The opportunity to be the luxury software brand
And dollars to Donettes you'll be jonesing for some Twinkies
Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going? I wanted to hijack the beginning of the newsletter today to note that right around now is the 3rd anniversary of Gobbledy. A newsletter about marketing has lasted longer than the average head of marketing.
I thought I’d skip the whole “state of the newsletter” thing and just share that I love (love!) writing this each week. Love it. And I love that some of you readers write to me to tell me you enjoy it, too. This has been an endeavor that has been nothing but delightful for me. I hope it’s been the same for you.
The question I’ve gotten from other marketers who are thinking about starting newsletters is “How long does it take to write the newsletter?” And the answer is really 2 answers. One answer is that it’s every single waking moment because I’m always looking for things to write about. But the other, more accurate answer is that it’s probably 10 hours a week of sitting down, writing, editing, etc. That’s 10 hours when I’m not out hustling selling messaging workshops. I’m very happy with that tradeoff, but it means I’m doing the newsletter instead of selling.
So, (and you knew there was a “so”) I’m opening up a paid subscription for Gobbledy. $8/month or $80/year. There’s a higher tier that includes a small consulting project. I didn’t want to change what free subscribers are getting, so I’m not changing what free subscribers are getting. Paid subscribers don’t really get any more than they were getting before (that’s great marketing!) other than the warm, fuzzy feeling they’ll get knowing they’re supporting work that they enjoy. Maybe down the road we figure out a paid-subscriber-only thingy (extra column? some sort of Zoom thingy where you can ask questions? I dunno, we’ll figure it out).
I’ve thought a lot about this, and what I came to realize is - there are a few newsletters I pay for because I really like the work the person is doing, and I really felt good about supporting that work. And so I wanted people who felt that way about Gobbledy to have the same opportunity, while not making anyone feel like they’re missing out because some stuff is reserved for paid subscribers. We’re all in this (?) together.
If you’d like to upgrade to paid, here’s the button:
OK, enough of that. Thank you for reading - it means a ton.
And finally, I’m changing the name of the podcast to “Everything Is Marketing” - if you’re subscribed on Apple or Spotify, the episodes will show up in the same feed, but with a new name. (On last week’s episode I talked to a rabbi about how places of worship think about marketing and the challenges they have around messaging.)
Onward!
A Brilliant (According to Me) Idea for You
Let’s get this out of the way - based on that headline you may be thinking to yourself, “Wait, I thought all the ideas in Gobbledy were brilliant. Why is he saying that THIS idea is brilliant? Has he been lying to us and feeding us mediocre-at-best ideas and suggesting they’re brilliant? My world is crumbling before my eyes.”
Wow, I love the enthusiasm. But worry not - all the ideas continue to be brilliant. But I think this one might be just a little bit more brilliant (and some-to-many of my ideas have been hovering around average, if I’m being honest.)
Which, now that I think about it, puts kind of an undue amount of pressure on this idea. What could this idea possibly be such that it lives up to this whole prelude? There’s no way this can live up to the billing. Let’s reset your expectations. Thanks.
Ever since my days in the apparel biz I’ve been fascinated/confused by the luxury fashion world. I was on the mass apparel side of the market, and people in mass apparel say things like, “We make clothes for everyone!” (well, not exactly those words, but also not not those words.). And because mass brands are for the masses, it’s important that people think that the clothes are for them. (Duh).
On the luxury side of things, it’s important that people who can afford those products think that other people cannot afford that product (or that only very, very, very attractive people - like you! - can afford that product.).
The names behind those luxury brands are often, themselves, mysterious and - no judgment - insane. I’m, of course, thinking of designer Karl Lagerfeld, who everyone says was a genius, but was also a crazy person who said a lot of stuff like this:
"I know revenge is mean and horrible, but I see no reason why I shouldn't do something back if somebody has done something bad to me. When people think it's all forgotten, I pull the chair away — maybe 10 years later."
So that was in my head when I was reading this article about designer Brunello Cucinelli. He says all sorts of inscrutable stuff about fashion that I haven’t heard since I stopped reading Women’s Wear Daily years ago: “When you wake up in the morning, do you really think, ‘Today I want to be quiet?…No! You want to be chic. You want to be sought after. Quiet luxury does not exist.”
Sure whatever. Luxury marketing confuses me.
But a little later in the piece he says something that I struck me:
“I want our company to be exclusive…Tomorrow we should be less known than we are today.”
This is actually genius.
On one level, luxury is about making something that is seemingly unattainable. Some of you may remember when Nordstrom opened a store in New York City that sold no products. Not like they sold very few products and the assortment was disappointing. No. They had a store that had no products available for sale.
What’s more exclusive than something? That’s right, nothing.
Cucinelli is in a bit of a bind, because he can’t sell nothing. He has to sell something. So the closest thing to nothing is something that nobody knows about. For a luxury brand, the highest attainable outcome would be a product that everybody wants and that nobody knows exists (what I will now call the Cucinelli Paradox) (tm).
Here’s my favorite part of this:
How do I know that Cucinelli doesn’t want anyone to know about his products and that he should be less well known tomorrow than he is today? I know because I read it IN AN INTERVIEW HE DID WITH A NEWS PUBLICATION.
This is a brilliant PR strategy. If you run a luxury brand and want to show that you are incredibly exclusive, you should go talk to the press about how you don’t want any press and, God willing, tomorrow nobody will know who we are. I love it!
Oh, I almost forgot my brilliant idea:
Why is there no luxury software brand? The luxury playbook is wide open - scarcity (“we will only sell 12 instances of this software this year”); pay for celebrity endorsement (you’ll shell out $2 million to Beyonce); and then you’ll create an “outlet” version of your tool to sell to the masses (“We only have 12 instances of FluzzioCollection.ai, but Fluzzio.ai is widely available.”).
Longtime readers have heard me mention my favorite scene from the film Margin Call repeatedly, but it stands repeating here. Jeremy Irons runs an investment firm and gives this sage advice: “There are three ways to make a living in this business: Be first; be smarter; or cheat.” He says he doesn’t cheat. And it’s much easier to be first than to be smarter.
The software marketing world is filled with smart people. And in the next story below I’ll discuss cheating. But, because software marketing is so conservative, there are lots of ways to be first. Cologuard, the “mail us your poop so we can screen you for cancer” company was the first to use an singing box to tell you about their product. That worked. And nobody did that second.
This is your chance…to be the luxury singing poop box of software.
Artificial Artificial Intelligence
The first mechanical turk was, well, the Mechanical Turk.
What’s that? Oh, in the 1700s it was a machine that supposedly played chess against people. And people, in the 1700s, believed that someone had created an automaton (we would say “robot” today)* that could play chess.
(*If a single one of you people writes me to tell me how a robot is different from an automaton, I will immediately unsubscribe you. Or worse, I will immediately subscribe you.)
Here is what that looked like:
Yes, people in the 1700s were stupid.
Obviously nobody in the 1700s realized that the chess-playing robot was actually a human person inside a box controlling the pieces. I assume that is because in 1792 people said to themselves, “Wow, our modern world is so modern that someone created a robot that can play chess, because now is the modern world!”
So that was the first example of a machine that was supposed to be a mechanical wonder but was actually a human stuffed in a box.
Back in 1999, Kurt Andersen (of Spy Magazine fame) wrote a novel called Turn of the Century, which, well, I read it 25 years ago so I don’t remember much. I believe the conceit was that it took place 6 months in the future, and that it foresaw a number of events that actually happened, including the idea that there would be cameras on every corner following us around (yep!).
And it also presented this situation, which I think about every so often, where a company has set up a fake video-on-demand service:
“They said ordering movies over cable TV was imminent, any movie you wanted. But the technology was a decade away at a price anybody could afford, so a big cable company faked video-on-demand, too. As the innocent Dorothys at home pushed buttons to order Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and The Bonfire of the Vanities, a kid on roller-skates in a room in Denver cued up each videocassette by hand, grabbing another tape, rolling to the next VCR, grabbing, rolling madly trying to fulfill twenty-first-century dreams (frictionlessly!) in slapstick twentieth-century fashion…”
That passage occasionally crosses my mind when I watch something on Netflix.
Because tech companies have no shame, there have been a bunch of examples of the mechanical turk/kid on roller skates sticking movies in the VCR in recent years. You may remember when you learned that Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology was powered in large part by 1,000 people in India watching you shop. Or Facebook’s virtual assistant called “M” that was supposedly an AI-powered chatbot personal assistant but (of course) there were people actually performing the tasks you asked the chatbot to do.
Anyway, I’m mentioning all that because the CEO of a fintech company called nate was indicted for defrauding investors after he told them that the technology could use AI to allow you to see an item you wanted to buy on any website, click a button, and it would - again, “using AI,” - choose your color, size, fill out all checkout info, and order the product, regardless of what site you were on.
From the indictment:
In reality, nate did not use AI to autonomously navigate the checkout process of e-commerce websites and complete purchases on behalf of users…at the time nate was claiming to use AI to automate online purchases, the app’s actual automation rate was effectively zero percent…
In truth, nate relied heavily on teams of human workers—primarily located overseas—to manually process transactions in secret, mimicking what users believed was being done by automation [using] hundreds of contractors, or “purchasing assistants,” in a call center located in the Philippines to manually complete purchases occurring over the nate app.
What I’m saying is - if you have a fake AI startup that just uses workers in the Philippines to complete tasks, you should tell people that! It’s brilliant! It’s human-in-the-loop!
It Seems So Obvious in Hindsight…
One of the themes of this newsletter is that marketers should be honest with themselves about their product. If you’re honest with yourself about what your product can actually do, and who is actually buying it, you can create campaigns that will resonate with those people.
Marketers are, by nature, not honest with themselves about their product. In software there’s a long history of not being honest about the product (probably going back to the first piece of software… “It adds two numbers together, but we’ll just tell people it adds three numbers together because the engineers are working on that now.”)
But when you ARE honest with yourself about your product, the results can be highly effective. Speaking of highly:
Smucker, which owns Hostess, was looking to revitalize the brand, and saw that two groups of people eat Twinkies: kids and people who like to smoke weed. I’m sure they knew about the weed smokers in the past but were like, “oh, we’re a fun kid brand, maybe stoners like us, but we’re really for kids.”
That article has lots of ridiculous quotes from their CMO, whom I don’t blame at all for saying things like, “They’re actually doing mini-meals throughout the day, and so snacking in one form or another has become something that’s critically important for them.” Critically important Twinkies!
Also this:
”It is continuing at the Munchie Mobile, where people are given a free Hostess snack in exchange for reciting designated phrases like “Bet you dollars to Donettes I have the munchies.” In exchange for 89 cents worth of donuts, you can say something stupid.
Oh, and my favorite: “New commercials include an irreverent, bossy voice-over and bold lettering.”
I don’t want to discount the difficulties of being a marketer for a consumer product. I really don’t. Seriously. I think it’s a difficult job for a host (or hostess, har!) of reasons. On the other hand, one of the ideas to revitalize the brand was “bold lettering.”
Anyway, that’ll catch the attention of the stoners who love Twinkies.
As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part.
Remember to subscribe to the Everything Is Marketing podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. And thanks again for letting me present the opportunity to upgrade to a paid subscription - I always say that if marketing people were good at sales, they’d switch to sales and make 3 times as much money.
If you want to chat marketing stuff, or if you think your employer would like to reach the thousands of marketers who subscribe to Gobbledy, let’s talk about advertising - I’m at jared@sagelett.com.
To clarify, but you still look at the pictures of Women's Wear Daily?
I can't believe I've had three years of delight!