Stop Making Sense, Start Making Magic

Embracing The Irrational

“Opera is a very inefficient way of telling a story.” – Rory Sutherland

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about the science of marketing. Now let’s talk about the magic of it. The alchemy. The dark art of persuasion.

Let’s say you are the CMO of the Missouri River Fish Company. Your hypothetical job is to deal with the massive problem of invasive Asian Carp.

The problem: Huge numbers of bighead, silver, and grass Carp are taking over the Mississippi River Basin. They eat everything. They’re prolific and enthusiastic breeders. And they’re absolutely wrecking the ecosystem for native fish. If they reach the Great Lakes, it’s game over for the sport fishing industry.

One obvious solution is to eat them. They’re delicious, healthy and plentiful. But they have an image problem.

Common Carp — the ones we’re all familiar with — are not a popular eating fish. They’re incredibly drab and dopey-looking. They’re bottom feeders, so they can taste sort of swampy. Also, a whole lot of people in the US do not aspire to eat Carp.

Asian Carp, however, are not bottom feeders. They are a little odd-looking, but not terribly so. They taste pretty great, and they’re healthier than most freshwater fish with lots of omega-3s and whatnot. This should be a slam dunk.

Except that invasive Asian Carp have three words working against them — invasive, Asian and Carp. It’s pretty easy for consumers to translate them into “threatening”, “different” and “bad”.

What do you do?

You could appeal to everyone’s deeply ingrained sense of environmental responsibility — “Eat fish! Save the Great Lakes!” Then again, not everyone has a deeply ingrained sense of environmental responsibility. Last we checked, Christmas is still more popular than Earth Day. Preaching to the choir is fine as long as you remember that the choir is very small.

But you’ve got something more ambitious in mind, inspired by … potatoes.

In the 1700s, King Frederick of Prussia wanted to cultivate potatoes as a backup source of food when wheat was scarce. People are less likely to get sick, die or revolt when they have enough to eat. If you’re ever the King, it’s a good idea to have subjects who are not sick, starving or storming your castle.

Potatoes are easy to grow. They’re a great source of nutrients and energy. And as a fun bonus, you can turn them into vodka, though no one knew that at the time.

Ordinary Prussian people had no idea what to do with potatoes. They were fairly new to Europe (the potatoes, not the people). They didn’t smell particularly appetizing, nor did they taste like much (again, the potatoes, not the Prussians).

King Frederick threatened, ordered, cajoled and coaxed. Yet his subjects seemed actively appalled that they were being told to eat something so pedestrian.

Then, as the story goes, he said something like, “Right. The potato is now a Royal vegetable. No one but the King and his family may grow, prepare, serve and eat potatoes under penalty of death.” Except he said it in German. And the penalty might not have been death. Anyway …

He planted potatoes in the Royal Gardens and posted guards. Because, of course, nothing says, “This is worth stealing,” quite like placing guards in front of it. He also told the guards to look the other way if any curious peasants tried to sneak off with a potato or two. And if they tried to grow potatoes on their own, so be it. It worked.

By turning “I command you to eat this” into “You can’t have it, it’s only for royalty”, King Frederick was able to reframe potatoes as something desirable, valuable, a status symbol. He changed their meaning.

So, back to invasive Asian Carp. They’re delicious, healthy, and eating them is really good for the environment. Logically, people should be clamoring for them. You are very aware they are not.

As CMO, the first thing you’ll probably want to do is rename these things. Let’s say you call them “Ghostfin”, “Dragon Snapper” and “White River Char”. Aspirational, mysterious yet familiar, reassuringly interesting. That sorted, you move on to the real challenge — getting everyone to eat this stuff.

What you have on your hands is a commodity at best, and you could price it that way. Consumers are price-conscious after all. However, price is also an indicator of quality. People instinctively know that cheap = bad.

If the 2025 Mercedes-Benz S 580 were suddenly priced at $19,895 instead of $139,895, the first question you’d ask is, “What the hell is wrong with it?”

(People also know that cheap = low status, so your next question might be, “What the hell is wrong with Mercedes-Benz?”)

Price even affects people’s experience. For example, you can make cheap wine taste better just by raising the price.

So you decide to follow King Frederick of Prussia’s lead:

You partner with some of the best chefs at the most exclusive restaurants in the country and get them to feature Ghostfin, Dragon Snapper or White River Char on their menus. They agree to keep the menu price almost prohibitively high, and you sell it to them at a ridiculously deep discount.
You find posh-as-hell lifestyle influencers and get them to rave about how delicious these fish are and how hard they are to find. They’re only hard to find because you’ve deliberately made them the Birkin bags of fish.
Ghostfin, Dragon Snapper and White River Char start showing up at famous fish markets like the Fulton Fish Market in New York and the Toyosu Market in Tokyo next to “classier” fish like tuna.
The fish appear as high-end ingredients on competition shows like “Top Chef.

Maybe you do a few more things we haven’t thought of, like getting Food & Wine and Bon Appétit magazines to dedicate entire issues to White River Char or Ghostfin. Maybe you make Dragon Snapper the exclusive fish of Formula 1.

Eventually, you ship your invasive Asian Carp to grocery stores, fish markets and restaurants across the country.

At the same time, you get beauty editors and influencers to start raving about Ghostfin oil for younger-looking skin and richer, fuller-looking hair. And you create a premium beauty brand with your Ghostfin fish oil and collagen. Or you simply sell the stuff to existing high-end brands.

You produce a line of high-end Dragon Snapper omega-3 supplements. You transform your excess White River Char into a high-end, organic pet food.

You even — and this is why you’re a marketing genius — turn all that fish waste (hopefully there’s a lot of it) into a boutique, high-end organic fertilizer for organic hobby farms, flower gardens and vegetable gardens..

You’ve performed the nifty little magic trick of giving invasive Asian Carp new meaning and new value. They were infamous; you’ve made them famous. Go you!

Obviously, this is all easier said than done, but it has been done.

Rich people used to turn their noses up at lobster. No one was eating Patagonian toothfish until it got rebranded as Chilean sea bass.

It works the other way, too. As Rory Sutherland points out in his book “Alchemy”, Red Bull shouldn’t exist. No one asked for it. It tastes awful, you get less of it per can than soda, and it’s at least twice as expensive as Coke. Thanks to a whole lot of clever marketing and fame campaigns, people buy billions of cans per year. That’s what we mean by magic.

What does this mean for you?

As a science, marketing and advertising are absolutely not paint-by-numbers, but there is an effective guidebook to follow.

How you get to success depends on your category, the size of your brand, the business problems to solve, your distribution channels, internal culture, external culture, and even what success looks like.

The craft, the alchemy, the magic of marketing are just as important.

When we point that magic in the right direction, well, that’s when the real fun starts.

We’ll see you next time!

Sources!

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don’t Make Sense – Rory Sutherland
The Illusion of Choice: 16 ½ psychological biases that influence what we buy – Richard Shotton