If you're going to create an off-color campaign, it should actually be clever
And the movie Blackberry is really good
Hello Gobbledeers, how’s it going?
I thought I’d recommend a movie that isn’t Barbie and isn’t Oppenheimer, and isn’t a Barbenheimer double feature and isn’t a Marvel movie.
Have you seen Blackberry? No? You should watch Blackberry. It’s about, um, the Blackberry. But it’s actually a movie about positioning. I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I think you can find it by just screaming “BLACKBERRY!” into your remote. That worked for me.
One of the initial struggles when the Blackberry was introduced was what to tell people it was. In Software Startup World you can imagine the founders inventing a category (because of Play Bigger, my nemesis book), and then trying to convince people that that category is a thing, and then that people need to buy the thing in that category.
It worked a little differently for them:
There’s a scene in the movie where one of the founders is speaking with a skeptical exec from Bell Atlantic (now Verizon):
Bell Atlantic Guy: “Well, it’s definitely the world’s largest pager.”
Blackberry Guy: “No, it’s actually the world’s smallest email terminal.”
Nobody would want the first thing (a bad version of something they already have), and (almost) everybody would want the second thing (a better version of something they already have).
The first half of the Blackberry story is about the meteoric success of this positioning decision.
The second half of the Blackberry story is about their inability to respond to an even greater positioning story - the iPhone.
At the 2007 Macworld conference, Jobs famously said they were introducing 3 new products - a new iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device. Which - you’ll be shocked to hear - was actually one product, the iPhone. (Ta da!)
Why is it the “iPhone” and not the “iRaspberry” or whatever? Because everyone knows what a phone is, many people have a phone, and people had a budget for cellphones…this was just like a regular phone, only wayyyyyy better (except if you had an iPhone in 2007 you may remember that basically every call you made dropped during the call, which was unbelievably frustrating and actually caused me to switch to a Motorola somethingorother for a brief period in the late ‘00s).
After the iPhone is introduced, the Blackberry founders go to a meeting with Bell Atlantic and pitch their own new phone, which, they tell the Bell Atlantic people, has - wait for it - a trackpad.
You may remember wayyyyyyyy back last week when we talked about relying on product features, and how if you’re talking about product features, you’re losing. This is a classic example of that - while it is true that the iPhone lacked a trackpad, roughly zero iPhone buyers were buying because of features. They bought because of the cool factor (obviously) and they bought because its initial target market was carrying three devices and could now carry one.
As we said here, if you’re competing on features, you’ve lost.
I guess what I’m saying is -
I haven’t seen a lot of movies about positioning, and this was one great.
Obviously I liked it because I agree with what it’s saying.
The Octopus Is Now an Octochicken…
Long-time Gobbledy readers may remember my love of what I call the “Octopus” - the graphic on about 80% of software websites that show 4 things on the left, then a thing in the middle doing something, then 4 things on the right.
This is a classic octopus:
That was supposed to show you why you should buy (in that specific case), a product called Lytics.
Anyway, in the year or so since I wrote about the Octopus, it’s apparently evolved quite a bit. You can’t halt progress, y’know?
Our friends at Breadcrumbs (some sort of lead scoring thingy) have created the world’s first octochicken diagram. What’s great about it is that it really makes it clear what the product does:
If you buy Breadcrumbs, first you’ll take Hubspot and Mailchimp and Segment and a few other things I don’t recognize. Then a small chicken will eat breadcrumbs. Then you’ll have Product Led Growth.
Magic!
Canadian City Fingers New Campaign to Promote Tourism
So I think there are probably 3 types of marketing campaigns:
Type 1 is “this is a marketing campaign, and we don’t think it’s offensive in any manner,” and the general public agrees that that campaign is not offensive in any manner. As you might guess, this is most marketing campaigns.
Type 2 is “this is a marketing campaign, and we don’t think it’s offensive in any manner” but then - maybe not immediately, but at some point - the general public disagrees.
One example of this is this spectacular ad from 7up:
The copy reads (in part), “7-Up is so pure, so wholesome, you can even give it to babies and feel good about it.”
I think we’d all now say, “I don’t think we’d feel good about it.”
(But kudos to 7up for really trying to prove that it’s pure and wholesome - the copy continues, “Look at the back of a 7-Up bottle. Notice that all our ingredients are listed.”). Hard to argue with that!
Type 3 is “this is a marketing campaign that we designed to be offensive, and we don’t care, tho probably in a few days we’ll make a forced apology because somebody tweeted that they were offended, even though that was specifically the point.”
My favorite of these campaigns was (oddly enough) from Kmart, who ran a campaign 10 years ago called “I just shipped my pants.” This was slightly controversial at the time, but - and maybe this speaks volumes about me - I thought it was really funny:
Also, it’s not just a stupid joke - the point was to tell you that you could ship your pants. (again, Ta da!). The joke’s probably on me here, as Kmart now has 3 stores open.
(Very very side note: Whenever I see anything about Kmart I think about a comedian I saw years ago who had a bit that went something like, “Kmart announced they were making big investments in new technology to help improve their business….I hope that new technology is a mop.”)
That is all to say that the City of Regina (Saskatchewan) faced one of those fake internet backlash thingies this week when their Experience Regina (Type 3) digital campaign included this ad:
Now, do I think that women were actually offended by this? I have no idea - I only saw that people were Tweeting their displeasure and apparently a dozen people showed up at Regina City Hall to protest.
But do I think that this is very lazy copywriting? Obviously. Like we all know what Regina rhymes with.
(In case you weren’t sure, there’s another ad in this campaign with the tagline, “The city that rhymes with fun.”)
There’s nothing clever in there (not like “Ship your pants”!). If the tourism board of the Greek Isle of Lesbos had a campaign that was like, “The Indigo Girls Love Lesbos!” - like that’s not clever. “Ship your pants”, though…
Anyway, my point is - if you’re going to try to be a little off-color, make sure that color actually reflects something about your product.
I Think I’d Rather See Gartner’s Regina
It fills me with joy that people pay them $45,000 a year for that.
How We Can Work Together
As always, thanks so much for reading.
If you’re a marketer and you’re starting to think about your positioning, there are two ways we can work together:
In a half-day (or so) workshop we’ll help you hone your positioning and messaging so it’s clear what you do, and why you’re better than your competitors.
Do you have an event where you want someone to talk about messaging and positioning in a fun way? I do that!
Happy to chat - here’s my Calendly link. (I’ve had great conversations lately with some people who were thinking about names for the company, with people presenting to their board and wanted to make sure what they’re saying made sense, and others who just wanted feedback on their website…those are all good reasons to chat).
And it would mean the world if you could share Gobbledy with 2 friends. (I used to ask for 3 friends, but I’m having a 33% off sale). Would you mind?
It looks more like a prawn to me. That being said, I'd go to Regina. Maybe see the Pats. Or whatever.
not the f*ng*rs verb again...