How would someone outside of your industry market their products? How might Disney, Starbucks, or Mcdonalds enter your category with their type of unique approach to marketing? What does it mean to think like a disruptive marketing professional?
For example, how would Heinz brand their ketchup as if it were a wine? What if Heinz marketed their ketchup with a wine marketing approach using flowing language to romanticize their product?
What if you were the Chief of Police, how would you approach your challenges by being a disruptive marketer? What would be a way to delight your customers (the community) with an unexpected approach to policing? How might you act differently than expected?
Last week, One Minute Brief, a division of a UK ad agency, put forth a challenge around marketing ketchup. It got my head spinning.
One person came up with a visualization of what it would be like if Heinz acted like a winery to market their classic condiment.
I’m sorry I don’t know the designer/copywriter’s name – I’d love to give them credit. The label copy reads like a wine label. It is hilarious.
When I shared the graphic with my Twitter friends in the wine industry, aka WineTwitterVerse – I think I broke the Internet. At least the little corner where the wine world hangs out and sips Chenin Blanc.
Disruptive Marketing
The overwhelming feedback I saw was that most of my wine marketing friends were laughing at themselves and their industry. They were confronted with the obvious struggle of sameness in wine messaging. Almost everyone markets wine like other wineries.
Tomatoes and grapes are agricultural products. In other words, only wine folks talk about the variety of grape, country of origin, or the lilting sea breezes coming from the coast to kiss the fruit as it ripens. Wine marketers describe the family tradition and heritage of generations making wine and there is a sameness to it all.
Oh my.
Cops Delivering Ice Cream
Most industries’ marketing has its protocols, rituals, and sameness. They race to the center, to the average, and the obvious where they should be trying to disrupt the patterns. Instead of differentiation, there is a rush to the center – let’s be like everyone else.
We see the oddity – not the everyday.
Messages that are deliberately different and align with strategy stick out when they break the conventions of a category.
When I approach a marketing challenge, my first question is to find the rules of marketing within that industry.
And then ignore every single one.
How can you reimagine what it is like to be a farmer’s market, be a different type of blanket company, or non-profit acting like a restaurant?
Last week I noticed a great example of changing expectations and counterintuitive thinking. This is disruptive marketing at its finest.
Mr. Softie
Unrelated to the world of marketing, I heard an interview with the former Chief of Police for Camden Scott Thomson, NJ, and Anne Milgram, former NJ Attorney General. The two of them were responsible for the critical restructuring of how policing is done in Camden. Listen here for the full story. They restructured the department from the ground up.
One wonderful tidbit from the interview was that the Chief decided to get some ice cream trucks and have his officers ride around the innercity communities where people were afraid to come out into the street.
The drug lords owned those corners. Instead of taking a confrontational approach to the criminals, the Chief motivated the community to come out and take back the street by using ice cream to bring people together. Police usually use weapons not soft-serve ice cream.
Renting ice cream trucks isn’t part of the policing culture. The manual on how to run a police department does not involve Popsicles. Yet, that was why this approach to the challenge was so inventive and successful.
They found a different way to see the problem and show up like human beings, neighbors, and friends – not as militant cops.
Disruptive Marketing Challenge
- List all the rules of marketing in your category. Moreover, what does everyone do when they market products and services within your industry or category?
- How can you, in a meaningful and strategic way, break one of them? Find one tactic everyone follows – and do something wildly different.
- Think ahead about what success would look like? How would you measure it or know it worked? What metric would indicate you are on to something new?
- Test it. Try it out. Learn from the real world, not a survey. Try to download this thinking into your marketing teams’ approach to their work. Give them permission to do what no one else is doing in your area of business.
In conclusion, successful marketers break patterns, disrupt expectations, and think counterintuitively.
What food will you be pairing with your ketchup tonight?
Does your brand need to disrupt your industry?
I can help. You can set up a time chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Our initial conversation is free. You talk, I listen. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com or call me. 919 720 0995. Visit my website at www.themarketingsage.com Let’s explore working together today.
Camden Police offer free ice cream. (Credit: Kristen Johanson
