3 Secular Marketing Lessons from Manischewitz

And you're not the world's worst marketer

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? First day of school went OK? If you live south of Ohio, has your first 2 months of school gone OK? Yes? Good.

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Rows.com and Bows of Angel Hair

You may remember a few weeks ago we talked about Rows.com, which I said was the best website I’d ever seen (which may sound impressive, but in the 18 months I’ve been writing Gobbledy, it’s the 3rd or 4th “best website I’ve ever seen,” so, y’know, grain of salt, etc.)

Rows.com is the spreadsheet company that skipped having a normal homepage and just put their product as the homepage.

Humberto Ayres Pereira, the CEO of Rows.com, was kind enough to reach out and share that they’ve published a blog post that goes into some detail about how they made the decision to change their homepage, as well as some results from making the change. If you were intrigued by Rows.com, it’s definitely worth a read.

And if you weren’t intrigued by that, I don’t care and I’m going to share a couple of quick things.

First, if you were wondering if you should switch your homepage to something similar, here’s what they think are the criteria for making that decision:

If:

a) you have a very large audience;

b) that can get value from the product on their own;

c) a business model (freemium) that does not require you to monetize everyone;

d) a product that can be experienced in ‘single-player mode’,

Why do you need a landing page? You don’t.

You can lead with the product. It’s ‘the epitome of PLG’. (Product Led Growth)

Pereira also shared a couple of metrics:

- The conversion rate to sign-up rose by 72% from 11.1% to 19%.
- The activation rate of users who converted from a sandbox account is 30% higher than those who sign-up via other channels (e.g from mobile)

As great as it is that they’re seeing those results, I give that team even more credit for being open to trying something completely different. I stand by my view that fear is the biggest hurdle to making the changes necessary to bring clarity to your product’s value proposition. It’s rare to see a team be fearless. Bravo.

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Now You Can Be Sure You Aren’t the Worst Marketer Ever

One of the challenges of marketing - especially, though not exclusively, brand marketing - is that it’s hard to know if you’re doing a good job. If you work in a performance marketing role, you have a better sense of whether you’ve done a good job because you have Return on Spend goals to hit (or something along those lines).

It’s harder on the brand side, since there’s some art alongside the science, and what’s “on brand” to one person may be “off brand” to another person.

For example, for many years I was the person being accused of creating “off brand” campaigns. Possibly because they were off brand.

There’s a wide range of campaigns that fall between brand and performance, and we see countless numbers of these every day - you probably barely notice them at all.

And if you’re someone who works on these campaigns - let’s say they’re ads running on Twitter or whatever - you may wonder if you’re doing a good job.

You may be having a terrible day and you may wonder (as I certainly have at times…those times being 2011-2015) if you’re the world’s worst marketer.

Well, my friends, I have good news for you. You are not the world’s worst marketer. Unless you are the DraftKings marketer who thought that a promotion involving 9/11 and urging you to “never forget” to bet on New York-based sports teams was a good idea:

See, you’re not so bad at your job.

(For you gamblers out there, the Mets lost, so you would’ve lost the parlay.)

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Grape Expectations, or 3 Marketing Lessons from Manischewitz

The other night I was at my synagogue for services. (For some reason Jews say we went to “services,” even when it’s one service. Just wanted to point that out.)

While we were there I spent some time with long-time Gobbledy reader Gary S., who, after the service(s), walked by me while holding several shots of Manischewitz wine that they had out for the snack following the service.

For folks not familiar with Manischewitz, it’s a kosher wine that’s incredibly sweet and is often associated with being 14 years old and getting drunk at a Passover seder, where tradition says you drink 4 glasses of it, which is 3 1/2 glasses too much for a 14 year old. Specifically, for this former 14 year old.

Gary mentions how he actually likes Manischewitz, despite that it is universally derided as “bad wine” by everyone in the community. I say that I, too, enjoy it.

And because Gary is a longtime Gobbledy reader, he says, “It’s bad wine, but actually it’s good brandy.” Which I’m sure he said because he wanted to impress me with his ability to re-position Manischewitz.

That was going to be my column this week - about how you can take something that’s bad (incredibly sweet kosher wine) and call it something else (why don’t they just say it’s brandy?) and it becomes re-positioned as a good something else, rather than a bad something.

Except it led me down a history-of-Manischewitz rabbit hole that, because Rosh Hashanah is a few days from now, I’m going to share here so that you can bore your family members with it (if you’re Jewish), or bore your family members with it (if you’re not Jewish).

I’ll keep it (very) brief.

Manischewitz started as a matzo company in 1888. The founder’s sons take over and they add a bunch of new food products. They’re smart marketers, so they understand they’re not a matzo company, they’re a kosher food company. (They do not make the classical business school example mistake of the railroad companies thinking they’re in the train business, rather than in the transportation business, and missing the opportunity to extend their brands to become airlines.)

Marketing lesson #1 - extending the brand is really only possible if you understand why your customers actually value you. Manischewitz wasn’t valued because it made the best matzo, it was valued because it made Kosher food readily available in places where it was not previously readily available.

It’s so successful that they take the company public back in 1923.

By 1940 they extended the line to more than 70 different food products, and a winemaker comes to the Manischewitz company and says (paraphrasing), “Hey dawgz. I make kosher wines, but you have a much bigger brand than my company (Monarch) does. What if you license me the name for 99 years, and 40 years from now a future marketing newsletter writer will have 4 glasses of this stuff shortly after his bar mitzvah at his uncle’s seder.”

They agree to a 99 year license for the wine, which becomes their most successful product.

Marketing lesson #2 - understand what you’re good at (making wine) and less good at (branding) and find a partner where 1+1 = 3.

Things chug-chug-chug along for a bunch of years, and then someone at the company does some research and finds that by the end of the 1950s, 80% of Manischewitz customers aren’t Jewish. They are, in large part, Black. (Thanks to this Slate article from which I learned a lot of this).

Black Americans had lived around Jews for quite some time, and their cuisines intermingled a bit. Plus, African-Americans (apparently) held kosher items in high esteem, believing, for example, that Kosher meat was better (or “better”) because there were standards around how the meat was prepared.

On top of that, the sweet flavor was actually a selling point in that community, which explains why Manischewitz ads were found in Ebony Magazine talking about how sweet the wine was:

Yes, the Ink Spots say that it’s a “sweeter, natural wine made according to ancient tradition,” which certainly sounds better than, “this wine is disgusting.”

It also may explain why a group called The Crows had a minor hit song called the Mambo Shevitz noting the virtues of Manischewitz wine back in 1953 (like how the hip hop community somehow decided to embrace Cristal champagne a few years back):

Marketing lesson #3 - embrace who you customers actually are, not who you want them to be.

Fast forward a bit, and Sammy Davis, Jr. converts to Judaism, which allows the universe to come into alignment and presents us with this ad for Manischewitz Almonetta (almond flavored?) Wine:

Also, Sammy Davis, Jr. struggled mightily with alcohol, though I’m not sure if he drank Almonetta despite his struggles or because of them.

After they hired an alcoholic to sell their wine, they decided to repent by being as truthful in their ads as possible. Here’s one that ran in Ebony in 1973, where the message appears to be, “here’s a wine for Black people that will get you so drunk, you’ll see double”:

Credit to the Work That Matters blog.

In the time since then, the company has embraced Caribbean communities, which also enjoy sweet wines, and Asian-American communities, while still remaining the number 1 selling Kosher wine, despite increased competition in the category.

I’ve worked in a number of places where I’ve been in meetings where someone will say how they want to find a new group of customers, and how their current customers aren’t really the market they want (often because it’s too downmarket in some way). Of all the marketing BS I’ve heard at work over the years, this is the BS-iest.

If you’ve read Crossing the Chasm (possibly one of only 2 business books I’ve found valuable), you may remember that one of the things Geoffrey Moore says in there is that as you’re looking to grow beyond your first set of customers, you should research some of the outliers in the your customer base — you’ll always find that you have customers who love your product and are outside your target market. Something about that product is valuable to them. Talking to those people may unlock the next stage of growth.

Manischewitz has done an amazing job with that strategy - it could’ve said, “we’re a kosher brand, and we just need to find more Jewish occasions for people to buy our wine. Or maybe we tell people to drink 8 cups of wine on Passover.” Or whatever.

But they didn’t - Manischewitz has 2 things going for it:

• The wine is sweet.

• The wine is kosher.

Those aren’t at odds with each other. They were able to run a two-pronged marketing strategy where they marketed to people who cared about kosher, and they found a growing number of markets where they cared about sweet (and the Ink Spots cared about both - sweet with an ancient tradition).

It seems so obvious, but it’s not: you can have two important but completely unrelated value propositions. And when those value props are clear, you have a clear new path to growth.

L’shana tova. Happy new year.

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As always, thanks for reading and sharing Gobbledy. Please, please share this if you enjoyed it - someone shared it last week and we got more than 50 new subscribers just from that. I’m sure that doesn’t mean a ton to you - it means a ton to me. Despite writing every week about marketing, I’m terrible at marketing this newsletter. Weird, no? Or maybe I’m not terrible, and I’m just relying on Word of Mouth. Yeah, that’s it. Word of Mouth.

Also - I’m always happy to chat - here’s my Calendly link. If you want some feedback on something you’re working on, or you want to complain about your boss, I’m here.