• Brandweek, Monday, October 12, 2009 10:40 AM

Who needs a traditional marketing budget at all? Evidently not Mint.com, a two-year-old personal finance site with 1.6 million users that Intuit bought for $170 million last month.

Noreen O'Leary writes that CMO Donna Wells, a veteran of huge media budgets at major marketers, has built the brand "on the cheap." In fact, she says her total expenditures are about what she would have spent in two days at Expedia.

How does she do it? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, iPhone apps, a blog and Google analytics, of course. She estimates that total marketing costs over the past two years are about $2 million -- primarily salaries for her four staffers and herself and some expenses like hiring an outside PR agency. Similarly, Pandora.com founder Tim Westergren is focusing on customer service and bonding at his four-year-old Internet radio site.

"The idea that you need a huge amount in marketing and advertising dollars ... was a major fallacy in the dot-com boom, where companies went out and spent millions and got no benefit," Laura Ries, president of consultants Ries & Ries, tells O'Leary. But Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, counters that "successfully doing it on a shoestring is not an average situation -- it's more like winning a lottery ticket."

Read the whole story at Brandweek »