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 Marketing Outrageously
How to Increase Your Revenue By Staggering Amounts!
Chapter 7 - continued...
METHOD IN THE MADNESS
Okay, let's say you're with a food product company. Your company make a little-known food product — a glob of mashed brown rice stuck together with oats and egg whites. You shape this glob into hamburger patties. Since there's no meat in this product, this glob would be perfect for vegetarians looking for a hamburger substitute. The good news is that there are enough vegetarians to keep your sales line in an upward direction.
But to get real growth, you need more than just vegetarians to buy your product. The only way to grow substantially is to expand outside your veggie niche and get some meat eaters. Thus, you decide to compete against the all-mighty hamburger — and those guys have deep, deep pockets.
Growing the brand won't be easy. You don't have many tools to work with. For one thing, your ad budget is not just small, it's microscopic.
This is the situation GardenBurger, a company selling a meat substitute, found itself in. How do you get meat eaters to toss a glob of mashed brown rice on the grill instead of of a slab of juicy red meat?
GardenBurger decided to market outrageously. It bought one television commercial. That's right, one thirty-second TV commercial, one time, in one show.
That's marketing outrageously? One TV commercial run one time in one show?
The one show was the finale of Seinfeld at 9 p.m. on May 14, 1998. GardenBurger isn't the megacompany you'd expect to see advertising on big events like the Seinfeld finale or the Super Bowl. Its sales for the preceding fiscal year were only $39 million.
The cost to air that one commercial during Seinfeld was estimated at $1.5 million. The previous year, GardenBurger had spent about $3.3 million on advertising. Wasn't this like a family blowing half its annual food budget on an extravagant eighteen-course banquet?
Besides, how can just one commercial produce any measurable benefit? If you asked the big network advertisers like Budweiser or Chevy about the impact of one commercial, they would just laugh. They believe in running "flights," which means airing the same commercial many times over many weeks on different shows.
Now that we've had a good chuckle at GardenBurger's outrageous marketing, let's pull back the tarp and take a closer look at their madness. What, in fact, did they gain with their outrageous marketing?
- The rare Big Bang. GardenBurger wanted to leap out of its vegetarian niche and become more mainstream, capitalizing on consumer demand for low-fat products that tasted great. To do this, it needed a Big Bang — a shot that turns out much louder than you would normally expect.
A Big Bang Horse of Opportunity — the Seinfeld finale — came along. Media hype said the Seinfeld finale might draw the largest audience ever to watch a TV program.
What made Seinfeld a Big Bang for GardenBurger, however, wasn't the size of the Seinfeld audience — it was the smallness of GardenBurger itself. GardenBurger's purchase of possibly the most costly thirty-second commercial in history became big news. More than 400 television, radio, and newspaper stories nationwide featured tiny GardenBurger and its outrageous gamble.
The impact of this media attention was greater than that of the commercial itself. No other advertiser got this kind of exposure. Heck, if Budweiser or Chevy had bought a commercial on Seinfeld, the media would have yawned and said, "What else is new?"
If GardenBurger's gamble had not received such extensive media coverage, then the Big Bang wouldn't have been as big. And if GardenBurger had not also gone after the next two benefits (below), then the Big Bang would have been just a super-expensive, one-time pop with no fizz.
- Increased distribution. What good would one commercial — or even an armada of commercials — do if consumers couldn't find the product on the supermarket shelves? Armed with the Big Bang, GardenBurger beefed up its distribution network of brokers, distributors, and supermarkets. GardenBurger had prepared for this rare opportunity by adding new products, which added to its shelf space.
Besides supermarkets, GardenBurger told its Big Bang story to the food service companies. Like a mushroom popping up overnight, GardenBurger was suddenly served at 40,000 food-service outlets like T.G.I. Fridays, Denny's, and Subway. Without the Big Bang, GardenBurger would have had no sexy story to tell the trade.
- Wider brand awareness. The lone commercial in Seinfeld triggered media hype and wider distribution, but a single commercial wouldn't have had the power to persuade consumers to chuck their hamburgers for veggie burgers. That took more advertising.
The additional advertising wasn't of the Big Bang variety. It was far cheaper. But it did require dramatically increasing the advertising budget beyond what GardenBurger had ever thought possible — to $12 million. That's pretty rare air for a non-Internet company with sales of $39 million and a pre–Big Bang ad budget of $3.3 million. This new, bulked-up ad budget wasn't doled out month by month. To get maximum effect from the Big Bang, GardenBurger spent the whole thing in three months.
Was GardenBurger's gamble a tough decision? You'd better believe it. But look at what GardenBurger accomplished in the three months after its Big Bang:
- GardenBurger's monthly sales increased by 411 percent. The Big Bang produced Godzilla-size results.
- Sales kept rising long after the Big Bang. In the first quarter of 1999 (about a year after the commercial) GardenBurger sales were $33 million — up 103 percent — and almost equal to its total sales for the fiscal year before the Big Bang.
- Fiscal year sales grew by 91 percent. Even though the Big Bang happened in the middle of its fiscal year, GardenBurger saw its annual sales jump from $39 million to $71 million.
- Market share increased. Within the three-month window of the Big Bang, GardenBurger's market share of the meatless burger category rose from 34 percent to 56 percent.
- The meatless burger market boomed. This food category, a sleepy little niche before the Big Bang, more than doubled. GardenBurger grabbed 78 percent of that increase.
- The business got profitable. GardenBurger was in red ink for the 1998 fiscal year. Right after the Big Bang, its losses grew; after all, it cost the little company a lot of money to pull it off. In 1999, however, GardenBurger jumped into profitability.
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