Entrepreneurs are always told to turn their weaknesses into strengths…. which is a bit like telling an introvert they should get out more. It rarely happens. Tesla\’s new ad, for example, talks about the power of its very cool autodrive system but it doesn\’t mention the car\’s battery range, the difficulty of finding charging stations outside California or the model\’s high price. Weakness? What weakness?
But what would happen if companies really did take that advice? What would happen if they took a problem that everyone knows about their product and made it the center of their marketing strategy?
For example, we all know the strengths of baked beans as a product: they\’re tasty, nutritious, kids love them, they\’re easy to prepare, they\’re a part of childhood. Those are usually the messages promoted in commercials for beans.
And we know the product\’s weakness too… trust me, when my company made the iFart app, we were very aware that our biggest competitor was a can of baked beans. So what would a smart commercial that put that product\’s… explosive power front and center look like? It would probably look a lot like this commercial for \”Haynes Baked Beans\”:
Sadly, that commercial isn\’t real. It wasn\’t commissioned by Haynes, or Heinz. It was made by Cinesite, a CGI company that wanted to show off its animation skills.
But here\’s the thing. Five months after Cinesite released that clip in December 2013, the film had racked up more than 9 million views. An official commercial by Heinz released a month later that used the product\’s traditional childhood messaging had been seen little more than 14,000 times. Shared on social media, Cinesite\’s commercial now has more than 21 million views.
Now, it\’s possible that if Heinz had used Cinesite\’s commercial as its way of promoting its product, it would only have reminded 21 million people why they hadn\’t eaten beans since they were kids. Letting one go in a math lesson could make you king of the class; interrupting a high-value sales presentation is less likely to make you master of the meeting room. But it\’s more likely that while some people would have been put off, more people in that giant audience would have felt that they\’d like to eat beans right now. Sales overall would probably have risen.
That would have been a bold move by Heinz. It would have been a decision to weaken its messaging in favor of the benefits of wider reach. It\’s easy to understand why decision-makers so rarely do it and why they tend to stick with promoting their products\’ strengths instead of taking the advice to play up their weaknesses. But entrepreneurs are meant to be bold. We\’re supposed to be willing to take risks… or at least to consider them. That old advice might not be a strategy for every business and every product but it is worth asking yourself how a commercial based on your product\’s biggest weakness would look, and how much of a stink it would make.