Tag: average

Kelly Baked (ham) Copywriting

MIKELeave a comment

This Honey Baked Ham ad ran in December 2022.

The good. (1) Like the Ridge wallet, it shows contrast – but not of the products. We see the finished, polished, and plated, Honey Baked Ham.

Contrasted with the process. It’s not that your turkey, ham, or sides won’t look good but that it takes some serious effort – with tools you use once a year.

And techniques you use even less.

Buy a stick blender instead.

(2) Consumer spending is an example of median and average meanings. We average three thousand dollars a year eating out, but it’s not as simple as that number divided by 12 or 52. We only eat Domino’s Pizza with a deal. Similarly, during the holidays, customers are price insensitive.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger noticed this phenomenon in 1972 when they purchased See’s Candy. As Munger said, “I may see Wrigley’s gum alongside Glotz’s gum. I know about Wrigley but I don’t know anything about Glotz’s. If one is $.40 and the other is $.30, am I going to take something I don’t know and put it in my mouth?”

It was the same for See’s and for Honey Baked Ham where the pricing power comes from the holidays, food’s ‘intimacy’, and tradition. They never mention the price and they never should.

(3) Looking the part. When she started Haven’s Kitchen, Alison Cayne thought her cooking business was about food, but she found it was about appearance. Her cooking students (pre-Covid Cayne operated a cooking school in NYC) and sauce customers (the post-Covid pivot) wanted to appear competent.

The ‘job’ of a meal wasn’t filling bellies, it was filling expectations. Todd Snyder said that expectations drive his consumers too. You need to ‘look the part’ at the wedding, the interview, or the party.

Watch the ad. It’s not about the couple’s food, it’s about their appearance.

(4) What does Honey Baked Ham compete with? One part of JTBD is that products in the same category may not be competitors, like Snickers and Milky Way. Pizza, Chinese, and Honey Baked Ham are all Christmas dinner options, but the customers of one don’t consider the others.

Honey Baked’s competition is DIY – which is what this ad addresses!

The Bad. None!

The Interesting.

This ad is polished, like a Honey Baked Ham. At the end of 2022, ‘trending’ recipes were common. Hopefully, the Honey Baked Ham company avoids this and keeps bringing home the bacon with ads like the one above.

Jurassic Park (book review)

MIKELeave a comment

Jurassic Park (1993) by Michael Crichton is a book about expectations. But first, we have to address the movie.

The movie was great. It was an amazing adaptation (and is connected to the Pixar story btw). But – it defines the characters. Hammond, Malcolm, Ellie, and Grant are the movie version in my version. Oh well.

Ok, back to expectations.

The Jurassic Park story turns when Malcolm tours the facilities and sees this:

See, Hammond says to Malcolm, everything here is normal!

But, Malcolm counters “that is a graph for a normal biological population. Which is precisely what Jurassic Park is not. Jurassic Park is not the real world.”

Normal distributions (and averages) are a specific tool. But they are the wrong tool for distinguishing between Snickers and Milky Way, student loan debt, or Aaron Rodgers touchdown passes. Or, tracking dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is a zoo. Cages. Fences. Pens. Controlled feeding. Controlled breeding (oops). Controlled everything.

Malcolm again, “Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”

Life finds a way.

“Now you see the flaw in your procedures,” Malcolm said. “You only tracked the expected number of dinosaurs. You were worried about losing animals, and your procedures were designed to advise you instantly if you had less than the expected number. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, you had more than the expected number.”

Hammond expected to run a zoo.

Hammond expected a ‘normal number’

Hammond expected his problem to be ‘fewer’ not ‘more’.

–

Expectations are heavy, they are hard to throw off. I could only picture Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm. Hammond could only picture Jurassic Park one way too.

–

This isn’t really a book about dinosaurs, they’re just a stand in. For what?

–

Also interesting that Waltrop’s Complexity came out around the same time. Something was bubbling in the early 90s. Something is bubbling now too.

Calendly’s CAC

MIKE1 Comment

Approximately seventy percent of Calendly’s new users come from using a Calendly link. That’s a crazy CAC.

But that’s not all.

Customer acquisition cost requires converting customers which requires building something that offers progress (the JTBD).

At first, Calendly’s users were broad. “What that means,” said Annie Pearl “is that product managers had a really hard time prioritizing.”

What the heck to build?

“We’ve made a clear distinction that while a lot of the feature work – that we’ll do to support our target personas of sales teams, customer success teams, and recruiting teams – will impact folks who are not in those personas. Those are the core ICPs that we’re going after. And so, historically, that would’ve always been a sort of trade-off decision and a question. And now I think we have a lot of rigor around our target market and the persona we’re going after. And so, teams can use that to prioritize and deliver better value for those users.”

A lot of people join, but the product may not be built for them.

Calendly’s actions represent Todd Rose’s three features from The End of Average.

We are jagged creatures. ‘Good’ executives are a collection of leadership, insight, and strategy skills. The average ‘good’ is a collection of jagged parts.

We are contextual creatures. We aren’t ‘jerks’, it’s just when we are driving. We aren’t ‘generous’, it’s just while tipping a server.

We are path dependent. The places we’ve been, affect the places we will go.

If a business serves “the average” they won’t find the jagged, contextual, or path-dependent parts that really matter. Calendly’s decision to build for sales teams, customer success teams, and recruiting teams show how their process embraces Rose’s observations.

95/5 Instead of 50/50

MIKE1 Comment

It’s 2004. Will Guidara is working at the Museum of Modern Art. Not in the esteemed gallery or adored restaurant. Will is in charge of the cafe: coffee, sandwiches, and snacks.

And he wants to create a gelato cart for the Sculpture Garden.

But first, he needs gelato worthy of the museum and his group, Union Square Hospitality. He finds Jon Snyder who sells it at a discount. He also convinces Synder to pay for the cart. It’s a nice cart.

Things are looking promising.

And then Guidara goes crazy.

He wants Italian spoons. “How amazing could a plastic spoon possibly be?” Will writes, “You’re going to have to trust me on this: they were paddle-shaped, extraordinarily well designed, and completely unique.”

But they’re expensive. His boss sees the cost and says “we’ll talk about this later.” But Guidara loves them. He gets them. He creates The 95/5 Rule.

“Manage 95% of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent ‘foolishly’.”

This idea manifested later when Guidara was at Eleven Madison Park. While traditional wine flights had average wines, Will and his winos wander wider. Most of the samples were good, diverse, and less expensive. But one, the last one, was excellent. “The Rule of 95/5 gave us the ability to surprise and delight everyone that ordered those pairings, making it an experience they would never forget.”

It’s a good rule because averages are not good measures. Save where you can but splurge on one thing. That’s helpful. That gets past average thinking.

The End of Average (book review)

MIKELeave a comment

If markets have a limited supply but high demand then prices will be high. Disney vacations are one example. Human capital is another. Computer science majors earn the highest salary out of college and humanities majors earn the least. Employers distinguish students (supply) by their degrees.

But how do you distinguish among the computer science majors? The answer is included in Todd Rose’s 2017 book, The End of Average.

Rose’s big idea is economic – society overpays for talent!

Throughout the 1800s and 1900s, modernization has been an experience of measurement. At first, the outcomes were crude because the measures were crude. Take the twenty years of Moneyball progress and stretch that through two centuries. In the same way that baseball teams overpaid for home runs, society overpays for talent.

Rose offers three explanations for our mistake.

1/ Jaggedness. What makes a good first baseman? That depends. What makes a good leader? That depends too. Unfortunately, nuance is neglected in our day-to-day functions. We tend to use loss-aversion-based heuristics. When you evolve from mammals focused on danger, food, and sex there’s only so much digging our default allows.

Winston Churchill is an example of a jagged leader. He excelled in oration and “stature” but less in collaboration. During the war, certain skills were more important than others. This brings us to…

2/ Context. Brent Beshore’s people are messy comment summarizes Rose’s idea. Instead, think of people as complicated creatures who act using If/Then statements. Someone may be honest or careful or diligent based on the situation.

We miss this, Rose writes, because our samples of other people aren’t wide enough. Jessica from the office may act snooty or kind at work – the only place we see her. But does that encompass her at church, at home, and with her family?

3/ Paths. There are not a million ways to do something, Rose writes, but there’s also not one. Think of a situation like being lost in the forest. The goal is to get out. One option is to find the path and follow it. But one could forge their own as well. Too often the focus is on the path and not forging a way out.

If a group undervalues these explanations then it restricts the possible outcomes. Imagine a rule that in order to start a business someone had to give up listening to podcasts. There are a lot of great business podcasts and the budding entrepreneur would be worse off – and so would we, missing out on the upside of their creation.

…

The End of Average is a Bob Moesta book suggestion and reading it from his point of view offers additional information.

Moesta is a product designer, researcher, and marketer. Put on that POV and we can see how products fit within Rose’s explanations as well. Our hunger is jagged, hence the difference between Snickers and Milky Way. Our purchases are context-based, Moesta comments that hot dogs and steaks are both the right meal for the right context. Lastly, consumers end up at a product in a variety of ways, there’s not a single sequence of “I need a new car”, but there’s not an infinite either.

My first impression of The End of Average was that I kinda already understood these topics and didn’t need to spend time on the macro-educational angle. Both impressions were true but there were deeper ideas too and giving names to jaggedness, context, and paths is and will be helpful.