The Biggest-ish Challenge with Creating a Category
And a manly breakfast for women
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? Good? We’re excited to have the girls home from college later this week. I hope you have a similar level of excitement coming in your life…
Next week is Thanksgiving in the U.S. so we will not be publishing. You should be enjoying yourself and not reading about marketing. That said, if you ARE thinking about marketing, and you’re thinking about messaging and how nobody understands your homepage, I’d love to talk to you about the workshop I run that will fix that problem. I’m at jared@sagelett.com.
While you shouldn’t be thinking about marketing next week, you definitely should be thinking about it this week, specifically we’re talking about:
The hard part about category creation is that nobody knows what you’re saying
Chess for Girls and Cereal for Men
And since we’re giving thanks, thank you for subscribing and reading this thing. It really, truly means a lot when people tell me they read it (and don’t hate it). So thank you for taking time each week when you could be doing something else (or, in the case of Gobbledy reader Scarlett B., should be writing a paper) to find some humor in the work we do every day. And for giving me an outlet to write about it.
Happy Thanksgiving!
A Moment Like This…
Here’s a piece of gobbledy that I wanted to share. It comes from an ad for Rokt, which is a lead generation tool, but obviously it can’t call itself a “lead generation tool” for a host of reasons, not least of which people hate “lead generation tools” and think they’re scammy.
Like if you were selling a tool that allows people to create the Facebook ads that Reuters reported* accounted for 10% (10 percent!) of the company’s ad revenue in 2024, you wouldn’t say, “We help you create ads so you can separate older people from the money that they have.”
(*If you hated Meta before, just wait til you read that report.)
No, you would say something like, “we optimize content and audience matching to maximize revenue opportunity on global social networks.”
Rokt - which, to be clear, is not one of those companies stealing money from people with fake Facebook ads - is one of those companies that has to describe what they do in as opaque a way as possible. Here’s an ad they are running:
(BTW - if you’re in an untrustworthy industry, a timeless marketing strategy is to say that trusted people trust you. How can a trusted person possibly trust an untrustworthy company?)
In any case, Rokt’s homepage has more gobbledy on it:
Sure. Whatever.
Anyway, I’m mostly sharing this because you’ll see in the ad that they trademarked their tagline, “To unlock relevance in the transaction moment.” And I’m sure glad they did, because you wouldn’t want someone else to steal that banger.
Also, they’re trying to make “Transaction Moment” a thing, which, y’know, fine. But here’s something to consider:
When you read that copy and thought to yourself, “what the hell is a ‘Transaction Moment’?” (and why is it trademarked?) - that is what everyone is thinking when you’re trying to create a category.
I’m not saying you should never create a category (though if you’re trying to create a category, I’d like to have a conversation with you about that), but one of the challenges of creating a category is that you will be using words that will make everyone else wonder what the hell you are talking about.
And that won’t necessarily even occur to you, because in your office everyone is talking about “The Transaction Moment” all the time, and the marketing team has come up with some cute internal marketing (your mugs have “The Coffee Moment” written on them, and your bathrooms have signs that say, “The Dumping Moment” and so forth.
And your weekly company meetings will start with a “Transaction Moment” where the head of sales talks about a deal that closed (er…transacted) that week, and other “moments” will be littered throughout, and the Slack channel will have a “Transaction Moment” channel, and you’ll sit in on a briefing with a Forrester analyst where your CEO and head of product will brief the confused analyst on “Transaction Moments” and how we think the industry will be talking about these moments nonstop and shouldn’t there be a Wave (tm) of Transaction Moment Platforms, and we’re happy to tell you who the other TMPs are, and where they fall short of the vision of True Transaction Moments (tm).
And you will have heard “Transaction Moment” so many times that it wouldn’t ever even occur to you that nobody who doesn’t work at your company has any idea whatsoever what you’re talking about.
Except they don’t.
Which is fine! Maybe! What I’m saying is that if you’re going to try to introduce a new concept to the world, there will be a year where nobody will have any idea what you’re saying.
Man, This Cereal Is Expensive
One of the themes of this newsletter is that there are many, many, many tools in the marketing toolbox, and that for a whole host of reasons, companies use none of those tools.
One of my favorite tools is to take a commodity product, do literally nothing to it, and then just say it’s perfect for some particular group.
This is not a new idea - here’s an SNL fake ad from the 1980s for Chess for Girls:
“Chess - it’s a classic game of strategy and wits…and bubbles!”
A while back we wrote about taking commodity products and positioning them as items for patriots (or “patriots”). I shared examples of my friend’s Patriot Microphone; Black Rifle Coffee; and Patriot Mobile, the “ONLY Christian conservative wireless provider” (I assume there are wireless providers for Christians, and wireless providers for conservatives, but none that speak to the intersection of those two groups. Excellent targeting opportunity.)
As I wrote then:
This kind of targeting makes it SO MUCH easier to decide what product to buy. If Hubspot’s marketing was “we believe life begins at 6 weeks and also in highly targeted, sequenced outreach” and Pardot’s messaging was, “it is imperative that women have the right to choose and also the right to choose the best targeted, sequenced outreach technology” it would be easier than figuring out today which of those two technologies I should buy.
If you’re struggling to get traction with a wide target market, you can always go smaller. Trust me, I’ve considered positioning Gobbledy as The Marketing Newsletter for People Who Love Cinnamon Toast Crunch to try to juice my subscriber numbers.
Speaking of…
Yes, that’s Man Cereal, which is positioned as cereal for men (obviously) because it has creatine and protein in it.
Cereal has a long history of this kind of thing - Trix was specifically for children and not for rabbits (“silly rabbit, Trix are for kids”). Cocoa Puffs were for children and not for insane birds:
And my favorite - Special K, which, in the 1980s, was positioned as cereal to help women lose weight. They marketed this with “The Special K Pinch,” whereby you were supposed to pinch your stomach, and if you could pinch more than one inch of fat, maybe it was time for your blubbery ass to stop eating bacon for breakfast and invest in Special K.
As I was typing that, it felt like I was making that up. I was not. And the commercials for it were exactly what you feared they would be:
Yeah, that guy thinks his thin wife is too fat and should eat more Special K. Har har.
Sorry, got sidetracked from my dissertation on Man Cereal that you definitely weren’t asking for.
One key piece of the “let’s say this product is for a specific group” strategy is that you should never say that “well, also it’s for these other people.”
I was thrown off by Man Cereal’s FAQ that included this:
No no no no no! You never talk about the other side of the targeting.
Patriot Mobile does not have this on their website:
It can’t be both! Well, it can be both, of course. Verizon certainly works for bible study, low taxes, bris organization and sending food for a shiva. You don’t need Patriot Mobile for that. Patriot Mobile is only for Christian conservatives and they’re going to stick to that, and Man Cereal should also be for men. And that’s that.
Side note - did I mention that Man Cereal is $15.40 a box? Just saying.
Also, while we’re here, one more general marketing note:
I actually don’t think Man Cereal is a crazy idea at all - their message is all about getting enough protein and being a great food for fitness enthusiasts, and being backed by science, etc. And most of their copy and imagery supports that.
But then, this:
If all of your marketing is about fitness and science and a great lifestyle, you should not throw in a ball joke. If the brand voice was all balls and penis jokes, then sure. But it’s not, and putting it in there is lazy.
Oh, and this image of milky cereal in the guy’s mouth is gross:
For a target-specific product like this to work, the messaging and the copy and the photography all has to fit together. I shared all that Man Cereal stuff because I think it’s 80% quite good. The problem is that there’s no room for error when you’re going with this approach - all of it has to resonate, or it feels fake or like it’s made by people who really don’t understand the target.
Which is why they may have felt like they had to include this final question in the FAQ:
As always, thank you for reading to the end - it’s the best part. And maybe it’s not clear - I’m serious about doing workshops for messaging. They’re fun and your team won’t hate you afterwards (and if they do, just blame it on me…but they won’t.)
P.S. - This week’s P.S. is for longtime Gobbledy reader William J. who is retiring next week, and it also the first person I know well to retire. He will now have even more time to read Gobbledy (and who wouldn’t want that.). William J. is the biggest Prince fan I know, and while I never exactly got Prince, if you never saw his performance of Radiohead’s creep at Coachella, it’s a masterpiece:
As always, hilarious and informative. Happy Thanksgiving!!