In a famous case study called ‘Why would you hire this milkshake?’ a chain of roadside rest stops had a problem: How to sell more milkshakes.
It cost them plenty of time and money trying out solutions: Promotions, price discounts and more flavour to appeal to children, but nothing would budge sales.
In desperation, the company finally called upon a marketing firm who asked the questions that the chain should have asked in the first place: Why do people want a milkshake?
It seems an illogical question only if you have already gone too far down a logical path – of course everyone knows that it is young people buying milkshakes on a warm day.
Except it wasn’t. Free from the boardroom embarrassment of asking stupid questions, the researchers went ahead and asked them. They first challenged the assumptions about the customer, sat in one of the diners and observed: Who was buying, what they were buying, when they were buying, and asked them “Why did you buy this?”
It turns out that the vast bulk of their customers were working-age adults buying chunky smoothies for breakfast as a break on their commute to work. Why chunky milkshakes? Because they could be eaten with one hand, felt healthier, and gave them a challenge of navigating the chunkier bits while driving along an otherwise uneventful highway.
Armed with that knowledge, the marketing firm set about providing for the real customers’ real needs, providing seating, reading material, healthy options and recognition of regular customers to roaring success.
If only that chain had reached out to the marketing firm earlier, they would have saved a huge chunk of time and money, and been much more profitable a year earlier.
This is a familiar pattern: A company will make assumptions about their business, create a product that is logical but doesn’t work, pat themselves on the back for how clever they are, spend plenty of time and money on trying to make it work, get confounded when it doesn’t. Only then will they call in the marketers to try to make it work, now with a very limited budget so they can’t start over like they may need to.
Marketing can indeed make a product more popular, but to use a marketing team as only this is to miss out on the real benefit of hiring a team of creative thinkers: They can work out the right puzzle to solve, and come up with market-breaking innovative solutions.
And THEN make it appealing.
Most companies are set up to reward logical thinking, but logic merely reduces personal accountability rather than solving anything, so becomes an expensive vanity project.
You need your creatives in early, and let them do what your logical team cannot: Be creative.
