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Looking to build your company’s brand on a dime? Consider the story of the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, Inc. a company I founded in 1996 with a single location near Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. The Crazy Carrot, which ultimately grew to five locations and annual sales of $1,000,000, was sold to industry giant Jamba Juice in 1999. While never profitable, we were able to do in a short time what few other companies are able to accomplish: we stood out from the crowd.

Although we opened our first store on a frigid day in January 1998, we had begun marketing the store nearly a year beforehand with an informational web site, Crazy Carrot T-shirts, hats and glassware, a media blitz, and the creation of a life-sized carrot costume.

Our most impressive guerilla marketing feat was the costume. Several months before our first store opened, I asked my mother to sew together a life-size carrot costume that we could use to promote the company at special events. The 'Carrot' was a huge hit and instantly became a recognizable icon for the Crazy Carrot Juice Bar, regularly making appearances at Grand Old Day, the Uptown Art Fair and at Saint Paul Saints' home games.

The Carrot was pictured in several local business publications and area newspapers, was seen on numerous television stations, and heard in on-air interviews for several Twin Cities-based radio shows. Hundreds of people asked to be photographed with the Carrot, and we were even approached by a local co-op to borrow the Carrot for its grand-opening festivities. Best of all, the entire Carrot costume cost us a mere $73 dollars! I bought the orange and green felt from a local fabric store and purchased cardboard and wood from a hardware store to make the shoulder rest.

If the Carrot costume was our biggest hit, the 10,000 carrot seed packs we distributed at stores, in our media kits, and at neighborhood events came in a close second. By working with a marketing fulfillment company, we were able to customize the carrot seed packs with our logo and store location, all at a cost of less than twenty-cents each. Kids loved the carrot seeds and kept coming back for more. Of course, every time they came in for the seeds, they walked out with a juice or smoothie as well.

We hit another grand slam with our logo, developed by a freelance graphic designer for a mere $500. We wanted a logo that would stand out in black and white newspaper advertisements as well as look attractive in color on our exterior store signage. What we got was a logo we were able to use again and again on thousands of reusable mugs, T-shirts, golf shirts, and glasses, as well as on all of our window graphics, business cards, cups, napkins and more.

To give each store an identity of its own, we commissioned a local artist to reproduce images from early 20th century fruit crate labels on giant canvases. The several hundred dollars we paid for each original piece of artwork was money well spent. Nearly every day people would come in and ask whether we were part of a California-based juice bar chain. They simply couldn’t believe that the Crazy Carrot concept - with its recognizable logo, brightly lit stores and colorful fruit crate label-murals hanging on the wall - was native to Minnesota.

Customers weren’t our only fans. In an environment where editors routinely review hundreds of press releases a week, we were able to generate more than 175 articles and mentions in the local, national, and trade press, all in a period of 15 months. Best of all, we received phenomenal press for very little cost.

The Crazy Carrot was a media darling due in large part to our ability to craft the Crazy Carrot story into copy we used and reused in our media kit, on our website, on our menu and company literature, and in press release after press release. Journalists appreciated the fact that the Crazy Carrot press releases were easy to digest, timely, topical, and included a human-interest element.

Early on, we learned that presentation was key to generating media exposure. For one of our more memorable press releases, we hand-delivered a Crazy Carrot T-shirt wrapped in a burlap sack and ‘planted’ in a terra cotta pot along with carrot seed packs and photos of our store. To announce the opening of our second store, we sent journalists live wheat grass with “We’re Growing!” splashed across a garden stake. Afterwards, I heard from several journalists who had carefully watered their wheat grass every few days until it eventually withered away. While our costs for these antics were low, their impact was immeasurable.

As a small business, we were always looking for ways to stretch the value of a dollar. By generating good rapport with the media, investing in a solid logo, thinking outside of the box, consistently promoting the brand using ‘guerilla marketing’ tactics, and selling branded merchandise (i.e. walking billboards), we were able to successfully brand the Crazy Carrot on a very, very tight budget.

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Eric P. Strauss is a public relations and business strategy consultant focusing on the needs of emerging companies. He can be reached at eric@entrepreneursforhire.com or through his website, www.entrepreneursforhire.com/