Often, the very best thing you can do is chuck everything you ever learned out the window. Take your B school professor’s proclamations, those focus groups that seemed to make sense at the time, the very best ideation sessions, and throw them all away. Run hard the other way. Don’t look back.
Go with your gut and take it to the bank. Or the poorhouse.
The wisdom of telling Conventional Wisdom to take a hike isn’t brand new. It doesn’t always work but it surely is ballsy, and right or wrong, it’s proof that conviction still lives. And if it’s so ballsy that it’s brazenly outrageous, you can spin it positively.
One of my favorite stories is about Red Bull. It was originally a Thai energy drink called Krating Daeng, which in English, of course, means Red Bull. Even though people gave no chance of success to an energy drink with the stupidly ridiculous name of Red Bull, founder Dietrich Mateschitz, with nothing other than his gut informing him, stuck by the name. Red Bull’s done pretty well in the wing-giving business.
So now Domino’s re-launches their reformulated pizza by proclaiming that for years they’ve had really bad pizza. TV commercials show focus group footage of people being extremely critical of Domino’s taste, from the cardboard crust to the ketchupy sauce, and then they surprise those same critics by delivering the new pizzas, which, surprise!, taste awesome!
Whether or not clever editing helped play a role in the transformation of these pizza experts, the story is told well and believably. The spots work and the idea works, most likely because Domino’s really was terrible all those years (unlike the old Coke, which has always been pretty good) and they really have made it better. And they’ve received a boatload of favorable press, including a story on NPR.
So the next time someone tells you negative advertising doesn’t work, or you should never utter even one micro-mini-negative peep about your product, consider the one thing that’s even more powerful than contradicting Conventional Wisdom:
The truth.
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