10.18
Think of your dumbest marketing idea and then defend it

Every so often an idea comes along that breaks conventional marketing wisdom and works. At first, it sounds implausible. But then it spreads and catches on.

These ideas are not absurd or random but calculated. They typically originate from an imaginative marketer who violates a norm not recklessly, like a pilot turning off autopilot during a storm for the thrill of it, but strategically, like poker champion Michael Addamo. Addamo is known for deliberately making mistakes (decisions a computer would deem "non-optimal") to confuse his opponents, and it works. Last year in a high stake tournament he knocked out world number one Daniel Negreanu in one hour.

I've been thinking about marketing oddities lately because of an emerging brand in the news: Liquid Death. If someone challenged you to break into the purified water category, the sensible thing to do would be to sell water that tastes better and at cost. Liquid Death sells water in 16oz "tallboy" beer cans with the tagline "murder your thirst" printed on the bottom. The company recently announced $70 million in series D funding. That's a $700 million valuation for water in a can.

Ling's Cars, a car leasing company based in the UK, also comes to mind. The website looks like it was made on a Macintosh II; the user experience probably breaks every design rule codified since Web 2.0. Newsweek called it "One of the Best Websites on the Internet."

It's tempting to treat Liquid Death and Ling's Cars as an excuse to break the rules. But being provocative for the sake of it can get you in real trouble. The copywriter Gary Halbert -- a legend in the direct mail business -- recounts a company that made pamphlets resembling traffic tickets and hired kids to place them on parked cars. Apparently, after people realized the pamphlets weren't tickets, they took the anger they had built-up out on the company.

Which implausible-sounding ideas are worth pursuing?

I once heard the comedian Louis CK say that bits that are funny right away rarely become great later on, and great bits usually emerge from the “bad air” that radiates from a joke that bombs. His point, I think, is that to have new ideas you need to know what they look like and then defend them in front of a critical audience.

You and I are members of that audience. So it's worth remembering something the investor Paul Graham said about responding to -- as he puts it -- Crazy New Ideas: if they come from an amateur we can safely dismiss them but if they originate from a "reasonable domain expert" we should pay attention. The originators of Liquid Death and Ling's Cars must have known how implausible their original idea was. Yet they went ahead anyways. Along the way, somebody paid attention.

In school, me and a few friends formed a "biker gang" that we called The Flaming Screaming Eagles of Death From Hell. I can't explain why the title made riding our shoddy bikes across campus so much fun. All I can say is that it just did.

As I read about Liquid Death's $700 million valuation I had this absurd fantasy playing in my head: It's a hot spring day and the Flaming Screaming Eagles of Death From Hell are flying across campus, looking awesome. We roll up to the dining hall and park our bikes outside. Before we go in, we sit down and crack open some ice cold Liquid Death.