Well, they’ve spent years selling off their food divisions, leaving them with mostly junk… candy and stuff.
It turns out that people NEED food, and they WANT candy. So candy is a lot more profitable. Since Hershey no longer sells food, they want to be sure the stock market knows this. Hershey Junk is probably not a good name for a company, so now it’s just Hershey.
Let’s assume that they’re correct, and that the stock market will get the message, giving them a higher PE ratio and stock price because they are in a higher margin business. What this means is that a story about what they do will end up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Just to tell a story to people who have an incentive to be informed about the truth. Of course, it’s impossible to tell the truth…
Vacuum cleaners are funny. The act of vacuuming is at least as important as the dust removal itself. A freshly vacuumed rug looks different… but in the short run, there’s really not a lot of visible difference between a rug vacuumed with a really expensive machine and one that was poorly vacuumed.
As a result, the worldview of the buyer matters a great deal. If you see yourself manhandling some big loud device, then only a big loud device is going to make you feel as though you did what you were supposed to do.
We’ve done the Dyson story to death, so I won’t go into that here. But I got this ad from Francesco Rovati in Italy, and it made me think about the alternatives. Francesco confesses that while this was the most popular vacuum in Italy, it was no better and no cheaper than the alternatives. Clearly, it was the story the ads tell that made the thing sell.
The reason that vacuum cleaner makers tell us lies like this is that we demand it. If they just told us the truth (weight and horsepower) they’d be doing nothing at all to make us feel good while we vacuum. And feeling good is why people spend their hard-earned money on things that they don’t actually need.
(PS the ad with Tarzan losing his loincloth was too racy for this family-friendly blog).
This is what it looks like as you walk through the parking lot to my Home Depot in Yonkers, New York.
No, it’s not a nightclub. It’s a hardware store.
Home Depot has a challenge. They’re not growing the way they want to. Huge discounts were enough to completely disrupt the local market, wiping out many mom and pop competitors. But low prices all by themselves aren’t enough to get a certain part of the population to show up, especially for just one or two (high margin) items like doorknobs, or even worse, stuff like a whole new kitchen.
Walk into the store and you can see which worldview the story is tailored to. It’s not for the homemaker or the occasional do it yourselfer. No, the store is clearly designed by, stocked for and organized around people who buy in volume and, even more than that, hardware geeks.
Take a look at this picture and tell me the truth: is it exciting to you? Does it fill you with anticipation to make your way down this aisle, looking at each item and finding an amazing deal? If so, you’ve got a worldview that matches the story Home Depot tells.
Many people, though, see nothing but dread here. They see a store with no helpful salespeople, a jumble of product, none just quite right, a very very long checkout line and fear. The fear of screwing up. The fear of having to come back and return something. The fear (very real) of something big falling from the top of one of these shelves and squashing them like a bug.
Home Depot is working hard to get new customers. They can’t… not as long as they continue to tell a story that only appeals to just one worldview.
Your organization may be just like the Home Depot. You may be good at one story, you may have grown into that story, but now that story can’t get you to an audience that doesn’t have the same worldview as your existing customers. The common solution is to yell. To yell louder, or more cleverly, or in more targeted media. To insist that you have the solution to this group’s problems, that you have proof that you are better, and why oh why won’t they switch.
Celebrity endorsements go back to the days of the early British Monarchy, and they still work. People still pay extra for perfume with Paris Hilton’s name on it (she’s making more than $10 million a year endorsing stuff). Why? Obviously, the perfume isn’t any better. Worse, no one else even knows that you’re wearing this particular scent (it’s not as obvious as, say, Ralph Lauren’s polo pony.)
We’d like to believe that we’re not swayed by such obvious nonsense. “No, I buy Polo jeans because they fit me better.” While it’s true that not everyone is easily seduced by Paris, most consumers (including the indigent and extremely poor) can’t help themselves when confronted with just the right endorsement–they pay extra for the story.
One of my favorite silly endorsements is Pierce Brosnan endorsing Omega. They’re not paying Pierce because they care about Pierce’s opinion (or that you care about his opinion). They’re paying him because he embodies a fictional character, invented fifty years ago by a now-dead author.
So, otherwise rational and intelligent men spend hundreds or thousands of dollars extra to buy a watch endorsed by a fictional character controlled by anonymous film producers and embodied by an actor. Because it makes them feel good. They buy the story.
Lying to consumers is great fun to talk about, but it’s far more challenging and more effective to lie to fellow business people.
This is the headquarters for the CAA, one of the heavyweights in Hollywood. (They represent folks like Pierce Brosnan–yes, him again–and dozens of other big names).
The last time I visited their headquarters, I was stunned by the 57 foot tall atrium lobby, and most especially by the invisible doorman–someone standing across the room with a remote control to let the good folks in and keep the riffraff out.
I mean, just for a second, let’s remember what these guys do. They charge millions of dollars to make phone calls, negotiate contracts and have lunch. They could just as easily do their jobs in some trailer park.
If you don’t think tone of voice and storytelling matters when selling to business, take a second to check out their entire website (it won’t take long): CreativeArtistsAgency.
When I was a kid, I wanted this product more than anything in the whole world.
Of course, when you got it, you discovered that all the glasses could see through was your right hand. (I’ll let you figure out how that worked).
So technically, the ad was “true.” Of course, the real deal was: 1. it fit the goals of a pre-adolescent (power, peeping tom, magic) 2. it fit the worldview that great things were available for not a lot of money, usually by mail if you knew what to get 3. when you got it, you felt ripped off, but realized that a) you could fool your friends and b) the wait was great… you were really buying anticipation.
I was in the supermarket last week, talking to some journalists about lying. We were talking about the fact that bottled water costs more than gasoline, and that some brands cost two or three times as much as others. They suggested doing a blind taste test–pouring one of each into a glass and seeing if people could tell the difference.
Big mistake! This is the same mistake that the Pepsi Challenge forced the poor shmoes at Coke into making.
The reason it’s a mistake is that in real life, there’s almost never anything that’s really blind. You know what container that beverage came from. You know whether the table has a white linen cloth on it–or whether you’re at a luncheonette. You can see the look in the doctor’s eyes when she talks to you. You can sense the confidence of the sales rep whens he brings the latest advance in ball bearing technology to your office.
Blind taste tests take the arrogant position that there is some sort of truth. I don’t think there is.
No, the right taste test to do is not Brand X vs. Nationally Advertised Brand in unmarked glasses. The right test is to switch the contents but keep the labels. How does that water taste in this bottle?
This is the new Mercedes Benz museum. If a car is just a car, a utilitarian device to get us from one place to another cheaply, quickly and safely, then why would Mercedes need a museum?
Of course, that’s not what a car is. A car is a symbol, a story… yes, it’s a lie. It’s an amalgamation of the identity of the maker and the purchaser and it says an enormous amount about who we are. The same thing is true about the mp3 player you wear, the cell phone you use and, yes, the insurance company you choose.
The best marketers craft these stories carefully, knowing that this is what people are actually buying. So, if you were trying to make something museum-worthy, what would you do now?
The brilliant John McWade completely understands my new book, and he hasn’t read it yet. In the editor’s column of the new issue of Before And After (print only, but check out freebies at (link: Before & After, the magazine for graphic design) he writes,
“Think of it this way. If I ask to see a picture of your dormmate, what are you going to show me? Not a snapshot of Condoleezza Rice. Not a Picasso. Not some visual concept of yours. What you’ll show me is a real photo, what she actually looks like.
If she’s dressed for a date, she’ll be more presentable than if she just yawned her way out of a sleeping bag, but it’s still her.”
I’d add, “no, of course, it’s not her. It’s a picture of her. And no picture can ever, ever tell the truth.”
What’s the point of telling a lie to a captive audience… and one that’s going to discover the lie in just a moment or two?
Dean Jackson sent me this illustrative chart… the result of a flight on United Airlines. Hey, at least he GOT a bag labeled Supreme Nut Mix. Most travelers just get a glass of Sprite.
April 7, 2005
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Now they want to be called just plain Hershey.
Vacuum cleaners are funny. The act of vacuuming is at least as important as the dust removal itself. A freshly vacuumed rug looks different… but in the short run, there’s really not a lot of visible difference between a rug vacuumed with a really expensive machine and one that was poorly vacuumed.
No, it’s not a nightclub. It’s a hardware store.
Take a look at this picture and tell me the truth: is it exciting to you? Does it fill you with anticipation to make your way down this aisle, looking at each item and finding an amazing deal? If so, you’ve got a worldview that matches the story Home Depot tells.
Celebrity endorsements go back to the days of the early British Monarchy, and they still work. People still pay extra for perfume with Paris Hilton’s name on it (she’s making more than $10 million a year endorsing stuff). Why? Obviously, the perfume isn’t any better. Worse, no one else even knows that you’re wearing this particular scent (it’s not as obvious as, say, Ralph Lauren’s polo pony.)
When I was a kid, I wanted this product more than anything in the whole world.
The brilliant John McWade completely understands my new book, and he hasn’t read it yet. In the editor’s column of the new issue of 