Your Gobbledy, Wrapped: Because That's a Subject Line That Works
Also, a fun quiz you should take!
Hello Gobbledeers,
Today is the Gobbledy Year End Holiday Edition (tm), which is to say: my gift to you is that you don’t have to read a full newsletter today. I’ll continue my holiday tradition of sharing the 5 most-read Gobbledys from the year. If you’re new to the newsletter, that’ll be a good place to start. If you’re not new to the newsletter, you’ll have the feeling that I get when I receive the New Yorker Fiction issue - “thank God I can skip the New Yorker this week.”
But before that, I was annoyed by a marketing thing, and I thought I’d share that with you. Is that OK? Yes? Good.
You may remember 2 weeks ago when we talked about logos and how Jaguar was catching all manner of hell online for changing their logo. Shortly after that, Scott Galloway, who I generally have some level of respect for even if I find him annoying, published a thingy where he crapped all over Jaguar for changing the logo. What annoys me is that it’s easy to crap all over a company for changing their logo, and I think he’s better than that.
No matter how bad a logo is, it’s very easy to say, “blah, you guys screwed up the logo” any time someone changes a logo. I think it’s a lazy take.
I also think this applies to company names. It’s very easy to dump all over a company name (or when a company changes its name to say its new name is stupid and they should’ve stuck with the old name), but in the end - like with the logo - I don’t think it matters all that much.
I know that’s not what most marketers think, which suggests that I’m wrong about this. Except that I’m not.
Anyway, I wanted to end the year with a fun (“fun”) little quiz where we may learn that the name of your product may not matter as much as you may think. You’ll need one small piece of information before this quiz: The Faroe Islands1 - which is likely where your most recent piece of salmon was farmed - is a really beautiful autonomous territory* of Denmark, located between Iceland and Norway.
(*I’m not sure what that means either.)
OK, without further ado… Time to play:
Is this the name of a prescription drug, a place in the Faroe Islands, or a brand on Amazon?
I really wish Substack had a tool where this could be interactive, alas…
Here’s the list: Which are drugs, which are in the Faroes, and which are on Amazon? (answer just below)
Euymhod
Hovamp
Yervoy
Eysturoy
Coovan
Saksun
Kisqali
Xtandi
Nubeqa
Pvendor
Hvalba
Mykines
Prescription drugs: Yervoy, Kisqali, Xtandi, Nubeqa
Amazon brands: Pvendor, Coovan, Hovamp, Euymhod
Faroe Islands places: Eysturoy, Mykines, Saksun, Hvalba
How’d you score?
0-3: Congrats, you can start a naming consultancy!
4-8: Congrats, you can start a naming consultancy!
9-12: Congrats, you can start a naming consultancy!
The 5 Most-Read Articles of 2024
#1: 3 Lessons from Selling Pizza, Religion and Coffee
Maxwell House was able to market to Christmas carolers while also marketing to, uh, Hanukkah carolers (?) because they used their core message (“good to the last drop”) with their core market, and a market-specific message (“kosher for passover”) for their secondary message (as Manischewitz did with their own core and secondary markets).
When a company’s target market is hitting a growth plateau, they’ll often discuss the opportunity of moving to adjacent markets - (from enterprise to small business; or expanding geographically; or distributing through a new channel). But another option is to think through the core attributes of your product and think about the markets in which those attributes would resonate. Even if you would consider those attributes to be negative (this wine is too sweet!) or too obvious (ALL coffee is kosher for Passover), that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to target another market that would care about it.
#2: The Worst Corporate Video I've Ever Seen (So Far)
THIS is the worst corporate video I’ve ever seen, which - at the same time - makes it the BEST corporate video I’ve ever seen.
Please go watch it. What? You don’t want to go watch it? Hm. What if I told you:
It’s a video produced by content-garbage-pile-creator and WebMD owner Internet Brands urging people to get back to the office and stop working from home.
It includes the CEO saying, “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point…we’re informing of how we need to work together going forward.”
It’s so important that people get back to the office that a number of the executives in the video telling people to go back to the office are very clearly on a virtual background that - I’m just assuming here - suggests they are not currently in the office.
They feature clips of the office to show people what they’re missing at the office, and based on these clips what they’re missing is the copying machine, cubicles and an office coffee maker.
#3 The Best Pricing Page, Because It's Honest...
The top part of the page is a regular pricing page, but if you keep scrolling you get this:
“If nothing else has sold you on PostHog, hopefully these classic marketing tactics will.” Love it. The little hog on the bottom right saying, “Please help our conversion rate.” Amazing. “Act now and get $0 off your order.” All of it, brilliant.
#4 The Airbnb case study in product marketing
If you’re struggling to break through in a crowded market with large competitors, you can always go back and focus on the product differentiators - even small ones! - that set you apart. I know that there’s pressure in software to focus on the category and talk about how you’re the only whatever whatever platform for self-loathing brands (or whatever), but that type of construction (the only XXXX platform for YYY brands) nearly always rings hollow.
The Airbnb tagline is actually a pretty helpful rubric to use: think about your product. Then think about “For some people, XXX is better with your product.” Who are the “some people?” And for those people, what makes your product better? Then - and here’s the crazy idea - go market to those people and tell them what makes your product better.
Marketing is simple. But it’s not easy.
#5 At last, I bother readers with the story of the fish in the cowboy hat
So that’s a little story I wanted to share: A bathroom costs $1.7 million and several years and everyone thinks that’s stupid, but everyone also thinks that every step of the way makes total sense.
Of course you want public input. Of course you want workers to be paid well. Of course you want an environmental review of a new sewer in a park.
Every step is smart, but the outcome is dumb.
This situation may sound familiar to you, but there is no term for it.
Well, there was no term for it until I started calling it the Fish in the Cowboy Hat.
As always, thanks for reading to the end of the newsletter. And to the end of the year. I really cannot explain how much I’ve enjoyed writing this each week, and - even more - how much I’ve enjoyed interacting with all of you through the comments, through emails (I’m at jared@sagelett.com - or you can just reply to this if you’re reading on email), and on Zoom when you set up time through my Calendly link. I still find it amazing that thousands of people read this each week. Thanks for being one of them.
Happy new year, and we’ll be back on January 8th.
We went to the Faroes a while back, and if you’ve been to Iceland and liked it, it’s a trip along the same lines, though it looks like Middle Earth rather than the moon. My daughters still say it’s one of the best places they’ve been.
You made all those names up, right?