocative ad series – asking if Obama/McCain “have a drinking problem” – are scheduled for release later in October. The ads can be accessed at http://www.erichopr.com/releases/tappening.htm . They have been downloaded over 52,000 times since their announcement, and are rapidly spreading over the internet.
In an effort to sustain and self-fund the campaign (Yaverbaum and DiMassimo each invested personally in the start-up), the partners decided to sell well-designed, reusable water bottles on their educational website. Each bottle says either “Think Global, Drink Local” or “What’s Tappening?” The pair thought their initial inventory would carry them through their first year. To their surprise, the bottles became trendy immediately, with the entire first stock (all 39,000 bottles) selling out within 36 hours of the site going live! “It was a viral reaction. I’ve learned very quickly, firsthand, the potential power of viral marketing,” says Yaverbaum.
Soon, Yaverbaum’s publicity machinery kicked into gear. National television appearances and coast-to-coast radio interviews ensued, and newspaper articles and bloggers alike touted both the information from the Tappening website and the bottles themselves. Schools and universities called, and Yaverbaum and DiMassimo would have needed their own jet to show up everywhere they’d been invited for Earth Day. Good Morning America featured the Tappening bottle on their New Year’s Day program, citing it as one of the “hottest products for 2008.” Adweek touted Tappening as “a form of business philanthropy…founded to right a perceived wrong.” People magazine photographed the bottles for its pages, and “Tappening” soon became part of the vernacular. BusinessWeek twice referred to the “tappening movement,” reporting that “the Marriott hotels have joined the tappening movement.”
The product line soon extended to include stainless steel bottles as well as BPA-free plastic ones and a duffle-type bag created out of 100% post-consumer recyclables (single-serve water bottles and yogurt containers). The most recent offering in the Tappening website store—for people who are seriously concerned about the quality of their tap water—is e-WaterTest (www.e-watertest.com), which offers professional lab testing for 150 possible contaminants.
As it turns out, almost 300,000 bottles and bags later, Yaverbaum and DiMassimo have unwittingly created a new and quite profitable business enterprise, and they have reinvested every dime back into the company. As marketing professionals, the Tappening duo admits they know little about product manufacturing and distribution. However, they now find themselves one of their own biggest clients. Says Yaverbaum, “Everyone in the agency business assumes the grass is greener on the client side. Although I must admit that having our writing, concepts, ads and plans immediately approved by us is fun, being the client is hard work!”
Yaverbaum and DiMassimo have been pouring their profits back into the venture, and recently launched Tappening’s first advertising campaign, created by DiMassimo’s hot ad agency, DIGO. The campaign features three print ads, each of which focuses on a specific bottled water issue: pollution, overrunning landfills or unnecessary cost.
While the unanticipated business success of Tappening has been gratifying, the pair’s greatest satisfaction has come from the public’s responsiveness to their cause, the role they’re playing in helping to make tap the water of choice, and in weaning people off single-serve disposables. On September 10, a Senate sub-committee held a hearing on the quality and environmental issues surrounding bottled water (http://wjz.com/watercooler/bottled.water.senators.2.814398.html). Plus - second-quarter 2008 results are in, and both PepsiCo and Coca-Cola reported declines in the sale of unflavored water. PepsiCo announced in July that sales of unflavored water fell by double-digit rates in North America during the second quarter, while Coca-Cola Enterprises acknowledged that their second-quarter result “reflects persistent weakness in sales of higher margin 20-ounce packages of sparkling beverages and Dasani.” A July 2008 Associated Press article reported that, in addition to a weak economy contributing to declining bottled water sales, “Americans’ concern about the environment was also a factor and has been driven by campaigns against the use of oil in making and transporting the bottles.” The article cites Tappening as a project “that promotes tap water in the U.S.” In August, the publication Ethical Corporation reported that “the bottled water backlash has been fortified by a campaign called the Tappening project, which promotes tap water as safe to drink.”
Concludes Yaverbaum, “It’s my hope that Tappening can serve as one kind of business model for others who would like to promote a cause or issue that’s meaningful and serves what they deem to be a higher good, while also allowing them to thrive economically.”
About Tappening:
Tappening (www.tappening.com), founded by Mark DiMassimo and Eric Yaverbaum, is an educational campaign designed to encourage the public to drink only tap water, and to send a message to the bottled water industry about its unnecessary and extreme waste of fossil fuels and resultant pollution of the Earth.
About DiMassimo Goldstein:
More than an advertising agency, DiMassimo Goldstein (DIGO) is a marketing strategy and communications partner focused on promoting “health, wealth and the pursuit of happiness.” Brand building at this thriving independent includes strategy, research, design, innovation, advertising, direct, digital, buzz, brand advocacy and social marketing. DIGO clients have included blue chip and entrepreneurial marketers such as Crunch, Citibank, MasterCard, SunTrust, Barclays Capital, Pfizer, Gateway, Vitamin Water, Joseph Abboud, Comcast, The Plaza Hotel, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, GoSMILE, Juice Energy, ESPN, American Red Cross, Dr. Mehmet Oz’s HealthCorp, and Rare Conservation, among others. For more information, visit www.digobrands.com.
About Ericho Communications:
Founded in 2007 by best-selling author Eric Yaverbaum, Ericho Communications is a full-service public relations firm “where green meets the latest that technology has to offer.” Ericho’s projects range from the recent launch of the first-ever video text messaging company and a new peer-to-peer video-sharing website to Tappening to work with Tibet. Yaverbaum is the former president of Jericho Communications, where he managed a who’s who of brand names for 21 years, including IKEA Home Furnishings, Domino’s Pizza, Subway Sandwiches and Salads, Progressive Insurance, TCBY, Sony, H&M, Bell Atlantic, American Express, and many more. Yaverbaum is the author of four books, including PR for Dummies, which is required reading in marketing classes at 57 U.S. universities. His fourth book, The Everything Leadership Book, was published in May. Ericho Communications has offices in New York City, White Plains, New York, and Tampa, Florida. For more information, visit www.erichopr.com.
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Eric Yaverbaum and Mark DiMassimo are available for interview.
23,589,456 page views | (c) 2008. Tappening.com
