The Secrets of My Success: The Story of Boost Juice, Juicy Bits and All

Chapter 9

Mixing up your marketing

It is no accident that Boost Juice achieved 94 per cent brand awareness in Australia in just five years. After all, there’s no point in having a terrific product if nobody has ever heard of it!

Much has been made of Boost marketing and, the truth is, it should be. We weren’t the first juice bar, but we were the first in most people’s minds. At one point, there were 47 different juice bar brands, vying to be in the top two to survive. Boost was the brand that made it through.

It may be old school but the philosophies of Ries and Trout, covered in their book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, were followed to a T. This is marketing defined simply as find out what customers want and give it to them — but it’s only half the story. The other half of the story for Boost was find things that they could talk about and give it to them. So consumer desire and innovation became our mantra.

Early on, so we had a flag for our team to point to, we came up with the ‘Boost JAM Factor’, which still stands today. JAM stands for Juxtapose, Assimilate and Make your mark, as follows:

• Juxtapose: If the other guys do it, we don’t!

What can we do because we are small and don’t answer to a marketing committee? Things like the ‘What’s ya name’ game (where customers receive a free smoothie if we call their name), or ‘Boost Vibe Challenges’ (where customers do crazy stuff for free smoothies). Another promotion that was a huge success for us was the ‘Give away a Boost ...