If Snoop gives up smoke, how much ROI should you get?
And at the end there's a really good article about a plane crash
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? This has nothing to do with marketing, but have you ever had to rent a car at a non-airport location? I just had to rent a car at a Hertz in a city location, and I was probably 5th in line and not a single one of the 4 people in front of me (nor, oddly enough, anyone working there) was even remotely familiar with the concept of car rentals. Every single person had the oddest questions (“do I have to return the car here?” “Can I return it at 10am instead of 11am?” “Why do you need my credit card?” “What’s your husband’s phone number?”). Apparently I was quite traumatized by it.
Anyway, in today’s Gobbledy:
Gartner explains how a murder something something something composable commerce.
Snoop gives up smoke and causes Solo Stove to give up their CEO.
Or Maybe You Don’t Mention the “Interesting Times”
I just tripped across some research our friends at Gartner put out a few years ago called “The Future of Business Is Composable” talking about the need to restructure your business to make it more able to adapt to changes. That’s fine.
Though they did it in a typically Gartner way - for example, instead of one of their analysts saying something you could understand, they said, “We’re talking about the intentional use of ‘composability’ in a business context — architecting your business for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.”
Sure, whatever!
Anyway, that research contained a short film that included this slide:
Now, in fairness that slide built in the video, so it told a little story as the different sections were added to the slide so while that just seems like a bunch of silliness, there’s some logic behind it.
HOWEVER.
In the upper left hand corner there. Wayyyyyy up in the upper left. Where there’s a hand holding a sign that reads, “I can’t breathe” and then next to it, “We do live in interesting times.”
Yeah, um. Let me understand the logic here.
So a guy was murdered by cops, which led to “interesting times,” and therefore if you create a composable business, you can “add the voice of society to those of your customers” and embrace that as a “new way to sense value and make it measurable.”
Also, “composable business architecture.”
Is linking the tragedy of George Floyd and the very real, very emotional response to that to the need to do a corporate restructuring, just the saddest, most cynical way of looking at the world? I don’t really think of myself as overly sensitive to this kind of thing usually, but the flippant “we do live in interesting times” just made my stomach gurgle very, very slightly.
We’re in an election year where marketers are going to be tempted to comment in some way on the goings-on in that election. What we see with the Gartner example is generally true for marketers more broadly - even if you think there’s a genuine point you want to make about societal stuff, it is a rare brand that is able to pull that off in a way that feels genuine, and not cynical.
I’m not saying that Gartner missed the implications of what they wrote because they have no African Americans on their leadership team (though they don’t), I’m saying you better be very, very sure you want to wade into these waters.
We’ve talked here before about my favorite example of a brand having-its-head-up-its-ass about commenting on civil rights, but if you haven’t watched the Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial recently, it’s continues to be amazing.
Giving Up Giving Up Smoke
If you’ve been in a marketing job, you may have encountered a scenario like this one:
You somehow get enough time away from nonstop internal meetings about how to use the new HR software and discussions about definitions of the Lead Object in Salesforce, and you’re able to focus on creating marketing campaigns.
(Congrats, you’re one of the lucky ones.)
Maybe you work with an agency, or maybe your creative team is internal, it doesn’t really matter. But you brainstorm a bunch of ideas and come up with something clever.
And because you really believe in this idea, you go to your CEO and CFO (or maybe even to your Board, depending on the company), and you tell them your idea:
“Hey, you know how you keep saying we need to ‘get our name out there’ and ‘get people talking about us’ and ‘go viral’ and ‘break through the noise’ and ‘get people to think about us’ any time they think about buying a product like ours?”
(They will nod, even though your question was somewhere between rhetorical and passive-aggressive).
And you will respond, “We have a brilliant idea! What if we…”
And then you’ll tell them the brilliant idea and they will ask how much it will cost, and you will tell them a number that will be upsettingly high to them, and they will either gasp audibly, or otherwise display their surprise, and you will have anticipated this, and you will say, “Well, in order to get our name out there, and get people talking about us, and go viral, and break through the noise and get people to think of us when they think about a product like ours, this is how much it costs.”
This will put them in a bit of a conundrum. Because they DID tell you that you should get the name out there, etc.
And if getting your name out there, etc., didn’t cost anything, certainly you or the previous 3 CMOs the company has had since 2020 would’ve done that thing.
So they really don’t exactly have a choice, except to say yes.
(Or to say ‘no’ and decide that they really need a CMO who’s willing to “get their hands dirty” and “do more with less.”)
But first, the CEO has a question:
“If we invest that budget in this campaign, what will the sales lift be?”
Which is definitely a fair question, and certainly not a surprising question for the CEO to be asking.
It is also, however, a trap for you, the CMO. Because you have 2 choices here. You can either answer:
“This is a marketing campaign, and I’d be insane to sign up for a number, because while the team thinks it’s brilliant, maybe customers don’t think it’s brilliant. Or maybe everyone likes it, but we need to keep running the campaign for 18 months to see results. Or something else. But there is no world where I’m signing up for a number, when we just created this campaign to “break through the noise.’”
Or:
“15%”
Answer 2 will end the conversation, which is actually what you’d like to happen. But answer 2 will likely come back and bite you in the ass. Answer 1 is the correct, far more satisfying answer (for you), that will probably cause you to lose your job (if not right then, later when they tell you “we lost faith in you when you couldn’t justify your marketing spend.”)
I was thinking about that when I read about the backlash-slash-fingerpointing following the marketing campaign featuring Snoop Dogg for Solo Stove:
Remember that from last fall? Whew, it seems like a while ago.
That ad gets posted to Instagram, there’s 2 days of think pieces about what it means that Snoop is no longer going to smoke weed, and then hilarious-in-hindsight quotes from marketing professors like the one from this article:
“You feel a certain way about this particular person who’s iconic in your life for various reasons,” said Americus Reed II, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “And so you’re going to create a narrative in your own mind about what the particular reasons might be for this pivot…”
Reed predicts fans will likely hear more from Snoop on this announcement in the near future — whether it be to clear the air of speculation or build on this announcement for potential future ventures, particularly in the growing cannabis space which, from edibles to infused beverages, goes well beyond smoking.
Oh, they heard more from Snoop, alright.
Turns out the whole thing is a campaign for Solo Stove, a smokeless fire pit.
Har har.
Clever, accomplished the things our fake CEO asked for above (break through the noise, etc), everyone has a good laugh. Har, again.
Then comes the backlash - FROM THE COMPANY.
A few weeks ago on their earnings call, the CFO of Solo Brands, the parent company of Solo Stove, seemed to blame their earnings miss on - wait for it - the Snoop marketing campaign.
While our unique marketing campaigns raised brand awareness of Solo Stove to an expanded and new audience of consumers, it did not lead to the sales lift that we had planned, which, combined with the increased marketing investments, negatively impacted our EBITDA.
Also, they fired their CEO. (The company later told the Wall Street Journal that the CEO’s departure was “not a direct result of the disappointing sales lift.” Those words “direct result” kinda make me think that maybe the firing was a just-slightly-less-than-direct result of the disappointing sales lift.)
Then the company started the backpedalling:
“[The campaign] inserted our Solo Stove brand into cultural conversations, dramatically increased exposure for Solo Stove and laid the groundwork for future opportunities…”
Then came the random agency folks weighing in (“it generated a fantastic amount of online buzz” and “Communicating a clear product benefit or more information about the smokeless fire pit or giving people urgency to buy was missing for me…”)
But this quote from a marketing guy hit the nail on the head:
“I would guess that in selling-through this campaign idea, there were promises made that were directly related to short-term sales and directly contributing to the bottom line and overall health of the company…”
Ding ding ding!
I’m not really even sure what my main takeaway is from this whole Solo Stove story. The company creates a pretty clever social media campaign that gets some buzz. It’s possibly too-clever-by-half as some of the buzz around the campaign is about whether we should collectively be smoking less weed. We all assume that the campaign is a success because there are lots of articles talking about it. Then the company says the campaign was not a success, while also (confusingly) saying it was a success, just not in the way we thought it might be a success. Then the CEO doesn’t work there anymore.
Just know that whatever conversations you’re having internally about campaign measurement, and whether something is a “brand” campaign or a “direct” campaign, and whether the campaigns you run should have a direct impact on sales, some other company is having those same conversations, except in public.
It could always be worse…
So, Was That Snoop Campaign “Good?”
I keep thinking about that Snoop/Solo Stove campaign, and that question I keep asking myself is - Was that a good marketing idea?
And I’ve landed on, “Almost.”
The initial ad about “giving up smoke” is clever, though if Snoop were giving up smoking weed, he would say “giving up smoking weed” and not “giving up smoke.” So lots of people thought something was up.
And given Snoop’s associations with marijuana, many assumed it was an ad about gummies.
But then we found out it was an ad about a smokeless stove.
A few quick thoughts on that:
Using Snoop and that initial “I’m giving up smoke” ad did create a lot of buzz. That’s good.
That was an ad for a smokeless stove. That seemed to be a bit of a letdown.
After the initial splash of the campaign…then what? Would Snoop just talk about how sometimes he smokes weed and sometimes he uses a smokeless stove? The initial roll-out got the buzz, but the ongoing use of the celebrity endorsement didn’t really work.
Campaigns like this take a longer-term investment. It would’ve been very unusual to pull of a stunt campaign and have that lead to ongoing sales lift. And the CFO talking about missing earnings because this one campaign didn’t provide a revenue boost within a few weeks makes me think they never agreed to ongoing campaign investment.
Long story short, if you’re going to invest in a viral, splashy campaign, save some money for the next 12 months of add-on marketing work.
That article I mentioned about the plane crash….
This has nothing to do with gobbledy, but this Atavist article about that plane crash in the Colombian jungle where the children survived is completely bonkers. Also just a great piece of writing.
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. I had such a great chat last week with a couple of readers who work at a software company and we talked about adding a little humor to their content. We can talk about that kind of thing. Or we can talk about the rather confusing new rules for the college football playoff. Whatever you’d like.
- 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.