Out of the Box

The Masters of the Creative Words

By Menachem Lubinsky on August 03 2007

In the last two weeks, the advertising world mourned the passing of two very creative people, Alan M. Pottasch and Jerry Ringlien. They are credited with having come up with creative themes that helped propel their companies to national success. Marketing people can learn much from their accomplishments.

Mr. Pottasch is credited with being the “father of the Pepsi Generation” which helped the company keep pace with its icon competitor Coca Cola. Up until that point Coke had managed to gain the positioning as the beverage of choice of the young and active. Pepsi, on the other hand was viewed as being the beverage of the older generation, an untenable position in the fast paced youth oriented society of the “60’s and “70’s”. With his concept of the “Pepsi Generation”, Pottasch was able to change that perception overnight. His ads obviously showed scenes of active young people, all under the banner of the “Pepsi Generation”. This stroke of genius by Pottasch earned him the admiration of marketers everywhere. Needless to say, sales of Pepsi soared.

Laypeople often wonder why it takes high priced advertising people to come up with simple terms. Pepsi Generation? How could such simple two words become so celebrated? But it isn’t the two words that made it a success. It was the timing, the visuals and everything else around the campaign that made it a success. It adds up to what we commonly refer to as “strategic thinking”. The late Mr. Pottasch did not just pull the term out of a hat. He dug deep into the strategic challenge and the results show that he was on the mark. He really completely transformed the thinking of marketers by focusing on the lifestyle of the customer rather than the virtues of the product. Today it is a common practice as the slogan by Visa illustrates, “Life Takes Visa”. It’s all about the lifestyle of the consumer with Visa sliding in as the signature to that lifestyle. “Nobody else had the audacity to name an entire generation after its product”, Mr. Pottasch told The New York Times in 1981.

The late Mr. Ringlien was credited for his genius when he took a relatively successful regional brand and turned into a national success. Mr. Ringlien worked at Oscar Mayer, producer of deli and meat products (non-kosher) for 23 years, rising to VP-marketing. He was known to be an Out of the Box thinker, including getting ideas for his ads from watching children in a playgroup. He created ads that focused around “My bologna has a first name”. This was a reflection of the fact that he felt that everyone needed an identity and a sense of belonging.

The company already had a reputation of being aggressive in promoting its products with the famous “wienermobile” that made the rounds to stores, but Mr. Rnglien took it to an entirely new level when he created one of the most successful jingles in “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener” campaign. His use of children in the ads only enhanced the friendly image of the company, which helped propel it into a national brand and is now owned by Kraft Foods.

The genius of Mssrs. Pottasch and Ringlien is not that they were great advertising people, which they were, but that they had an ability to understand people and thus reflect what the customer is thinking. In many of the eulogies that appeared in the marketing and business press, the consensus was that Pottasch proved that a brand need not accept its fate as being second fiddle to an icon. Avis took on leader Hertz successfully by acknowledging that their competitor was indeed # 1, but “We try Harder”. This slogan crept into the hearts and minds of the consumer.

I have often counseled that a good slogan can do wonders for a company. It need not be so “creative” that it requires interpretation. It simply needs to define, as Pottasch did. The three simple words, The Pepsi Generation, made people want to be part of the generation, irrespective of their age and social strata. It held up well against such Coke slogans as “Coke Is It” because it spoke directly to the consumer.

A marketing professor I hold in high esteem counseled that establishing an image is not about overwhelming the consumer with words. He said that if someone asks what you do, you are not expected to go into a lengthy job description or your work plan for a given day. It is sufficient to say “I am the Vice President for Finance at ABC Company”. He had the same view about corporations or products. He added: “If you can’t quickly define who you are in simple words, people will just move on to the competitor who can”.

We have all seen the slogans that certainly do not do what the professor counseled. I have often lectured against using such trite phrases as “in pursuit of excellence”, since people cannot put their finger on exactly what that means. They can identify with Pottasch’s phrase of The Pepsi Generation, because everyone wants to belong and be part it. He also did not try to do too much with it like “Now You Can Be Part of the Pepsi Generation”. People have a tendency to try to add words thinking that using two or three shorter catch words will not be enough. But with a well thought out marketing campaign, the slogan becomes the signature.

Every business needs to consider defining itself properly. If it takes a salesman a long time to define the company or product, there’s little time left for the sale itself. Like everything else, the best school is the school of history and these two gentlemen were surely ahead of their time.

Out of the Box is a collection of strategic marketing articles that Lubicom has published on various topics, trends and ideas in the marketing world. The articles have been published in the Hamodia weekly newspaper circulated on three continents to a readership of well over 100,000.

The name, "Out of the Box" is a term used frequently in business nowadays to describe creative thinking that is not the norm. It is meant to help a business pull away from the pack or separate oneself from the competition. It is to some extent fraught with risk, simply because it is not the run of the mill thinking, but it is at the same time the key to reaching the next opportunity.