🍱 Same love; Kalifornication; An existential question
Papa's got a brand new Bento
Hello and welcome back to The Marketing Kable, where I'm taking you along on my journey to discover ideas, voices and campaigns that can inspire us.
something to watch
love has no gender. In Saatchi & Saatchi New York's Make Homosexuals Marry campaign, we meet Devin and Glenn - a couple who met, fell in love, tied the knot, and then lived with the repercussions of their decision. They encountered issues familiar to most married couples, such as pesky in-laws and passive-aggressive disagreements over dinner.
The point of it all? To show that marriage is a universal experience regardless of sexual orientation.
Released in the aftermath of prop8 - legislation that was passed banning gay marriage six months after the California Supreme Court first legalised it. The campaign sought to keep the dialogue around same-sex marriage alive and active with humour, "To the 44% of Californians who think homosexuals should not be allowed to marry. Why would you support prop8 and spare them from a long, unforgiving, lifetime of wedded torment?"
Here's why it's my pick this week:
The obvious reason - it's funny. There's nothing that gets people going more than humour. It takes a familiar stereotype - blah married life - and depicts it in an atypical context eliciting laughter and closer consideration.
It demystifies and normalises gay marriage. Most people who oppose homosexuality don't really know much about it in the first place. A lot of their panic and hatred is fueled by ignorance and misinformation. In taking the audience behind the scenes of a scenario they've been fearmongered into loathing, it makes it all everyday and mundane.
something to read
maki rolling. The first time I ate sushi, I didn't like it. The voice screeching "THIS IS RAW FISH" inside my head did quite a number on my tastebuds.
Several years along, I have come to love sushi to the point that I even enjoy train station sushi and its second cousin, airport sushi. Not the best idea for your digestive system, as this SNL sketch will tell you.
This week, sushi is a marketing lesson!
Nir Eyal uses the sushi example to show how important it is to find the right balance between familiar and fresh when you bring something new to the table. Frustrated with customers refusing to bite, restaurant owners reimagined and marketed sushi as the California roll, which paved the way for the ubiquitous adoption of this Japanese staple across America, and, dare we say, the world. It made the dish seem at once familiar and exotic, and brand new.
So when you're introducing a new way of doing things or a product for which your customers have no context, make sure to tap into their biases and inherent beliefs so it seems familiar and new and exciting at the same time.
As Nir says, "If your new product or service isn’t gaining traction, ask yourself “What’s my California Roll?”
thing to listen to
quel raison d'etre. There's a joke that keeps popping up on the web - an interviewer asks a job seeker why they want the job. The job seeker's honest answer - they're really passionate about earning money so they can keep existing. Makes for a good laugh, but if we actually said this during a job interview? Well ..
So if you're an entrepreneur or a marketer trying to establish a brand, and I was to ask, "Why does your brand need to exist?", what would your answer be?
If your answer is in the same vein as that of the fictional job seeker, chances are, your brand is going nowhere. So how DO you answer that question?
Insight Unpacked, a podcast from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University hosted by faculty, offers two important considerations when launching or rebranding a product:
First off, you gotta think about your brand purpose. What do you want your brand to represent? Once you have that sorted, you should ask yourself whether you need to start from scratch or build on what you already have.
Next, you need to figure out your brand position. This includes identifying your target audience, your frame of reference, your point of difference, and your reason to believe. They recommended targeting a specific group of people and building your brand around them, but fearlessly expanding your audience if you see the potential.
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