Maybe Focus a Little More on the 'Having It Your Way' and Less on the Flame Broiling...

And 30% vs 54% and too many percentages

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

Have you ever been in charge of sending marketing emails? Has that ever been your job - to be the person who actually pushes the “send” button?

I’ll share a little story about that…

But first…I’ll put the thing that I usually put at the bottom of the newsletter at the top of the newsletter (A/B testing!)

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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:

1. 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.

2. 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?

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Lying about Emails Also Doesn’t Bring Joy

(Sorry about that interruption…)

If you’ve had a job where you actually send emails, you know the uniquely terrifying feeling of hitting send. I’m not going to pretend it’s terrifying like, I don’t know, something that’s actually terrifying (fighting a war? NASCAR? asking a girl out in 7th grade?) But that feeling of “please, God, I’ve been a good person, please. Please make sure the From line is correct…and it’s the correct list…and I didn’t miss a typo…”

Back when I was at Hilfiger, for some reason I was sending emails (mistake #1) and I once sent an email to several hundred thousand people where the From line was a guy on my team (mistake #2). Which meant that guy on my team received the - literally - thousands of “out of office” emails and bounceback emails and rando responses. Oops! Sorry, Brian!

(But also, why the hell was the default From line the first one that appeared alphabetically? And why couldn’t that be changed? And why was I too, um, lazy? unfocused-on-details? to change it?)

I think most of us who have been in the email sending racket have some sort of story like that (or I tell myself that to make me feel better).

But I’ve never quite seen (or done) anything on the level like what Aditya Pai - who’s running for Congress in California - (allegedly?) did last week.

Pai’s campaign sent an email (on the left below) saying that he was suspending his campaign because, as he says, of “a lack of joy.”

Then, 8 hours later, Pai’s campaign sent out the email on the right (below) saying, the previous email “was sent by a now-former aide in error.”

Which is curious, right? Though maybe throwing someone else under the bus is always a good response?

Yet also he said he DID in fact write that email - he was, indeed, not feeling the joy. But he didn’t mean for it to be sent.

But then after I wrote all that, SF Gate published an article calling all of that into question, finding (long story short) that only Pai had access to the email account and (probably? for who-the-hell-knows-what reason?) sent both emails himself.

All of which is to say - email marketing really works to get your brand out there!

(Thanks Dave Weigel)

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Numbers Can Be Useful in Marketing

We’ve talked here before about how companies under-utilize numbers as a branding tool.

Not that they don’t use numbers in the marketing. Au contraire, mon frere. Software companies like to throw around blocks of numbers like guys running for Congress in California throw (fake?) co-workers under the bus.

To wit:

Headless 2.0. Hahahahhahahaha.

But throwing around numbers doesn’t help people remember you, and it doesn’t really serve as the proof point that marketers seem to think that it does.

We’ve discussed how for a hundred years Ivory Soap boasted on their packaging that they were 99 44/100% pure. I didn’t even have to look that up - if you say it enough, people remember it.

Using non-round numbers like that can be effective, as Allstate showed in this 50-year-old ad meant to get you to buy car insurance in case a drunk driver hits you in his 1973 Pinto:

That copy is way better than “Did you know that drunk drivers kill almost a thousand people a week?”

But numbers don’t have to be non-round to be impactful. Burger King has started (once again) talking about how you can customize your order with them:

I love the “200,000 ways to have a Whopper” tagline. Which I am 200,000% sure they won’t stick with, even though it’s memorable, super clear, and both focuses on the primary experience differentiator and product differentiator.

I’m not saying it’s easy to integrate the numbers into your marketing - it’s hard to find a number that is both memorable and reflects a key value of the product. But that’s why 99 44/100% pure has stuck around for 100 years — because it’s memorable and reflects the (supposed) purity (originally the differentiator) of the product. It’s why “4 out of 5 dentists surveyed”* still works for Trident - because parents do wonder whether chewing gum is bad for their kids.

(*Insert the hack comic joke here about the 5th dentist…)

But I also wanted to share what happens when numbers are used haphazardly in a marketing. And I feel bad because I used to work at marketing tech company Bluecore, and I really like the people there, but I thought this ad of theirs on LinkedIn was illustrative:

Putting aside that the copy doesn’t really make sense…what do those numbers mean? Is 30% a lot? A little? Is 54% too much? Too little? What would you expect those numbers to be? And what would the numbers need to be such that you would want to unlock the power of shopper identification?

Here the numbers are accomplishing the opposite of what they’re trying to do - adding confusion rather than illuminating a larger point.

I’d bet, oh, a 1973 Ford Pinto that if you went to your website right now, there’s some 30%/54% type nonsense going on.

I often like to suggest activities that you won’t do, so here’s a fun (?) one: Get your marketing team together and brainstorm the 1 number that represents either the benefit (our soap is pure, unlike other soap that will give you syphilis); or biggest question they have (will my kid’s dentist tell me I’m a bad parent for letting them chew gum, even though it’s better than many, many of the other things a 14 year old will put in their mouth?).

And good luck with that :)

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They Should’ve Just Had It Their Way

Speaking of Burger King, they’ve been struggling for, um, 40 (?) years with their marketing. You may have noticed from the ad above that they undoubtedly paid somebody a crapload of money to tell them to go back to first principles and focus on what differentiates them from McDonald’s - the ability to customize your order.

This is one of those things that’s incredibly obvious in hindsight - Burger King lets you customize your burgers in a way that McDonald’s does not. It’s likely the biggest differentiator between the two chains. In the 1970s, back when they were successful, their jingle focused on letting customers “have it your way,” and they’ve brought that jingle back. But why did it ever leave?

I asked that rhetorically, but I uncovered one of the answers in this 1987 article in the LA Times about Burger King firing their ad agency and replacing it with (yet another) agency. They had already given up on “Have it your way” and replaced it with the clunker “the best food for fast times.” I also don’t know what that means. It was the 80s, so maybe “eat this burger after you snort coke.”

Also, Cuba Gooding, Jr. was in a commercial during that campaign:

Nobody else knew what it meant either. So BK fired that agency and they brought in a new agency. The new agency couldn’t just say “let’s go back to ‘Have it your way’” - I mean, sure - people remember it and it reflects our key differentiator. But that was the past. And now we live in fast times, so…

So they put their own spin on it, with the head of the agency saying, “We’ll express the notion of the old slogan ‘Have it your way,’ but in a new way that involves the customer.” In other words, “we can’t wait to screw this up.”

Which they did by talking about flame broiling because Burger King believed that was its point of differentiation compared to McDonald’s. And sure, yes, their hamburgers are cooked differently. But what has a deeper connection with customers:

a) I can go to Burger King and they let me get exactly what I want the way I want it.

or

b) Burger King makes their burgers in a different manner than McDonald’s.

The first is about the customer. The second is about the product. As we seem to discuss here each week, if you’re talking about the product you’re losing.

One last thing on this - If you’re a recently hired CMO, you have two options for how to move forward:

1. Everything sucks, let’s change everything.

2. Let’s skip the part where we pay McKinsey $800,000 to tell us to go back to what used to work for us and we just go back to what used to work for us.

I’d choose option 2. (Marketing really is about choosing the right number.)

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Thank You

I had a couple of people tell me this week that they actually used some of the stuff I write about here to help them improve their marketing. I wanted to cry. Thanks for reading this thing…