It was really tough to do business overseas and all of a sudden it was just an email away and that I think has had a big impact on the world and then Skype did the same thing in a bigger way , right ? You invented viral marketing . I don't think a lot of people know that you encourage them to put this footer on the bottom of every uh account in an email .
Did you know you were doing something huge at the time which today people take for granted . I mean , I , I don't know what the value of viral marketing is today , but it's in the trillions of dollars . And you invented that Yeah .
And they all love the product . And so there were these Tupperware parties and it spread and it was the cheapest marketing ever . And uh so I did kind of have that in the back of my mind thinking , you know , this is sort of like a Tupperware , you know , but , but thinking three or four moves ahead realizing that it's uh it can grow to the whole world in a pretty fast way .
How important is marketing to the success of not only a company but to us as individuals and how we market ourselves in both our personal and our professional lives . Well , look , let me start with the , the , the last part I think marketing is , is the exercise of connecting a product or service to people who would like it . Uh I don't think you ultimately sell anybody anything .
Your first job , there were doing a test market of new products in cities like Indianapolis where you worked on products like lilt the home hair perm kit and a hair conditioner called the Bound . You saw that one of the ways they launched new products like shampoos was through something called sampling where they would put a little small version of the shampoo and a little pack and , and distribute it with newspapers or direct mail , hoping that people would like it and buy it , which ended up being a core strategy for AOL during your years of high growth , where you distributed many millions of free trial versions of AOL by sending discs in the mail . You then worked at Pizza Hut for a couple of years in Wichita .
