I’m a huge fan of the American Marketing Association. I’ve attended local AMA events for as long as I’ve worked in marketing, attended the national event in Las Vegas many times (an amazing experience if you ever get the chance) and even serve on the board of my local AMA chapter! It’s always a thrill to hear from other amazing marketers, and that’s why it was an absolute honor when our Las Vegas Marketing chapter asked me to speak at the January 2021 virtual luncheon!
Watch the entire presentation The Creative Catalyst below!
This has been a presentation I’ve wanted to do for a while, and being able to share it for the first time with some of my local community’s best and brightest marketing minds was an incredible honor. There were some fantastic questions as well, even from some marketing experts I’ve personally admired for years.
To everyone involved in last week’s presentation, thank you!
What I’m talking about when I talk about marketing.
For those interested in learning a bit more about this presentation, it’s actually based on a larger writing project I’ve been working on. More details to come. That said, I decided to share a few excerpts from that project below, to help you gain a little more insight into the stories and ideas within The Creative Catalyst.
The Fictitious Epic of Marketcles
What is marketing? Let’s start with a totally fictitious story to explain.
Imagine you’re transported back in time to Ancient Greece, where you’re introduced to two individuals.
The first is Buyer Personius, an average Greek citizen with the want and means to purchase vegetables for his family.
The second is Sellerus, a local merchant who grows and sells vegetables to Greek citizens.
As you’ve probably guessed, there’s a lot of opportunity for these two folks to make some magic. Personius has money and desire for Sellerus’ vegetables, and Sellerus likewise is ready to offload his vegetables in exchange for Personius’ resources.
Now let’s assume these two cross paths, and, as expected, they exchange goods. Classical economics teaches us that when this happens – when the buyer and the seller come together – they’ve created a market. And this is a good market! Both men have the means, the opportunity to connect, and will ultimately be satisfied with the outcome.
But what would have happened if they weren’t able to connect? What if Personius never became aware of Sellerus’ growing vegetable operation? Or if Sellerus never had the opportunity to present his vegetables to Personius?
Marketcles, connector of Greeks.
Enter our hero, Marketcles, Connector of Greeks! Creative, clever, and charismatic as Hell, his mission in life is to solve challenges and bring people together.
Marketcles saw that the Greeks faced a challenge. There were many vegetable buyers and many vegetable sellers, but without the right combination of awareness and opportunity to connect, both parties would lose. As he saw it, bringing people together was essential for the process of buying and selling to work.
So, to make his living, Marketcles made a deal with Sellerus. Every day, Marketcles would walk throughout the city finding people who needed vegetables – people like Buyer Personius – and would make sure they knew of Sellerus. Everyone he spoke to, he would ensure they heard about the amazing quality of Sellerus’ vegetables, and also had the necessary directions to find him. In exchange for this service, Sellerus would pay Marketcles a portion of his sales at the end of every day.
If you haven’t guessed by now, this is marketing. It’s the act of connecting buyers and sellers together, and creating opportunities for them to exchange goods and services. Literally, it’s the process of creating the markets we mentioned before.
Now, this all might sound simple, and in the beginning for Marketcles it was. However, as time went on, word got out about his arrangement with Sellerus. Inspired, and in an area with many vegetable growers and many hungry Greeks, it didn’t take long for several sellers to make agreements of their own.
Marketing quickly became chaotic, with many Greeks jumping on board. Soon, the city became a bustle of noise announcing the majesty and prowess of their clients’ vegetables “just a few blocks away!”
Suddenly, nearly every Greek citizen, from Buyer Personius to Not Hungry Maximus, was inundated with a cacophony of “best vegetables ever!” everywhere they went, whether they were in need of vegetables or not.
As you can imagine, the results were less than successful. With too many options alongside so much nonsense, the buyers weren’t moved, and rarely heard the marketers’ messages at all. Some were better than others, sure, and thanks to clever speeches and innovative follow-up, some vegetable growers did well. Others, however, hired less than effectual announcers for their brands, and the result was their demise.
But clever Marketcles, always the innovator, felt that more could be done. His job had changed, certainly, but he knew with the right strategy he could still connect Sellerus with buyers. He simply needed inspiration.
So Marketcles began to ask questions and learn. He spoke to other Greeks about how they bought vegetables to learn their preferences on price, quality and convenience. He asked about their favorite vegetables, as well as their least. And he took the time to explore how the Greeks used different vegetables for different dishes, as well as during various occasions and seasons.
To his amazement, his curiosity quickly evolved into ideas. He’d discovered, for instance, that many of the Greeks liked to purchase their food twice a week to save time on traveling. As a result, he worked with Sellerus to create promotions that discounted multiple back-to-back purchases. He also became aware that several Greeks hosted a large family dinner on the first Friday of each month, and arranged for easy pre-orders of Sellerus’ vegetables to ensure enough were available on the day of the feasts.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, when other marketers eventually approached the Greeks, they found that most had already committed their business to Sellerus. The marketing strategy Marketcles had created had evolved from simply being the loudest voice in the city, and now offered real solutions to the Greeks’ challenges, sometimes long before they were even in the market for vegetables at all.
Marketers create markets.
The takeaway from the story is the power of the insights Marketcles used when he developed his final strategy. Yes, marketing is the act of bringing buyers and sellers together, but our marketplace has grown much louder than ever before.
For Marketcles and Sellerus, a traditional advertising plan worked well when there were few advertisers in the arena. However, as more marketers entered play, it became apparent that the marketing that moved the Greeks the most was meaningful tactics that truly worked with their lives - a truly strategic approach.
To get there, our hero only needed to take the time to ask the right questions of his audience, and learn from their feedback. He met with them, he spoke with them, and he created an understanding of their wants, needs, and values. And then he created solutions from those insights, connecting the dots between their challenges and Sellerus.
What would happen if…?
In 1975, Coca-Cola was the far-and-away dominant leader of the soft drink industry. Riding the high of their “It’s the real thing” advertising punch through much of the decade, and holding the vast majority of the market share, both the Coke brand and its namesake beverage felt like the preeminent pairing of proper promotion and perfect product.
That’s why, in 1975, it came as such a shock to both Coca-Cola - and its global fan base! - when the company’s closest competitor, Pepsi, famously stated that consumers actually preferred their product over Coke. And, they continued, they could prove it.
As part of a new marketing program, Pepsi had recently introduced blind taste testings of both their product and Coke into their strategy. Dubbed ‘the Pepsi Challenge,’ the test involved regular consumers taking a small sip of two unlabeled cola products, and revealing their favorite. In the vast majority of cases, Pepsi was the winner.
And, with that winning victory - which they proudly proliferated everywhere - Pepsi posed the question to their entire audience “Are you really sure you prefer Coke over Pepsi?
The Pepsi Challenge became a staple of pop culture, and an instant marketing success. Wowed reactions from real consumers taking the challenge was the focus of Pepsi’s ads and commercials, and the company continued to place real-world Pepsi Challenge opportunity spots at locations and events to help proliferate their question.
The results seemed to come back definitive for both the audience, and Coke: Pepsi was the superior product.
Like you’d imagine any marketing juggernaut in this situation would do, the Coca-Cola company quickly went back to development-mode to help save its brand. They conducted taste testings of their own, replicating the Pepsi Challenge over and over in their own labs, and the same results continued and continued - viva la Pepsi.
As testing continued, Coke eventually summarized that Pepsi’s product had an overall sweeter flavor than their beverage, and that evolving consumer taste preferences must be leaning toward newer, sweeter flavors like this.
Working to make strides to create a better Coke product that met the taste expectations of their customers, Coca-Cola scientists toyed for years with different sugar and other sweetener products, as well as variations in viscosity, saltiness, color, savoriness and more, all-the-while working with a sense of urgency and dread dictated by the impending market fall that was sure to come as more consumers made the Pepsi switch.
The process was a painstaking exercise that depleted both effort and resources, but in 1985, a full ten years after Pepsi had first made the claims from their Pepsi Challenge campaign, the Coca-Cola company had finally created a product ready for the taste buds of the new world.
Unfortunately, New Coke was a disaster.
Almost immediately, from the day New Coke hit the market, consumers complained that the updated Cola flavor was just far too sweet for them to enjoy.
To add insult to injury, longtime Coca-Cola brand advocates - those who loved and helped proliferate the brand worldwide - felt betrayed. In later testing, they’d say they had always preferred Coca-Cola’s original famous time-tested flavor, and now that it was no longer available, their connection to the brand dissipated as well.
Where did Coke go wrong?
Despite literally millions of customer testimonials that clearly stated the sweeter flavor of Pepsi was the preference, somehow New Coke completely missed the mark. Data said one thing, the world another. So, what happened?
Well, first, the data was incorrect. While insightful at first - that consumers preferred Pepsi in a blind taste test of shot glass-sized quantities of cola - it’s also important to remember that small shot glass amounts are not how consumers drink soft drinks.
Fun fact, humans don’t like ‘sweet’ as much as we think. When we consume sweets, it’s usually in smaller quantities, which is why desserts and candies are generally sized smaller than other meals and snacks. In larger quantities, we lose interest. If you want to create a product that’s sweet but intended to be consumed in large quantities, you need to tone down the sweetness a bit, and add other flavors like saltiness to make the brain ‘want’ to take another drink.
Basically, you need to create Coke.
The actual strategy behind the test at the core of the Pepsi Challenge is the flaw, as customers overall really do prefer Pepsi over Coke, on the condition that the quantities they’re drinking are extremely small. Like a dessert or candy.
In fact, the truth of the matter is that Pepsi is too sweet for the average consumer on the market. Coke, meanwhile, has nearly mastered the blend of sweet-but-not-too-sweet, which is a huge part of why they held such a dominate position in the market at the time (and still do!).
But instead of asking these important marketing questions in their process, and ultimately discovering these truths, the New Coke fiasco was almost entirely based on the Pepsi Challenge’s flawed methodology. Had Coca-Cola asked (and answered) better marketing questions, meanwhile, they would have uncovered a wealth of marketing insights that would have saved them a tremendous amount of trouble.
However, despite having essentially the perfect brand in the scenario, Coke missed the mark. A major data-point, derived from a great question, told a terrifying story, and that was enough for them to act. Coca-Cola never questioned the insights, nor tried to answer better questions with other data sources they had available. For the ten years of New Coke’s development, for instance, Coca-Cola lost extremely less market share than predicted by the impending doom. And, while the Pepsi Challenge data suggested that it was definitely coming, a full decade of macro-level market data should have encouraged further questioning.
This is a story about Pepsi!
The story of New Coke’s failure is ultimately one of marketing success for Pepsi, who did it entirely by asking a better marketing question: “What would happen if everyone thought Pepsi was better?”
Going into the 1970s, Pepsi knew they held a less popular product than Coke worldwide, and at some point called into question whether or not that Coca-Cola popularity was somewhat based on presumption - maybe people like Coke because they think everyone else likes Coke?
On the whole this is not the case, as on average more people will prefer to drink a can of Coke over a can of Pepsi, but working from that concept, Pepsi created a framework. Could they create a scenario in which people did prefer Pepsi, and could they make it truthful enough to resonate with Coke drinkers?
Pepsi asked the right questions, and created a research methodology that proved, through data, that they had the superior product. However flawed that methodology was from an unbiased standpoint, its impact on their overall marketing strategy was huge.
Customer testimonials are powerful, and through the Challenge, Pepsi was able to create real, authentic reactions from real customers preferring their product. They were also able to share those experiences widely, and even encouraged more consumers to experience this (biased) data truth for themselves, by simply asking them which beverage they preferred more.
The marketing strategy was largely successful for them. From the powerful content created through the campaign, Pepsi encouraged an extremely high number of consumers to give their product a first try, with many even sticking with Pepsi out of loyalty to their own personal findings conducting the Pepsi Challenge themselves.
But perhaps the biggest strategic result that came from the Challenge for Pepsi was, of course, the development of New Coke. Thanks to an innovative strategic marketing campaign kicked off by a truly phenomenal marketing question, Pepsi was able to create fear in their foremost competitor, and that fear lead to a huge spend in time, effort and resources that ultimately proved fruitless.
In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu accurately states that one must “attack him where he is unprepared, and appear where you are not expected.” Going into the Challenge, both Coke and Pepsi knew that Coke was the preferred product, which is why the former was caught so off guard when Pepsi provided real data that said otherwise. They were unprepared to deal with this strategy, and in reactionary fashion, took the information at face value instead of discovering and dissecting it for themselves.
A cunning move that yielded sales spikes, increases in brand awareness, and a major push to put their most prolific opponent on tilt, asking the world which product they prefer through the Pepsi Challenge is a stroke of marketing genius. It created real results, and continues to be a cultural icon to this day.
How do you make non-athletes athletes?
You’ve probably heard of Nike, the largest seller of athletic shoes around the world. The company was founded in 1964, and in its first two decades quickly established itself as the premier provider of the right thing to have on your feet if you wanted to win! The company proudly advertised world-class athletes, from distance runner Steve Prefontaine to then-rising basketball star Michael Jordan, wearing their famous footwear while accomplishing phenomenal athletic feats. As a result, Nike held the unquestionable position as the premier product provider of professional athletes.
But for Nike, professional athletes was not enough. While sports superstars and up-and-coming competitors firmly believed Nike was the product for them, the number of athletes would simply never be enough to sustain the growth the company was seeking. “Everyone,” however - referring to the general population of people that just wore any type of sneakers - was a much more ideal audience segment.
The challenge, then, was figuring out how to sell athletic shoes to people who didn’t consider themselves athletes.
In 1988, that challenge fell to advertising agency Wieden & Kennedy, and the creative team immediately set to work asking questions. They took the time to conduct research with their audience, and tried to find the hidden connection between the shoes people wanted and Nike’s key offering as a source for athletic performance.
What the creative team learned was that, while the average shoe consumer didn’t see themselves as an athlete, they did also have aspirations for their lives that involved athleticism. On the whole, nearly every individual they spoke to had some sort of goal, whether it was to lose weight, get in shape, or even just pursue an athletic activity not currently in their lives.
The challenge for these individuals, their learning went on to discover, was two-fold. Of those consumers they spoke to, nearly all had a list of excuses holding them back from pursuing their goals. They all, also, seemed to hold a universal attitude that athletes, real athletes like the ones Nike created products for, did not have that same list of excuses in their own lives.
As agency head Dan Wieden would later say, “I was trying to write something that would tie it up, so it could speak to women who had just started walking to get in shape, to people who were world-class athletes.” As he saw the situation, virtually every potential Nike customer fit somewhere on the spectrum he’d outlined, and it was up to his campaign to move each customer to action, while simultaneously embracing the “just for athletes” Nike brand perception that prevailed in the market.
And that’s exactly what they did when they summarized the entire challenge of the insight. Using clever copy, a single call to action was created that managed to inspire their entire audience to banish their excuses, adopt and athletic mindset, and put themselves in the shoes necessary to make it all happen: “Just Do It.”
The company’s “Just Do It” campaign kicked off with a broadcast commercial featuring Walt Stack, an inspiring then 80-year-old distance runner who wore his Nike shoes daily while completing a minimum 17 mile run. Similar advertising continued across print, outdoor and more, with executions always displaying relatable individuals becoming the athletes they aspired to be, each ignoring hurdles like age or mindset by “just doing it.”
The campaign inspired millions to revisit their own self beliefs, as well as their commitments to health and athleticism. By the time the campaign hit its ten-year anniversary, the company had conquered a full 43 percent of the North American shoe market[Center for Applied Research, “Just Do It” Advertising Campaign”], and as the powerful marketing tagline continued to be translated into language after language, Nike managed to establish itself as the preeminent global leader it has become today.
Ask questions. Learn answers.
Anthropology, the study of human societies and cultures, has given us much of our knowledge about how ancient civilizations lived and believed. As father of modern anthropology Claude Levi-Strauss famously stated, “the wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” And, as it happens, anthropology is exactly what we’re trying to do.
Dan Wieden and his team created a magical piece of marketing for Nike, all through their ability to formulate an amazingly deep understanding of the customers the company wanted to speak to. Research into the hearts and minds of these individuals revealed aspirations, perceptions, viewpoints and psychological cores that eventually helped them map a strategy for success. And just like Levi-Strauss suggests about his field, they did it by asking questions.
Just as anthropology helps us understand cultures and societies of old, we marketers today are making the same quests for knowledge about our audiences. Whether in pursuit of anthropological truth or an effective outline for marketing strategy, the importance of asking questions in this learning process cannot be understated.
