3 Lessons from Selling Pizza, Religion and Coffee
And at the end: this is how you get a marketing job
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going?
For me, one of the great things about writing this newsletter is that I’m constantly learning new things. For example, last week I learned that if the subject line of the this newsletter contains the phrase “The BEST air purifiers for 2024” people will not open the newsletter. Even if, again for example, that phrase was used in jest. Apparently, even in jest, people do NOT want to know about the BEST air purifiers for 2024. That is a thing I learned, and I made sure that the subject line of the email you received letting you know that this newsletter was available in your inbox contained no trace of the phrase “BEST air purifiers for 2024.”
Instead I went with the tried-and-true “X lessons for…” subject line, and I just made up the number. I have no idea how many lessons there are.
Moving on.
A Few More Examples of Self-Hating Products
Since many of you decided to skip last week’s excellent newsletter simply because you feared that newsletter contained information about the BEST air purifiers of 2024, I wanted to make sure you got caught up with those hearty souls who DID read it.
We talked last week about how one of the ways to overcome the shortcomings of your products is to note how that shortcoming is actually, in its own way, a sign of how great the product is. I shared an old Listerine ad that noted that because the product tasted so terrible, that meant it must be killing germs.
And because of my never-ending ongoing and desperate search for new readers, I posted about that on LinkedIn (in a pathetic attempt to gin up some traffic). In response to that, every Canadian who read it sent me an ad from Buckley’s cough syrup.
Buckley’s is a Canadian cough suppressant, and their ads have, famously and forever, touted the terribleness of how it tastes:
“It tastes awful. And it works.” is brilliant.
Here’s a quick 15 second ad where the message is that although it tastes terrible, it works so well that you won’t have to take it for very long.
Brilliant. Every product has drawbacks - go figure out how your drawback is actually a benefit.
Some of that Old Time Religion…
I keep a list of topics to write about, and every week I go through that list. And every week I see the phrase, “Jesus, He Gets Us.”
(For Gobbledy’s international readers, a group in the US is currently running an ad campaign called “Jesus, He Gets Us” to sell people on Jesus. You can see the ads here.)
I have never been more fascinated with an ad campaign. Perhaps you, too, have thought to yourself, “How in God’s name would I even approach creating a campaign like that?”
And then you thought, “ha - “in God’s name” - that’s funny. I’m really clever.”
And then you thought to yourself, “If I’m so clever, why don’t more people subscribe to the newsletter I write?
And then, “That’s weird, I don’t write a newsletter.”
In any case, someone (in God’s name) did create that campaign, and that someone is Ken Calwell. Calwell used to be the chief marketing officer at Domino’s and at Wendy’s, but he’s now running a Christian nonprofit called Come Near that’s offering 50% off the second pizza when you buy a medium 1-topping.
That can’t be right.
No, he’s running that nonprofit and they’re responsible for the “Jesus, He Gets Us” ads that ran during the Super Bowl.
If those ads fascinated you as a marketer, you should read this Wall St. Journal interview (no subscription needed) with Calwell about that campaign.
He approached the problem of “how do we get more people aware of what Jesus stands for” like a brand marketer. He focused on measurement, specifically measuring awareness and engagement. “We have most recently seen that over 65% of all Americans are aware of or recognize the “He Gets Us” brand.”
For engagement they looked at a number of metrics, but he talked specifically about measuring Google searches: “Prior to the Super Bowl last year, the number one day that people searched for Jesus was Easter Sunday, and number two was Christmas Day. But last year, Google searches for Jesus on Super Bowl Sunday were even more than Christmas. We beat out Christmas.”
Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Isn’t it sad that more people searched for Jesus during the Super Bowl than on Christmas?”
Well sure. But it’s also a sign that good marketing can be effective, regardless of the product. Also of the collapse of America. But also that thing about good marketing.
One marketing tactic I’ve pushed for multiple times over the years but have never been able to convince anyone to do is to create a mascot for a software company. Mascots can be an incredibly effective shorthand for brand values, easily recognizable, and you can give away stupid stuffed animals shaped like them at conferences and parents bring them home and then they sit on the dining room table for months and the parent is reminded each morning when they see the CreditKey Duck-Billed Platypus* (or whatever) that CreditKey’s buy-now-pay-later solution allows you to duck bills (and pay later).
(*Not a real thing.)
But whenever I’ve suggested that, someone (or usually someones) will say, “we’re a serious company and mascots don’t work and really our buyer only cares about how our APIs work and blah blah blah blah.” (I’m not still angry about this.)
But I’d suggest that what Calwell says above shows the power of mascots.
Which two holidays does he mention? Christmas and Easter.
Which two holidays have mascots?
I guess what I’m saying is that the same marketing tacts that sell pizza and software also work if you’re trying to get people to join your religion.
Which was all a lead up to what I really wanted to talk about today:
Maxwell House coffee.
Specifically, how did Maxwell House coffee become the un-official sponsor of Passover haggadahs*?
(*A haggadah is the book Jews use to tell the story of Passover prior to eating a meal at the Seder. That’s all the Jewish stuff you’ll need as background…)
Also, that’s not all the Jewish stuff you’ll need as background, I was lying.
Here’s the one more bit of background: there are rules/traditions** around what Jews can eat during the 8 days of Passover. The big one is about not eating leavened bread.
(**They’re traditions but for reasons I don’t really understand, they’re treated as rules by secular American Jews, who are also happy to ignore many other rules of the religion but follow the traditions of Passover. Or at least whatever their mother had decided were the food-related restrictions of Passover.)
Then there are the other rules/traditions around which foods can be eaten that someone else can write about, except you should also know that some Jews (don’t ask) do not eat legumes during Passover. And because as the old expression goes - if you get 2 Jews in a room you get 3 opinions - some Jews DO eat legumes during Passover.
Anyway, coffee is made from coffee beans, and for many years there was some confusion about whether coffee beans are a bean. Because if they ARE a bean, then many Jews will not consume coffee during Passover.
Coffee beans, however, are a fruit, not a bean, so they can be consumed for Passover.
If you were wondering who would care so much about this, the answer is “any company that sells coffee.”
So in 1932 the Maxwell House coffee people worked with Joseph Jacobs Advertising (an agency that’s still around today, focused on marketing for the kosher market) and came up with the idea of Maxwell House giving away haggadahs at the grocery store during Passover as a way of ensuring people that you can have a cup of coffee during the Passover meal (and during all 8 days of Passover).
The company says that it has printed more than 60 million haggadahs over the past 100 years, which has to be the most effective affinity marketing campaign ever, no?
If you’re not Jewish, don’t worry - Maxwell House still wanted you to buy coffee:
You can drink Maxwell House when you’re singing Christmas carols, too (I mean, maybe they aren’t singing Christmas carols? But also, Jews are not going to stand outside in the cold and sing. Or stand outside in the cold at all. Or stand for too long. Those people are definitely singing Christmas carols.)
Last year we talked about Manischewitz wine and how they were able to market successfully to both their core market (Jews who wanted wine for religious occasions) and to another market where other brand attributes mattered (African American wine drinkers, who believed that a kosher label suggested higher quality, while also enjoying a sweeter-than-typical wine).
Maxwell House was able to market to Christmas carolers while also marketing to, uh, Hanukkah carolers (?) because they used their core message (“good to the last drop”) with their core market, and a market-specific message (“kosher for passover”) for their secondary message (as Manischewitz did with their own core and secondary markets).
When a company’s target market is hitting a growth plateau, they’ll often discuss the opportunity of moving to adjacent markets - (from enterprise to small business; or expanding geographically; or distributing through a new channel). But another option is to think through the core attributes of your product and think about the markets in which those attributes would resonate. Even if you would consider those attributes to be negative (this wine is too sweet!) or too obvious (ALL coffee is kosher for Passover), that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to target another market that would care about it.
This Is How You Get a Job Nowadays
Maybe this is more gobbledy-adjacent…
A product marketer was having a hard time finding a job, so she made a product video about herself. You should watch it, it’s great.
As always, thanks for reading to the end.
I really, really enjoy chatting with readers, which is why I include a link to sign up for a 25 minute chat: Here’s my Calendly link. We can talk about why some Jews eat beans on Passover. Or about affinity marketing. Whatever you’d like. Or I can go over your website - it can be about work, realy!
And lastly, I’ve been doing a bunch of 1-day workshops around messaging, and the outcome is that your homepage will be SO much clearer. If you want your homepage to be clearer, we should chat. You can reply to this newsletter, use that Calendly link, or email me at jared@sagelett.com.
(For those of you who had Jewish grandmothers who came from Eastern Europe, you will grow nostalgic when you look through this Passover recipe book that Planters - the peanut people - put together 70 years ago. It’s got recipes for foods I haven’t thought about in forever like knoedel, mandelach, chremsel, and matzo with kuchen. Really made me think of my grandmother.)
You really didn't need pizza in the title to get a hearty soul to read this week's Gobbledy.
Laughed out loud so much on this one. Thanks (as per usual!) for making mid-week better with your ad musings!!