Hello Gobbledeers,
How’s it going?
First - some housekeeping:
There’s been some confusion about the Paid Subscription option. That makes me sad, because I work with companies on messaging, and my own messaging is apparently terrible, and shoemaker’s children have no shoes, etc. There is no content behind a firewall. The Wednesday column is available to all subscribers. The Friday podcast called Everything Is Marketing is available to all subscribers. I’ve done a less-than-great job in the quick Friday email that goes out making it clear that it is a blurb about the podcast. Again, the podcast is available to everyone. The Paid Subscription option is like a Patreon - if you want to financially support this endeavor, that’s amazing. Supporting work you like is a lovely gesture. It’s $8/month or $80 a year. But if you remain a free subscriber, you’re not missing any content. Being a free subscriber is also a lovely gesture.
To that end, I know I’ve gone back and forth on this, but I’m definitely settled on it: no more Friday email about the podcast. If you’d like to hear the podcast, I suggest subscribing on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. It’s called Everything Is Marketing. I’ll mention the podcast topic in the usual Wednesday emails. Last week I spoke with musician Laurie Berkner, who writes and performs music for families, about how she thinks about marketing, and why creating a mission statement for herself helped her get more comfortable with the idea that she, herself, is a brand. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
And finally, this is your last chance to sign up for the session I’m calling “Everything You Need to Transform Your Homepage Messaging (in 45 minutes”.) It’s not a webinar - it’ll be interactive (ie, you can ask questions). I’ll walk through the structure of how you can hold your own messaging workshop at your company, including who needs to be there; each session of the workshop and who leads it; and how to turn the output into new messaging.
Basically, I’m sharing everything I’ve learned from doing these workshops with you, the Gobbledy readers.
It’s your last chance because it’s happening tomorrow (well, tomorrow if you’re reading this on Wednesday) - Thursday, May 15th, at 2pm Eastern time. It’s free, and I promise it’ll be fun and useful. Register here.
Ice Cube, Ice-T, Scoop the Ice…
So a while back we talked here about companies using rap to sell their products, and the tl;dr of that was companies should not use rap to sell their products because they are - wayyyyyy more often than not - just embarrassing themselves. (You may remember this clip from Canva’s conference last year that involved rapping and also involved me doubling over with laughter while watching it).
I had mentioned that there are, as far I had remembered, only two uses of rap in marketing that I have found acceptable - weirdly one was Hamburger Helper releasing a mixtape about cooking with Hamburger Helper, and one was a mixtape from Wendy’s that included dis tracks about McDonald’s.
I had forgotten about a 3rd amazing use of rap to sell products - a fake commercial for the real drink YooHoo from fake rapper Clark County from the real show Atlanta:
As Donald Glover says at the end, “the shit is good.”
Anyway, at the end of that newsletter, I said “…don’t insult your audience’s intelligence. Though if you’re going to make it terrible, please make it terrible enough for me to share here.”
And finally, someone has taken me up on that last part. Reader Jordana G. has found something truly terrible enough for me to share here. You have been warned.
In the 1990s, Wendy’s (the same Wendy’s that made the absolutely amazing mixtape noted above) created a series of training videos for employees to learn how to correctly pour drinks, serve chili and whatever else one needs to learn to do to work at a Wendy’s.
One of the best ways to get people to remember things is by putting the instructions to music - like if I listen to 2010’s banger Teach Me How to Dougie, I will remember that to Dougie I should “back it up and dump it, put your arms out front, lean side to side…” (Now I’ve been taught how to Dougie.)
So using rap to give your employees instructions is not a crazy idea.
Using this particular woman with an incredible mid-90s haircut (I’m not sure I even mean that in a bad way) to rap in this particular late ‘80s sing-song rap style about how to make cold drinks, on the other hand:
“Use the scoop to fill with ice, never use the cup, take my advice.”
I know that a chunk of Gobbledy readers work in Content for tech companies. I’ve been there, and I know I’ve groaned to myself when I’ve had to work on a white paper or some other bit of wordiness and felt that writing it will be pure drudgery.
Which is why I am jealous of the person at Wendy’s who got called into the boss’s office one day in 1996 (?) and had this conversation:
Boss: Thanks for coming in.
You: Remote work won’t be invented for a while, so I was in the office already, no problem. What can I do ya for? (In this imaginary conversation you’re the type of person who says “what can I do ya for?”)
Boss: Got a fun assignment for you. I’d like you to write the script for a training video. Like so our team members know that they should only never use a cup to scoop up the ice. Stuff like that.
You: Oh. Hm. What’s the fun part?
Boss: You know that crazy rapping music that a lot of the kids like? You get to write instructions for how to fill a cup with soda, but it should rhyme like in that rapping music.
You: Like if we wanted to teach people how much ice they should put in a cup, the woman in the video could say, “For soft drinks fill the cup halfway, no matter the size that’s what I say.”
Boss: You got it!
You: Oh, I was joking.
My original intent when I saw that video (and the whole series of training videos about doling out Wendy’s chili and making coffee and so forth, all with different 80s style rap and r&b beats) was to mock how ridiculous they were.
Except - I watched that video during the day and that night I went to get a drink and I opened the freezer to get some ice and I thought to myself, “always use the scoop to get the ice, never use the cup, that’s my advice.”
And then I stopped being annoyed at reader Jordana G. and decided to be thankful to reader Jordana G. for making me realize there are two acceptable ways to use rap in marketing:
Make an actual good song that doesn’t insult your customers (harder than it seems.)
Use it to help people remember instructions.
Just a few months ago I shared how Lil Jon wrote a song for Cologuard about how to use that product. For those who don’t remember (also, consider this a trigger warning for those who don’t want to remember), here are the lyrics:
Let me see you get low
Drop that ass to the bowl
Now set, set, set it up.
Scrape, scrape, scrape it up.
Box, box, box it up.
Ship, ship, ship it out.
Those are the instructions! “Drop that ass to the bowl” is the modern equivalent of “take the cup, push against the lever/keeps the foam down, now isn’t that clever?”
So, to sum it up:
If your product requires customers to remember
From January to late December
Here’s an idea that’s better than crap
Just ask ChatGPT to write you a rap.
Et cetera.
I’m sorry.
There Are No Cheap Haircuts If You Just Charge More
Here’s the thing about marketing - no product is perfect. If every product were perfect, you wouldn’t need marketers*.
(*You need marketers…really. You definitely need them. AI won’t replace them. It’ll replace some of them, obviously. Of course. I’m not an idiot. But it won’t replace all marketers. Specifically, it won’t replace you. And that’s what matters.)
So your product isn’t perfect, that’s fine. There are plenty of ways to deal with that. I often share the strategy of “just figure who actually would benefit from the shortcoming of the product” and market to those people. For example, mobile phones without Internet connections aren’t “dumb phones” they’re “perfect phones for people who are members of religious organizations that frown highly upon viewing adult content.”
And so forth.
Another option is to just address the shortcoming head-on. Here’s one example: A couple of days ago I received an email from the CEO of United Airlines. Their product has the shortcoming of “air traffic control keeps shutting down at Newark Airport.” Now, I’m not sure who would benefit from that shortcoming, so the previous approach would not work for them.
Instead, they chose to go with the very uncomfortable, but probably-they-had-no-choice email that included the sentence, “The truth is that all the flights in and out of EWR are absolutely safe.” Well yes, but somehow that made me feel like maybe they weren’t safe?
My absolute favorite example of this is a political ad from the 2006 Delaware Senatorial race between Christine O’Donnell and Senator Chris Coons. O’Donnell shocked the Delaware establishment by winning the Republican primary. She then faced accusations that she was, in fact, a witch.
Now, that is a challenging accusation to address, because - as you might imagine - that accusation was published in the press, and, given the size of Delaware, directly into the ears of every citizen of the state. It’s hard to pretend you have not been accused of being a witch.
So, when faced with a product challenge like that, you have 2 options:
Option 1: The porn phone approach, and find the people who would be happy that she is (or might be) a witch. I suspect the Total Addressable Market of Republican witch voters is quite small. So you’re left with:
Option 2: Take the United Airlines approach, and put out an ad that is the equivalent of “of course it’s safe to fly.” In this case, you start the commercial by saying, “I’m not a witch”:
The fact that she is not currently Senator O’Donnell suggests that sometimes even the direct approach will not help you overcome your product shortcomings.
But I recently saw an amazing example of addressing a product shortcoming head-on in an ad for inexpensive haircuttery Supercuts.
It’s worth 90 seconds of your time:
If you were too lazy to watch that, the guy in the ad reads some comments from “trolls” about how Supercuts is really cheap and who would ever go to Supercuts? Basically, their shortcoming is the perception that they’re too inexpensive to be any good.
Their strategy was to address that concern head on, by offering to raise the price if you’d prefer:
“It seems some of you won’t set foot in one of our salons unless it costs more than it should…so here’s an offer: The Supercuts Real Dumb Coupon. It adds $50 to the price of any haircut. Not $50 off. $50 on. Heck, you can stack 4 coupons for an extra dumb price…”
Just a brilliant way to address the elephant in the room with humor. 5 stars.
Thanks for reading to the end, it’s the best part.
A little P.S. for you - Here’s what happens if your kid orders 70,000 lollipops from Amazon.
I'm confused by the Wendy's (Wendy's's?) training video--fast food restaurants used to fill the cup for you?!
So, the paid version is like using the Supercuts coupon?