How the Rolling Stones + Musk Oil = Marketing

Plus 2 things you can always say at a conference...

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? I know where it’s going, and where Michigan is going is to Number 1 on the football charts. See you in Pasadena.

Today, we’ll talk about:

- High low prices on Instacart

- The Rolling Stones and the benefits of being first

- A short musical about type 2 diabetes

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Our Low Prices Are Highly Low

If you sometimes shop for groceries in a store and sometimes shop for groceries from that store on Instacart, you may have the following reaction when you shop on Instacart:

HOLY CRAP THIS SHIT IS EXPENSIVE!

I, myself, have had that reaction.

So I must give credit to the fine folks at New York City-based supermarket Fairway for putting this pricing disclaimer on their Instacart page:

Our prices are higher than in our store. Consistently. But they’re low! Every day! Consistently! Consistently low and higher. We keep our prices consistently medium. We want you to be able to feed your family, and still have cash left over to live the lifestyle you want. Like buying leggings from Lululemon instead of Athleta. You should be able to do that. That’s important to us. That’s why our online prices “remain” 15% above in-store prices.

“Remain” is an odd word choice there. Like, they could choose to lower them, but they don’t? Or “despite our best efforts, our prices remain 15% above in-store prices.” I’m not sure. But I am sure I love the way that’s written as if it were going to say “we keep our online prices low, just like our in-store prices,” except the words are the opposite of that.

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Smells Like Teen (+ 60 or so years) Spirit

I’m going to confess a little something:

I was planning to use this block in the newsletter to make a stupid joke about the sponsor of the 2024 Rolling Stones Tour:

Yes, their tour is sponsored by AARP. Har har.

But instead I went down the concert sponsorship rabbit hole (thanks, Internet), and I wanted to share just a tiny bit about the history of concert sponsorships. Because it all goes back to the Rolling Stones.

Back in 1981, advertising agency J. Walter Thompson worked with Rolling Stones management to find a brand to sponsor their tour to help - the band said - keep the price of tickets reasonable. Inconceivably, the average ticket was $18 on the tour (about $55 in today’s dollars, which is roughly the price of a beer at a concert at Madison Square Garden).

This would be the first ever corporate sponsorship of a concert tour.

JWT tried to find a suitable beer brewer to be the sponsor, but Schlitz turned down the opportunity, saying that they were already involved with several musical acts including Kool and the Gang, the Commodores, and Mickey Gilley (??).

They land on fragrance manufacturer Jovan, who agrees to pay $3 million for the right to put their name on the tour poster; access to a bunch of tickets they can use to bribe - er - give away to DJs to get them to mention Jovan when they talk about the tour, as well as the rights to some other giveaways and merch tie-ins.

And if you thought gobbledy started with tech companies, not quite. From an article about the tie-up:

Jovan thinks of itself as "bold and daring," a phrase that surfaces repeatedly in conversation with David Miller, the company's director of advertising. "The Rolling Stones are considered provocative, sensual, iconoclastic, and we don't shrink from that. We've always been a fragrance for people who aren't afraid to do things a little differently," he says. "We made a whole fragrance based on an animal note Musk Oil back in 1971."

I guess smelling like musk oil is bold and daring? I dunno. But I do know that they ran ads that suggested that if you wore the stuff, women would have sex with you:

It’s a “provocative scent that instinctively calms and yet arouses your basic animal desires. And hers.”

(A quick side note: Most fragrance ads have an underlying theme that if you spray some of it on you, someone will have sex with you. Specifically, someone else. But is the inference that they would not have otherwise had sex with you if you were NOT wearing the fragrance? Like the only reason the person has agreed to sleep with you is because of how you smell? Do you even want to sleep with someone who is only sleeping with you because the “provacative scent…arouses [their] basic animal desires?” Maybe not? Marketing is weird.)

Onward…

A Rolling Stone article discussed how the sponsorship paid off for Jovan:

According to Jovan’s advertising director, David Miller, the Stones’ audience now includes two distinct generations, ranging in age from midteens to midthirties. The radio tie-ins, he said, were particularly valuable in reaching the younger end of that spectrum, “fifteen, sixteen — people who are just starting to think about wearing fragrances.”

Why am I talking about Jovan’s musky fragrances here? Two reasons:

1. Several times a week I’ll come across a post or something where a software marketer is asking about what percentage of their budget should be used for “brand marketing.” I generally think people say “brand marketing” when they mean “marketing, but fun!” That’s not marketing, that’s an art project.
   
   But Jovan showed here that a sponsorship can be a great top of funnel marketing tool if you use it to activate other promotions. It sounds a little silly, but their positioning was clear (basically, the bad boy of fragrances for guys who actually think that smelling good will get women to jump into bed with them). Jovan used the tickets they received to build relationships with DJs across the country to promote their products. They created branded calendars that they sold in department stores (where Jovan products were sold). They had a clear target market (18-34 year olds), and a clear goal (get the younger end of that market to buy more musk oil so they can have sex with women who smell it.) Sponsorship is the beginning of a series of activations, it’s not the activation.
   

2. In Margin Call, the 2011 movie about the financial crisis, a character played by Jeremy Irons says, in reference to Wall Street:
   
   “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat. I don’t cheat. And although I think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a helluva lot easier to just be first.”
   
   Do I think that a concert tour sponsorship is the most brilliant marketing idea we’ve ever discussed here? Um, no. But was it extremely effective for Jovan? Yes - I mean, I’m sitting here blabbering about it 40+ years later. But we’re talking about it because they did it first.
   
   Software marketers love to complain about their own marketing - how often do you hear someone say, “Webinars used to work, and now people don’t attend them anymore.” or “People used to open our emails, and now they don’t.” “Why won’t people download our white papers????” All the time, no?
   
   That’s because you’re not first. Lots of strategies work until they don’t. It’s a helluva lot easier to just be first.

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Like Hairspray, But with Diabetes

Speaking of ways to make money…

A little while back I mentioned that if you’re ever on stage at a conference and you don’t know how to respond to a question, you can always say:

“There’s only two ways I know of to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.”

I stand by that advice.

But maybe you’ve already been on stage and used that line to get out of a situation where you weren’t listening to the question. In that case, I have some good news for you. There are two other responses that will work if you’re ever at a loss for words at a conference or while serving as a guest on a marketing podcast:

“Well, like John Wanamaker said, I know that half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Whenever I hear someone say that on stage, I think to myself, “I don’t know which half of my advertising is wasted, but I know that I’ve been wasting my time listening to this.”

So that’s one option.

The second option is to say:

“Well, as Marshall McLuhan said, ‘The medium is the message.’”

I would suggest that after you say that you keep speaking and pray to God that nobody asks you any follow ups, because let’s be honest - neither of us knows who Marshall McLuhan is, and we’re not exactly sure what that quote means, but we’re pretty sure Ezra Klein said it once or twice so obviously it sounds smart.

You’re welcome, by the way.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the intersection of two things we've mentioned here today — It’s best to be first, and the medium used to convey a message makes a difference in how the message is received.

And obviously I thought of Jovan Musk Scented Sex Oil (not tm) and Marshall McLuhan when I saw the Jardiance commercial featuring the woman with diabetes singing a song about lowering her glucose levels:

I would warn you not to watch that, but you’ve definitely seen it. If you haven’t watched it, please don’t, unless you want to spend the rest of the day singing about lowering your glucose.

Or do! You should watch it! It’s like if you watched the musical Hairspray, then you had some bad oysters at dinner, became deathly ill, and had a fever dream where there was a song & dance number from Hairspray, only it was about a drug for type 2 diabetes. Also, it’s performed by the theater group at the local senior center.

I promised myself I wouldn’t spend 1,000 words on this commercial (someone else has already done that better than I can.) Also, you’re welcome.

So, again, ha ha ha at this commercial. But here we are talking about it. Why? Because they were the first to use a 1-minute musical to sell pharmaceuticals. They didn’t have to be smart, they had to be first. Plus, nobody has used that medium to sell the product, so it sticks with you.

One marketing hack is to take something you’ve already done, but do it somewhere else. Voila - something old is new again, being the medium is new.

As you’ll say one day on stage, McLuhan was right.

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I’m always happy to chat - here’s my Calendly link. (It’s free!) If you want some feedback on something you’re working on, or want to talk about that Jardiance ad, I’m available. Or you can just respond to this email - I get those messages too. Thanks for making it to the end :)