Marketing Archives

Omotenashi: How the Japanese Remind Us We Deserve to Be Happy

May 16, 2023May 16, 2023 Nik

On our last night in Tokyo, we missed the korot stop. It was nearly 8 PM, and we knew this was our last chance. “Dude! We have to turn around!” My friend and I got off at the next stop along the red Marunouchi metro line that connects Shinjuku and Tokyo Station, then hopped right back in to go the other direction.

I can’t recall whether it was Ginza, Kasumigaseki, or Shinjuku-sanchome station, but I still remember exactly what the tiny stall selling little pieces of heaven looked like. It was a 10-foot-long aluminum box with two glass displays, their bottom half straight, the upper half curved — the kind you typically see in bakeries and cake shops. “Thank god!” The single-pull metal shutter was still open.

You Must Meme Your Dreams Into Existence

June 22, 2021August 9, 2024 Nik

Why is America “The Greatest Country in the World™?”

Unlike Italy (Caesar), Greece (Alexander the Great), and Mongolia (Genghis Khan), America never ruled half the known world. In fact, America is only 200 years old. It’s one of the youngest countries of all.

So why do they get that slogan? America gets that slogan because for all 200 of those years, they’ve been yelling it at the top of their lungs. When the founding fathers put their signatures on that document, they said: “This is what makes a country great.”

Ever since, America at large has been saying, “Look! This is what makes a country great. And we’re doing it! Look at us! That is why our country is the greatest.” It’s marketing — but it works.

“Which country is the best?” is a stupid question, of course, but let’s ignore that for a second. For any of the years it has existed, including this one, you could argue a thousand ways that America is not the greatest country in the world. You could use facts. You could use opinions. You could use ideas. What about originally taking the land from Native Americans? What about slavery? What about the problems with energy, finance, poverty, food, race, and a million other things? Every country has problems. America is no exception.

And yet, if you could put your ear on the global chatter-chamber, you’d find there’s no debate: By and large, people around the world agree that the USA are “The Greatest Country in the World™.” It might not be more than half the global population, but it sure is a hell of a lot more than just the 328 million people who live there. How many dream of moving to the USA? Billions.

USA wins, and it wins because when it comes to “the country reputation scoreboard,” Americans have made up a competition and declared themselves the winner. They’ve memed the outcome they wanted into existence, and even if the memes were just made up, the result is very much real.

Achieving your dreams works the exact same way.

You Don’t Care Enough About Your Book

April 6, 2021August 8, 2024 Nik

I’m writing a book. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Writing articles is easy. It didn’t use to be, but when you’ve done it 2,000 times, anything becomes frictionless. Articles are low-stakes. If one flops, I’ll just write another. It only takes a day. With a book, well…

If your book tanks, you’ll have wasted a year. You won’t get paid for work you’ve already done. If people hate your book, they won’t hate 1,000 words — they’ll hate 200 pages. That’s a lot of bad karma, and, quite frankly, it scares the hell out of me.

Other people, it seems, aren’t as afraid. Everyone’s writing a book these days. Books are the new business cards. Haven’t you heard? I hate this trend. It leads to shitty books, and we already have too many of those.

If you’re writing a book solely for money or clout, I suggest you reconsider. You’ll make careless mistakes driven by greed and fame-seeking. Chances are, it’ll be exactly one too many, and you’ll get neither gold nor groupies.

If you’re one of those rare specimens who — gasp — write a book for the reader, I’d like to issue a warning, a reminder to myself, really: Right now, you don’t care enough about your book. If you don’t start immediately, your supposed masterpiece will flop like a Michael Bay movie at Cannes, and, worst of all, you’ll deserve it. It’ll be your fault and your fault alone.

Let me show you two examples. The point here is not to ridicule the authors, so I’ll blur their names. My goal is to show you how “small” mistakes add up to a book that looks sloppy overall — and will inevitably fail. Look at the cover and backside of this book. What’s your first impression?

The Japanese Art of Kintsugi: How to Practice Self-Improvement Without Judging Yourself

January 29, 2021August 9, 2024 Nik

I still remember the commercials: “Clearasil Ultra Face Wash — and in three days, they’re gone!” “They” are the pimples, of course.

Each ad played out the same way: A teenage boy hides from his crush because he has acne. His friend reminds him of the party in three days. “You can’t go with that face!” The boy uses Clearasil, shows up, and gets to kiss the girl.

As someone who suffered three long years of intense acne in high school, those ads hit me right in the feels — first with hope, then with misery. After I tried the product and it didn’t work, Clearasil continued to erode my self-worth in 30-second increments by reaffirming a false belief I held about myself: As long as I have acne, girls won’t be interested in me, so there’s no point in even trying.

Every year, millions of teenagers share this experience, and it reveals a pattern deeply ingrained in Western culture: Find a flaw, worry about it, try a quick fix, and if it doesn’t work, go back to worrying. Repeat this cycle until some magic pill works or you find an even bigger inadequacy. While this may lead to some improvement, in the long run, it inevitably leads to self-loathing.

You wouldn’t think a pimple commercial reveals so much about a nation’s culture, but if you watch a few Japanese skincare ads for reference, you’ll see — because unlike Clearasil, they do clear things up.

This Winery Makes Bank With a Facepalm-Simple Packaging Trick

January 18, 2021August 7, 2024 Nik

I come from Rheinland-Pfalz. That is not just a long and complicated name for Germany’s sixth-largest state, it is also a door to the infinite world of wine. Some 10,000 winemakers produce 65% of all German wine in my home state — and that’s about as much as I know about wine.

What I do know is good marketing when I see it, and I can tell you that out of these 10,000 winemakers, one has completely, unequivocally dominated grocery store aisles for the past few years. Their name is Emil Bauer & Sons, and what they’ve done is as genius as only the simplest ideas can be.

Before I tell you their marketing trick (and it really is just marketing on top of an already good product), you must know: selling wine in a German grocery store, particularly in Rheinland-Pfalz, is not an easy ball game. In most shops, the wine section looks like this:

A wine section in a shop. — Image via Wasgau AG

It’s not like your sauvignon blanc will be one of three white wines on display. No sir. You are going up against an armada of fermented grape juice from all over the world. Italy, France, Spain — New Zealand, for Pete’s sake! Your stuff better be good.

What Makes Viral Posts Do Well?

January 13, 2021March 2, 2025 Nik

The #1 rule of marketing is to double down on what works.

I learned this rule from Noah Kagan. Whether you look at his stuff from seven years ago, which is when I first found him, or at his latest YouTube video, the message will appear over and over again: Double down on what works.

Noah is living proof. He launched 24 business ideas before finding one that he stuck with for the next decade. The same with his salary: He has nine sources of income but spends 90% on just one because it pays the most.

Noah does a lot of case studies, and in those, the pattern repeats as well. After eight years of trying, MrBeast found a viral video formula he now uses in every video. Kevin Hart first tried to imitate Chris Rock in his stand-up comedy. When he realized making fun of himself worked better, he doubled down. To this day, he often mocks his height and family drama.

Writing is no different. All creative work requires experimentation, but from a business perspective, it makes sense to double down on what works until it no longer does.

In 2020, the following ten of the 200+ posts I wrote worked best. Together, they’ve garnered close to two million views. Four of them reached over 100,000 views. The lowest view count was 30,000, the highest 800,000.

Tallying up all the hours, people have spent a total of 420 days reading these stories. That’s more than a year! Member reading time is a great metric because it tracks what gets read more so than what gets clicked. That’s what this list is sorted by, from most to least. It means these stories held the most attention and thus also earned the most money.

Here’s an analysis of why I think these posts did well and what patterns I can see worth doubling down on.

The Age of Unpaid Attention

January 4, 2021August 7, 2024 Nik

In March, my girlfriend and I started an Unsplash account. We wanted a shared place to curate pictures of the food and travel we enjoyed together, and we thought: Why not do that in public? Maybe others will enjoy them as well.

It was never a commercial effort, but for kicks and giggles, we set up a $1 tip jar on PayPal. Unsplash has become a photography behemoth with some 20 billion views each month, and we too saw our stats rise quickly.

2,500 views in March, 16,000 in April, then 40,000, 60,000 — on and on, the zeroes kept piling up. This month, we racked up nearly 140,000 views, bringing our total to over 650,000 views in nine short months. We also got around 5,000 downloads. The only thing we didn’t get was a single $1 tip.

This is just a small example with no stakes, but it highlights a worrying trend: We now live in an age of unpaid mass attention.

Charlie Munger’s “How To Start Coca Cola in 1884” Thought Experiment

October 9, 2020July 31, 2024 Nik

A few weeks ago, Apple’s market value surpassed $2 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world. Apple is now worth as much as the entire German stock market. If you split that money between individuals, you could create 2,000 new billionaires tomorrow — or two million millionaires.

Million, billion, trillion, what’s even the difference? Such numbers are hard to process for humans. Maybe, this’ll help: If it takes one million seconds to complete a project, you’ll spend 12 days working on it around the clock (or a month of 8-hour workdays). If it’s a billion seconds, it’ll take 32 years — without sleeping, eating, or taking a break. A trillion? That’s 32,000 years. Going back in time, this is when we’ll find the first cave paintings known to man. From that perspective, Apple has eclipsed all of human history.

The most fascinating lesson from Apple’s journey to $2 trillion, however, may not come from Apple at all. In 1996, long before the tech giant’s meteoric rise, one man thought about how to reach that myth-enshrouded mark. He didn’t use Apple as an example, but since the proverbial one doesn’t fall far from the tree, he moved only two letters over in the alphabet — to Coca Cola.

The man is Charlie Munger, billionaire investor and legendary partner to Warren Buffett. In a talk, he explained how anyone could have started Coca Cola in 1884. In Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger, Janet Lowe included a transcript of his speech.

Using only a few ideas, Munger reverse-engineered how to turn a $2 million investment into an unfathomable $2 trillion market cap 150 years later — a figure the actual Coca Cola company is not unlikely to reach by the target year, 2034, given its previous high of $250 billion.

The point of thought experiments is to form our own, unique understanding of the world. Instead of importing ideas and opinions from other people, they lead to first principles thinking — to a worldview built from scratch which, in turn, will give us a more accurate picture of how the world really works.

Following in the footsteps of this particular experiment, made by one of the world’s best thinkers, will teach us about business, growth, psychology, and life. Here’s Charlie Munger’s $2 trillion masterclass in thinking for yourself.

Avis vs. Hertz: How To Beat Your Competitors Without Winning

August 20, 2020July 30, 2024 Nik

Since day one of its humble beginnings in 1946, the Avis rental car company has had a singular mission: To catch market leader Hertz.

Despite their nemesis’ 30-year head start, Avis managed to gain a 29% market share in its first 15 years of operation — but Hertz still had twice as much.

Then, in 1962, they came up with a slogan that would shrink that gap significantly, and all it took was three honest words: “We try harder.”

Audi’s Latest PR Disaster Reveals How Society Thinks

August 4, 2020July 24, 2024 Nik

Imagine this: You’re on a family trip to the mountains. As you drive up the winding slopes in your wagon, you reach a nice viewpoint and resting place.

Everyone gets out of the car, and you all munch on some snacks as you walk around the parking lot and enjoy some fresh air. As you turn around, you spot your four-year-old daughter, casually leaning on the grill, sporting her cool shades, and eating a banana. You smile and decide to snap a picture.

That picture could look something like this:

Pretty cool, right? What a nice memory!

Unfortunately, Audi’s PR people won’t have any nice memories from posting this exact picture on their Twitter account. In fact, they’ve probably had nightmares ever since.

Category: Marketing