Transcript
Question:
How important is research in business?
Lynda
Resnick: Research
has been so key to me, my whole working life. What we use to pay for research and the time we would wait
to get the answers, by the time a research study came back tens of thousands of
dollars later, you’d move on almost.
It used to take forever. I
would say that we must have a couple of research projects going every week at
one of our different companies.
Research is free today compared to what it used to be.
And
if you have a website and you know who your market is, then you can research
them, you can make them part of your new product development, you can take care
of them as your ambassadors. We do
a lot of that. But if you don’t,
if you’re just starting out in business; you know about Zoomerang.com? For $20 a month, you can do endless
research on that site with your demographic group, the age group, the level of
education, and so forth. You can
ask all kinds of questions to find out if you should market this better
mousetrap that you just invented.
So there
is no reason; one of the reasons I was into research so much when I was a kid
is I use to date a guy that worked at Rand and he was a researcher. So he helped me with my research. And then, as time went on, I developed
in house research. But today,
there’s no reason why everyone can’t do research before they go out and take a
chance.
Question:
How has transparency affected your business?
Lynda
Resnick: The
old idea was that when you’re getting hit over the head in the media, just put
your head down and wait until it passes.
That was the conventional wisdom.
We were attacked by the PETA people because in order to do testing on
humans for pomegranate juice. And we have spent millions and millions of
dollars with Harvard and UCLA and the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic and
so forth and so on, all these great universities and scientific centers. But you go from a test tube, and then
you do experiments in rats or mice, and then you go to humans. It’s just part of the scientific
protocol.
And
they [PETA] came after us. And
what my husband and the legal experts decided to do was to fight it in the
courts. Well, 8 months later,
they--not PETA so much, but the animal activists that are a fringe group--where
parked outside of the houses of my innocent employees with foghorns, screaming
obscenities, calling us murderers.
There were bomb threats at the building.
They
had gone on the Internet, saying, they had poisoned 500 bottles of juice on the
eastern seaboard but they wouldn’t say where. People were dumping our juice.
I
went into the office one day and my employees who are a happy lot were so
depressed. They [the protestors] were
also outside of my house but it didn’t get to me the way it did if somebody is
right on the curve and your house is right there and they’re whispering in the
window at night, we’re going to get your kids.
Now,
we had stopped animal testing 6 months before this. But I went to my husband and to the legal people and I said,
“I’m taking this over. You can
fire me if you want to but I’m going to fight this on the Internet. I’m going
back to the people.”
And
I wrote a letter to my retailers that I posted online, posted on every blog
that was talking about it, our own blogs.
Wrote to the consumers, told them absolutely the truth about we’d stop
testing 6 months ago. We were not
going to test juice again. Why we
did it; the mice and the rats.
There was one rabbit study for erectile dysfunction. You wouldn’t think rabbits would be a
good choice but be that as it may.
And
within one day, the animal activists stopped. Two days later, we made a deal with PETA. Now, we work with them. And we give money to the cause to find
ways to test.
Question:
How do you use social media?
Lynda
Resnick: I just hired a community media czar for the companies. Because every group is doing it but I
don’t want to reinvent the wheel every time we go out there. And so, I’m so committed to it. It’s not like running an ad with a
coupon, you’re going to go and count the money coming in. It’s just not like that. But if you are value based, if you are
unique, if you have ultimate transparency, then you go out and become close to
your consumer. Let them help you
build the business. You help them,
they help you. The dialogue. I want to become a part of the fiber of
the dialogue even more so. So that
is my next real effort, corporate effort, if you will, across all brands.
Recorded
on: March 17, 2009
