Turns Out You Can Use a Vasectomy to Sell Fast Food...

...sort of. Also, keep those acronyms in check

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going? One thing I learned this week: I always assumed daughter #1 who goes to college in Michigan would be the one suffering through the worst weather. Turns out I was incorrect - we visited daughter #2 (well, really daughter 1b) in upstate NY last weekend and they have approximately 92 feet of snow. Congratulations. Go ‘gate.

This week:

• A messaging best practice you can use right now! (AMBPYCURN!)

• The vasectomy - 99 cent roast beef connection

• A note on a passing…

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How Many Acronyms Does It Take to Get to the Middle of a Tootsie Pop? A-one, A-two…

I’m feeling generous this week.

And y’know what they say - generosity killed the cat. No, wait. That isn’t right. Something killed the cat. Something else.

Whether the cat was killed or not is unimportant - the key thing is that I’m going to be generous.

Here’s what I’m being generous with:

You will walk away from today’s newsletter - right at the top! - with a rule of thumb that will improve your homepage.

Oh, I’ve got you interested now, don’t I? Oh, suddenly you’re not so quick to just skim through and skip dow-

-Wait, come back. I was being a jerk. I’m sorry. That was on me.

But if I just told you the rule of thumb, what fun would THAT be? Not fun at all, I tell ya!

So instead we’ll try a little quiz. Here’s a homepage, and see if you can pick out what rule I believe they are breaking:

Hm - no, it’s not that a CRM tool will somehow make people obsessed with your products. It’s something else…CRM built for B2C…

OK, here’s an even better example that I hate even more:

AI-Powered CCaaS + WFM.

I have no idea either.

But here’s what I do know:

You can have 1 acronym in your homepage headline; you cannot have 2 acronyms in your homepage headline. That’s the rule of thumb. If you go to your homepage and you see 2 acronyms in your headline, that is the recipe for gobbledy (I almost wrote “literally the recipe for gobbledy” except it’s not literally the recipe for gobbledy, but you know what I’m saying.)

1 acronym. Choose it wisely.

(Thanks to Gobbledy reader Freeconlon for passing that Ujet example along…)

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Rax Put the “Vasectomy” in “Fast Food Marketing That Talks about a Vasectomy”

I’ve long thought that one of the challenges of being a marketer is that everyone perceives the job as being easy (“the product sells itself!” or “just lower the price and people will buy it.” Which, I guess isn’t exactly un-true?).

But the interesting part of marketing is that every market is different in unique ways. Lots of you reading this thing are involved in software marketing (or married to people in software marketing). Back when I was hawking polo shirts, I thought software marketing went like this:

1. Buy a booth at a conference.

2. Have salespeople send conference attendees 175,000 emails in advance of the conference.

3. Meet people at conference.

4. Tell the salespeople to call those people and sell them software.

Hm. Actually that’s a large chunk of it. But that’s not all of it (obviously! probably obviously!). Once you’re in that world, you come to understand that the devil is in the details, and every industry has its own deviled details.

With that, let’s chat about fast food for a moment.

As someone who knows approximately nothing about fast food marketing¹, I think fast food marketing involves choosing one of these options:

1. Hey look, here’s a value meal!

2. Hey look, here’s a commercial talking about fried chicken where the voiceover sounds far more racist to my ears than I’m comfortable with.

3. Oh, OK, we’re too cool for commercials, we’re a newfangled fast food company and we raised $300 million to sell $19 salads something something influencers something.

There’s probably others, but if you ever find yourself running marketing for a fast food company, you’ll likely decide between 1 of those 3 things, while also constantly being bothered by franchisees that the prices are either too high or too low.

Even if you choose one of those 3 strategies (they’re all good options!), you’re going to find yourself with competition who has also chosen that strategy (assholes), so you’ll have to plan for that.

The obvious way to differentiate yourself in a crowded market with little differentiation is to create a mascot. In this case, you have, yet again, several options:

1. The Ronald McDonald route: the mascot represents the characteristics of the brand. McDonald’s is fun. A clown is fun. Therefore, Ronald McDonald.

2. The Burger King/Wendy’s route: Burger King created a burger king. Wendy created Wendy. I just created Sweet Green, the mascot Sweetgreen needs to sell their $19 salads:

Now I kinda want to go to Sweetgreen.

3. The Papa John’s/Kentucky Fried Chicken route: have your founder be the face of the brand (at least until they’re no longer the face of the brand because, racist.)

I wanted to talk today about a fast food company that selected Option #1 (mascot that’s an abstract concept), but they added the twist that the mascot was a depressed middle aged divorcee with a drinking problem.

I am, of course, talking about roast beef slinger Rax’s mascot Mr. Delicious:

(Apologies for the image quality…)

It says: “When Mr. Delicious has doubts about his manhood, he goes for a beef, bacon and cheddar.”

Yes, the tagline was “Rax: You can eat here.”

I believe Rax ran a campaign around Mr. Delicious in 1989 and 1990 or so. To position themselves against other chains’ more child-focused positioning (for example, clown mascot), they created the Mr. D character. In a series of ads we learn that his life is not exactly on the upswing:

In this commercial he mentions that he goes to Rax for their 99 cent value items because “Mr. Delicious is a little, well, over-extended…”

In another ad he talks about why he doesn’t eat at other more kid-focused chains while suggesting maybe he’s got a bit of a violent streak: “Mr. Delicious doesn’t appreciate unnecessary commotion while he’s eating. It brings out the dangerous, hostile side in Mr. D.”

Other ads drop little tidbits about his life: how expensive his therapist is; how he had “a bout with midlife crisis in ‘89;” “much to his chagrin, he discovered that custom-designed hair weaves are non-refundable;” and “that vacation to Bora Bora he took with those two young ‘friends’ that left Mr. Delicious feeling empty and unfulfilled, unlike the robust sandwiches, baked potatoes and refreshing drinks on the Rax menu, for only 99 cents each.”

Yeah, the pitch was - if other fast food restaurants are too childish for you, and you’re a divorced, anger-laden middle-aged mess of a man who may have just brought two prostitutes to Tahiti but found it unfulfilling, you can buy a sandwich for a dollar at Rax.

The topper to all this was an ad they ran where sad Mr. Delicious talks about his vasectomy, which - I’ll be honest - is not a subject that’s often associated with roast beef.

The commercial is touting the rather unique (?) selling point that their value combos end in even dollar amounts (rather than, say, 99 cents).

Why does that matter? Because, Mr. Delicious says, he just “had some raaaaaather delicate surgery" and “…if there’s no change he doesn’t have to squirm so much to put it back in his pocket, now does he? He just grabs his combo and drives ever-so-slowly over the speed bump.”

I’ve said a few times that the perfect bit of marketing makes sense to your target market and makes no sense to people outside your target market. I would imagine if you are in Rax’ target market of middle aged men who have recently had vasectomies and find it painful to put dimes in your pocket, then this ad really resonated. Bravo.

Alas, Rax went into bankruptcy a few months after the Mr. D campaign. It now has fewer than 10 locations.

(Thanks to this article for some background on Mr. D.)

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A Quick Aside…

If you live in New York City and have watched the Knicks or Rangers over the past 30 years, you likely saw announcer Al Trautwig on MSG Network leading the pregame, halftime and postgame shows. Trautwig died this week after complications from cancer.

I’ve mentioned here before that my father (still alive! I never know how to refer to my father, who is retired, in a way that makes it clear he is very, very, very still alive and doing great) was a TV cameraman who worked regularly at Madison Square Garden for much of his career, and knew Trautwig for 30 years. During that time I was lucky enough to have met Trautwig a couple of times - when I’ve met people who are on camera for a living, often I feel like they feel they’re being forced to have a conversation with me. Trautwig didn’t feel that way - he was genuinely interested in chatting with me for a couple of minutes in a way that felt, I guess, normal.

I’m sharing all that because about 10 years ago my father was working on the baseline at a Knicks game when he was absolutely crushed by 6 foot 9, 230 pound Denver Nugget Al Harrington. Just toppled by him.

After the game, Al Trautwig spent a minute of airtime chastising the NBA and the referees for not stopping the game after my father was hurt (and was nearly pummeled again when play resumed).

Here’s the video of that (along with the clip of my father being knocked over - while still getting the shot, of course).

Not a lot of people on TV would spend live TV time defending their coworkers. He did.

Rest in peace, Al Trautwig.

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As always, thanks for reading to the end - it’s the best part. I had such a fun conversation with a reader this week about some messaging challenges in the undifferentiated market that she works in - if you want to chat for 30 minutes about stuff you’re working on, or roast beef, here’s my Calendly link.

1. I only know one thing about fast food marketing, and I mentioned it here a long while ago - the best piece of fast food marketing is this EP that Wendy’s released that included a diss track aimed at McDonald’s called Clownin. It’s a banger…