October 16 2015 was the Nike Women’s Half Marathon, where 20,000 women ran through San Francisco.
Walking past the Nike Store in Union Square the day before, I noticed a crowd forming outside. Looking more closely, they printed the names of every runner on the window.
How did the company of Air Jordan and baggy shorts become the brand for empowered women and racing events?
They discovered how to make marketing people want.
Over the past few years there has been a growing sentiment among Silicon Valley startups against marketing. The general idea is “make things people want”, and the assumption is if you make something useful, distribution will take care of itself.
This is incomplete, but it gets at something interesting. The industry of advertising, of Madison Avenue, has always whispered “make people want things.” My favorite example is Edward Bernay’s campaign to get women to smoke by associating cigarettes with suffrage.
Sometimes making people want things is your best move. When your product has a hard cost, like cigarettes or oil, prices will collapse if demand lowers. When your product is difficult to change, such as most products based on atoms, its cheaper to make people want things than it is to change the product. Advertising is more agile than product development.
If your product is made of bits, and the marginal cost of production is zero, and the time to change the product can be as little as a few hours, than advertising is no longer the agile move. Its can be faster and cheaper to change the product than change the advertising.
Advertising itself is from the world of atoms: the supply of inventory is limited, the cost to produce the advertising is greater than zero, and changing an ad campaign can take time.
The work of modern marketers, however, is based on the world of bits: the number of channels is unlimited, the marginal cost to produce another blog view is zero, and useful materials can be created in hours.
In this world of modern marketing, its no longer effective to “make people want things” because its actually faster and cheaper to “make things people want.”
In other words, its cheaper to “make marketing people want” than it is to “make people want marketing.”
Over ten years, from 2004–2014, Nike’s marathon raised $152M for LLS, or about $620 per runner. Is this marathon an act of charity, a marketing campaign, or a product?
Its all of the above.
Nike earned $7.5B in Q3 alone, and they did it in part by creating the market for aspirational women athletes. You can make people want shoes through advertising, but its far more effective to make people need shoes, by making people want to run a marathon.
By launching the marathon events, Nike created a category of new customers for their core products. The event becomes a showcase for Nike products, an attention space to dominate with branding, a feel good story about charity and giving, and a reason to buy a pair of shoes.
Nike is no longer the brand supporting sweatshops as documented by Michael Moore; now its the brand of the new woman who transcends the limits of the 99% by running.
No amount of advertising the virtues of running can match the demand created by an event like this.
And the best part? Everyone wants it. No one ever got excited about a TVC on women’s running shoes, but thousands of people are talking about their marathon on Sunday and how they’ve prepared for it.
We recently ran two email campaigns for a client.
In the first campaign, we sent a personalized, targeted free trial offer. Everyone felt the copy was spot on and it would convert well.
In the second campaign, we created a resource page that had no direct tie to a purchase. Their audience largely attends Dreamforce, so we produced a page that curated the best sessions at Dreamforce for their area of expertise.
The second campaign, with minimal CTAs, actually resulted in more demo requests than the first.
This puzzled us, until we uncovered this principle “make marketing people want.”
The free trial offer failed because no one wakes up and says “I want to sign up for a free trial today.”
Free trials aren’t free. Often they require time, attention, and data access. Produced by marketers under pressure to show results, they often fail to even demonstrate the best features.
No one actually wants a free trial. It is an attempt to “make people want things.”
The resource page is something people want. Launched just before Dreamforce, it solved an acute problem we knew their prospects had: sorting through hundreds of sessions and avoiding FOMO.
The resource page is an example of making marketing people want.
And it worked: the resource page actually resulted in more demo and trial requests than the trial offer. While the trial offer resulted in some unsubscribes, the resource page resulted in direct replies back thanking us for the email.
How do you apply this to your marketing? Here are some examples of traditional B2B marketing assets, and the assets your prospects really want:
Making marketing people want will continue to become easier, while making people want things will only become more difficult.