It's a Marketing Miracle and You Can Eat it Too!

"It's a Marketing Miracle and You Can Eat it Too!"

Transcript (for general use only – machine-generated and it may not be accurate)

Dave [00:00:00] Not too long ago, I discovered an amazing way to help people think about marketing just a little differently. Not just product marketing, but your own personal brand as well. Most people, when they think about classic marketing, think about Madison Avenue or maybe the TV show Mad Men.

Kelli [00:00:16] Oh, that's one of my all-time favorites.

Dave [00:00:18] I love that show. You tell nobody. Nobody thinks about the Fulton River District of Chicago, but that's where this story begins. Today's episode, a marketing miracle.

Kelli [00:00:32] And you can eat it, too. Hi, I'm Dave and I'm Kelly,

Dave [00:00:37] and this is my job here is done.

Kelli [00:00:41] If you really want that next promotion or you're a rising star entrepreneur, we have some stories to tell and that will absolutely help you.

Dave [00:00:50] I've been starting and running businesses all my life,

Kelli [00:00:53] and I've worked for the man like a dog for decades. Together, we'll share stories, ideas and notions that will help you absolutely soar past that cruiser sitting next to you.

Kelli [00:01:05] And if you're grinding forward with your growing business, we know where the landmines are. Let's find them.

Dave [00:01:11] Hey, it's only about 20 minutes.

Unidentified [00:01:13] What do you have to lose? Nothing for everything.

Kelli [00:01:20] Thanks for joining us today.

Dave [00:01:22] Yeah, we really appreciate it. You can go over to my job. Here is done. Dot com. That's all one word. Go over to the website and you can see information about the previous episodes and what's upcoming and so on and so forth.

Kelli [00:01:34] I'm Kelli and I'm Dave, and this is the one about the miracle berry.

Dave [00:01:39] The What?

Kelli [00:01:40] What does a berry have to do with marketing? You ask? Stay tuned. This is kind of wild.

Dave [00:01:45] This story starts a few years ago when I was attending an executive training session with a few colleagues at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And no, nobody's getting paid here for citing them. I just love their style and programs and the expertize that they bring forth. And I highly recommend them to anyone. Seasoned pro or newbie doesn't doesn't matter. They're just a great place. I'll plug them one more time. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Anyway, I'm in Chicago, where there for a few days, and I wanted to take my colleagues out to dinner. And I just love tasting menus and really unique restaurants, and I wanted to find something kind of really special for them. And I ended up at a restaurant called Moto, and it was in ... Can you guess? The Fulton River District of Chicago.

Kelli [00:02:37] So why did you choose to go there

Dave [00:02:40] while I was researching restaurants? I was looking for something unique, and I think I actually like Googled, you know, the most unique restaurant in Chicago. And up comes Moto. And Moto is a restaurant inspired by a chef named Homaro Cantu. And tomorrow, Cantu was just amazing diners by faking them out and showing them what they thought they were eating actually wasn't what they were eating tastes that when you looked at the food, you would think, Oh, this is going to taste like fish. And next thing you know, it tastes like filet mignon. It was amazing. It was just amazing.

Kelli [00:03:21] So a little background about chef Hamaro Cantu, who, by the way, died in 2015. Tragic. So unfortunately, you can no longer enjoy his unique creations, but he was not only an American chef, but also an inventor. His claim to fame, which earned him a Michelin star in 2012, was his use of molecular gastronomy.

Dave [00:03:46] And I saw that when I looked it up right here at the restaurant doing molecular gastronomy and what?

Kelli [00:03:53] And that's what makes it stand out as a different kind of place. Like, what's

Dave [00:03:56] that? That's what that's what threw me. I mean, I was looking at us like, this is not normal. And I mean, this place was popular.

Kelli [00:04:05] Yeah. So if you don't know what molecular gastronomy is, it's a branch of food science that focuses on like the physical and chemical changes that can occur when you're cooking. I think of it like cooking special effects.

Dave [00:04:20] Have you ever gone to a restaurant where you can eat the menu?

Kelli [00:04:22] No, no, no, no. I have not.

Dave [00:04:25] You had what felt like paper and you were reading it. And then the waitress said, Would you like to have an amuse bouche?

Kelli [00:04:33] Hmm. Of course.

Dave [00:04:35] Yeah. And it was like, Yes, please. And she said, Eat the menu. And I was like, What? Everybody's looking to each other is like. And she had a menu with her and did she start eating and she started eating it. And we're just like looking at it and we're we look at our menu and we take a taste and we start eating this menu. And. It was delicious. No, I do not like the menu, tasted like beef.

Kelli [00:05:03] Wow. So was it was it like a full size menu? Did it have writing on it or was it just like a few look like?

Dave [00:05:11] Kind of almost like a small picture, you know, like a portrait? Yeah. And it had not writing like handwriting on it. It was typed, Wow. And I and I later came to find out that it was a vegetable oil ink that Cantu would put in a printer and he would spray this edible menu, which I think was made with like corn starch and some something to make it feel like paper. And it wouldn't break. I mean, it would bend. It was amazing.

Kelli [00:05:42] That is amazing, and that's a great example of this molecular gastronomy. Also, in addition to his restaurant Moto, he opened a second restaurant and a coffeehouse where he focused on the use of miracle berries in addition to the molecular gastronomy to make sour food taste sweet. He was interested in reducing the amount of sugar in the standard American diet, and he found this great alternative with the miracle berry.

Dave [00:06:11] So the miracle berry, which is the topic of our show today, the miracle berry is so interesting and I never knew about this before. So we're sitting in the restaurant and dessert is served and the dessert is served as a deconstructed ice cream kind of banana split. Yum!

Kelli [00:06:31] I love ice cream.

Dave [00:06:32] Do you want ice cream now?

Kelli [00:06:33] Yes. Yes, please. I do. I always want ice cream.

Dave [00:06:36] So the first thing that they asked us to do was to taste the individual components, and it was just horrible. Bitter chocolate, like you'd never want to eat it and you taste other things. And it was like salty and it was very unappetizing. What they did was they brought over for us this small little tablet, and they said, put the tablet on your tongue and let it dissolve. And then a couple of minutes, the tablet dissolved and really didn't have any kind of taste. It was just that maybe a little sweet tart kind of taste, but it wasn't bad. It wasn't like a sweetheart. And then they said, Give it just a minute, and we just waited a minute or so. Now mix everything up on the dessert plate.

Kelli [00:07:25] All the powders?

Dave [00:07:25] All the powders in the liquids. There were powders or liquids to mix it all

Kelli [00:07:29] very interactive,

Dave [00:07:30] mix everything up on the dessert plate and then enjoy. So we're all mixing up all of these nasty things, and it turns into this beautiful color almost like a pudding kind of texture. Yeah. And all I can think of is Drano, because that's what it tasted like in my mouth a few minutes earlier. And you take the spoon and you tentatively put it in your mouth because you just don't know what's going to happen. And kaboom, this tasted exactly like a chocolate banana split. Wow. I mean, it was the best chocolate banana split I've ever had before. It was reconstructed. It was blobs nicely presented by the way blobs of things you would never want to eat.

Kelli [00:08:18] So the magic there was the miracle berry.

Dave [00:08:22] The magic was the miracle berry.

Kelli [00:08:23] So tell us a little bit about miracle berry.

Dave [00:08:25] So it's a fruit. It's grown in West Africa, and there are also now growing it in Florida because the climate allows it to occur and it's got a kind of flavor altering magic chemical called miraculous. And this has been around for a centuries. What's interesting is that the miracle berry effectively reprograms some taste receptors on your tongue.

Kelli [00:08:49] But this is temporary, right?

Dave [00:08:50] This only lasts half hour to an hour or so.

Kelli [00:08:54] And the Miracle Berry tablet doesn't really have a taste.

Dave [00:08:58] It has a small take. It has a slight taste to it. It's not. It's not unappealing, right? I mean, you wouldn't chew them all day long. Now, interestingly enough, this is not just like a trick for your mouth cancer patients, especially children who are going through chemotherapy and have a reluctance to eat because chemotherapy causes your in a lot of patients, causes a metallic taste in the mouth and it makes everything unappealing. And a lot of cancer patients need to be fed with a feeding tube or peg tube in order to get the nutrition they need because they can't stomach putting anything in their mouths. But what was discovered was that if cancer patients were to suck on the miracle berry and have their taste buds reprogramed, they were able to eat and it was miraculous. And it helps children all over the world. And I didn't know this. I just thought that this was like this little cool thing. That we were having at this really cool restaurant, and that would be the end of everything to do with the miracle berry for me.

Dave [00:10:03] OK, well, this is all cool, but how does this have anything in the world to do with marketing? Well, it has to do with marketing. If you start thinking about how you take a commodity, how you take something that is standard, how you take something that is hard to describe, come up with ways to be able to describe something like you've never described before to make it yours and to make it unique and to drive that into some people's minds. I had a few sessions with marketing folks where we use the miracle berry and we had a flavor tripping experience. Flavor tripping, flavor tripping, flavor tripping is where you get the miracle berry and you get a bunch of different types of fruits and condiments and foods, and you watch to see how your taste buds are reprogramed. And we did this in a marketing setting. We were trying to come up with ways that we could think differently and use the miracle berry as a trigger.

Kelli [00:10:58] What a great idea. Like, everything isn't always obviously how it appears.

Dave [00:11:03] And that was the message that we wanted to send when we were doing the sort of focus group with the marketing people. And I would suggest that you do the same because it's fun. It is so much fun.

Kelli [00:11:15] So, you know, we decided to do our own experiment. I had never done a flavor trip. And I wanted to see what what it was about. So we bought miracle berry tablets on Amazon. You can just go on Amazon and look for them. You dissolve one on your tongue and voila, flavor tripping.

Dave [00:11:31] If you're sensitive to stuff like this, then maybe it's not right for you. However, you can go online and you can Google flavor tripping and you'll see all the set ups for this. And it is a blast.

Kelli [00:11:43] A lot of fun. I would recommend it. So the tie in for the miracle berry with our story today is the idea that the best way to create curiosity is not necessarily using something obvious.

Dave [00:11:55] So here's an example. Most people have heard of the Revlon brand

Kelli [00:11:59] yet the makeup people.

Dave [00:12:01] Yup. The makeup people started by a guy named Charles Revson. He was the founder of Revlon, and he had a problem. He was trying to make a commodity, and he needed some way of being able to stand out in front of everybody else. And you just can't say, Hey, listen, we make the best lipstick right now, or Hey, buy our red lipstick, it's on sale this week and Revson knew this. Revlon cosmetics were extremely popular and it was based on their advertising because they weren't any better or worse than anybody else's makeup. But what resin did was, he said in a very, very famous quote when asked, What's the magic to your marketing? Rapson said in the factory, we make cosmetics in the store, we sell hope.

Kelli [00:12:55] That's brilliant. Sometimes it's a little more than just the product or service in front of you.

Dave [00:13:01] Exactly. It's the feeling that you get.

Kelli [00:13:04] It's the emotion that invokes

Dave [00:13:06] think about it for a second. If you went to Kentucky Fried Chicken and the slogan was, We make great chicken, I guess that'd be OK, but you go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and the slogan is, it's finger licking good.

Kelli [00:13:18] What does that tell you? Boy, I'm going to. I'm just going to be shoving this chicken in my face. I'm going to be licking my fingers.

Dave [00:13:26] They're trying to invoke an emotion. And that's what I was trying to get the marketing team to start to think about. Here's another good one, and I think this is brilliant. Kay Jewelers. Every kiss begins with K, right? They're not talking about any jewelry, right? They're not saying we have the cheapest, best or whatever diamonds. Not only did Revlon understand that they took it to the next level,

Kelli [00:13:54] so they followed through with this in the store. We sell hope as opposed to just selling lipstick.

Dave [00:14:00] Yeah, you actually couldn't buy red lipstick, right?

Kelli [00:14:03] They didn't name the lipstick colors, actual colors pulling on those emotional strings again. They named their lipsticks. Things like paint the town pink, cherries in the snow, fire and ice, say it with rubies.

Dave [00:14:18] I don't want to go out with red lipstick. I want to go out and paint the town pink! Heck, yeah, I mean, that's what I want to do, right? Well, I actually don't know for for a rouge, you

Kelli [00:14:28] know, that's a different that's a different

Dave [00:14:30] that's an entire and it's an entirely different episode.

Dave [00:14:34] So think about what your product or service is really providing is value and how you can create curiosity. And you'll hear that theme a lot when we're talking, creating curiosity to draw potential customers to your product, service or business. So I think it's really, really important to define marketing very simply as creating curiosity in anything that you do. And we've got a podcast that's coming up that we're going to talk all about creating curiosity, but I'll seed you with that. While you think about this and you think about how Revlon and how some of these great advertisers have taken a commodity item and turned it into something special and turned it into something that is profitable. Dig in and try to find something that's not obvious. Try to figure out a way to make lemonade out of lemons

Kelli [00:15:24] like the miracle berry

Dave [00:15:26] and use the miracle berry as a springboard. Have a flavor tripping party with your marketing team.

Kelli [00:15:31] You can have a little fun and you can learn a lot of things as well and kind of brainstorm while while you're enjoying your flavor tripping party,.

Dave [00:15:39] It's an ice breaker. It gets people talking, and I've seen positive results coming out of flavor tripping parties for marketing departments. I've watched people change the way they think, and actually what it did was it made them get out of their comfort zone and it allowed them to have the freedom, the personal freedom to not feel afraid to make that wild suggestion.

Kelli [00:16:00] And you know, here's the other thing, Dave, what's the chance that the people in the room have done this before have seen this before? It's very unique, and I think it's very engaging

Dave [00:16:12] and we're all looking for something new to do anyway when it comes to getting people involved. And here's the good news you don't have to be in the same room to flavor trip. You can flavor trip over Zoom and to make this a little easier on you, go to the show notes at my job. Here is done. RT.com for this episode and in the show notes we'll have some tips on how to do your own flavor, tripping along with an Amazon link to order your miracle berries.

Kelli [00:16:35] This is just making it easy for you to have your own flavor tripping party. So what's the takeaway?

Dave [00:16:41] Pretty simple. Think about what your product or service is really providing is value, and how you can create curiosity to draw potential customers to that product service or your business.

Kelli [00:16:54] Think differently. That's it for today. Share the fun and tell just one friend about us.

Dave [00:17:00] Just one. We don't need a lot. We just need one person out there that you think that this program or the series could help just one.

Kelli [00:17:08] And check out our website. It's easy. My job here is done. Dot com.

Dave [00:17:12] Wait a second. We're not done. Don't go yet.

Kelli [00:17:15] It's time for

Dave [00:17:17] buzz word bingo. We hate business buzz words as much as anybody else does. And this is the part of the program. How are you wearing overalls? Calm down, girl. This is the part of the program where we take business buzz words and we try to make fun of them. And we try to do it by not using the business buzz word in a business sense, but in a phrase that has absolutely nothing to do with business. This one's for you, Kelli. Practice using drill down in a sentence that has nothing to do with business.

Kelli [00:17:52] Dave, I know you're trying to fix stuff around the house, but would you please put that drill down before you hurt yourself?