Insights from Remarkable Business People (Collections)

Winning Customers with Commitment

Gary Hirshberg

I can’t claim that Stonyfield’s founder, Samuel Kaymen, and I gave up conventional marketing through a reasoned decision. Short on money to pay for ads and promotion, we had no other choice. But what we had at the outset was worth more than billboards and magazine layouts. We had Samuel’s yogurt recipe, pieced together from Yiddish yogurt masters in Brooklyn, along with the simple conviction that our stuff was so good we need only persuade people to try it to win them over. Our first customers, we were sure, would spread the word to ever- multiplying crowds.

But how to get those first customers’ ...