Obvious Adams and In Search of the Obvious

Obvious Adams, a short-read pamphlet, has influenced millions across the globe for its obvious principles. Mark and Lorraine talk through the five tests of obviousness and how it influenced Jack Trout's last book, In Search of the Obvious. Learn how positioning is directly related to the five tests of obviousness and why finding a position can be problematic if it doesn't pass the "obvious" sniff test.

Spend 30-ish with Mark and Lorraine to learn more about advertising, marketing, and positioning.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 5:27 Obvious Adams
• 32:44 In Search of the Obvious
• 33:53 Outro

Transcript

Mark Vandegrift:
Welcome to the latest episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me is the obvious choice for president of this podcast, Lorraine Kessler. Lorraine, what's on your mind?

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, that's quite an introduction, as always, Mark. You always surprise me. I mean, I heard President, I stopped there, and I'm like, you'd have to be insane to run for President.

Mark Vandegrift:
Oh, absolutely.

Lorraine Kessler:
No, I tell you what's on my mind. I just saw a Domino's commercial for their pinpoint delivery. And I don't know, have you seen this? Have you seen the commercial and what they're doing?

Mark Vandegrift:
Yeah, I've seen it. It's great.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, you know, few brands, really few brands that I can remember have done as good a job as Domino's in finding their diamond, right, delivery and just polishing it and polishing it and sticking to it and making it multifaceted, right? They were the first or one of the first to create the software where they could, you would call in and they could understand your location, your address. So they knew right away where Mark Vandegrift lived. I think last year they did a huge campaign on their EV cars, which was quite an entertaining the commercial, but also effective. And now they have this pin point or drop a pin delivery. I think they call it pin point, which is fantastic because you could be... you know, hiking in Alaska or on a lake and on a pontoon boat. And they're going to get their pizza to you somehow by pinpoint. You drop a pin, you go to their app and you drop a pin on where you are. And Domino's will deliver. I can't imagine any brand that has done as good a job over so many years, decades, really owning a position. So it's pretty good.

Mark Vandegrift:
I think on a previous episode, I mentioned this, but we heard in college, so this is in probably ‘89, we heard the CEO speak and he was talking about delivery at that point in time, but his forecast never came true. If you recall, I said their goal was to actually get rid of locations and cook the pizzas in the vehicle.

That was their whole goal. Now they may get there someday. Who knows, the batteries are getting better, and you know, but that would be a very hot car. I can only imagine mixing a hot pizza oven with an EV battery. That may have the makings of an explosion.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, maybe it'll be a self-driving car with the pizza maker in the back. So, I mean, hey, crazy. Another thing that occurred to me was just that, years ago, Seth Godin, who I've previously said I wasn't a fan of his book, Permission Marketing, and I'm not because it was mostly wrong, missed the boat, but he did write a book called The Purple Cow, and that was all about how your brand has to be remarkable. So that's about positioning, right? He just had a neat way of calling it a purple cow. 

So I have a purple cow award, and I think that's for Yuengling. We talked a lot about the beers and what's going on, but Yuengling, America's oldest brewery. And as you and I talked, how does heritage play into that? Well... They're America's oldest brewery, but the other thing they've done to make this really, I think, strong position, they're very, very careful about where they distribute the beer. Like, we are the co-conspirators and the corruptors of people in Michigan who know we come from Ohio. And so we are hauling cases of Yuengling up all summer long. But that's smart because it creates a mystique and it creates demand and the family who's run it has run the brewery all these years, has been very, very careful about not becoming ubiquitous and everywhere. So anyway, for me, they get a purple cow award.

Mark Vandegrift:
We used to have a developer that made money; he paid for his beer by being the guy that ran over to Pittsburgh to get his Yuengling for everyone and they paid him for the beer, of course, but they also paid him for gas and a little extra. So he never had to pay for beer, at least for his Yuengling when he was in college. So I thought that was a pretty funny story.

Good, well, I like the purple cow award that we could start assigning that to places that are doing a good job. So let’s dive into today's topic. I thought it made sense to touch on Jack Trout's last book, In Search of the Obvious, which he dedicated to our agency and more specifically, Dick Maggiore. You obviously know the background of this, but our listeners may not. And it's that Dick sent a small pamphlet or gave Jack Trout a small pamphlet called Obvious Adams. That spurred Jack to write this book and it's why Jack dedicated the book to Dick. I know you have more details on that. We'll get that from you here in a second. The background of the pamphlet he sent Jack is this. Obvious Adams, the story of a successful businessman, was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916. So this is 107 years old. It's a short story. You can actually read through it in about, I think, 25 to 30 minutes. And it's a businessman in the field of advertising and his journey to business success. And Adams leads individuals with business ideas to garner great success in the world of business and in their professions. And that's how he ends up getting this idea of Obvious Adams. You don't even find out where his name comes until the end of the book. The author was Robert Updegraff, and there are five primary takeaways from the story. And I thought it'd be good to walk through each one that is about this very short story. But Lorraine, go ahead and give your background on how this all came to be with In Search of the Obvious.

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, admitting that sometimes people's memories are conflated, this is my memory. When Jack was in the agency about 14, 15 years ago, when we were going to do, and I believe this is the right time, but we were going to do the Akron event with him, I was reading Jack's book Simplicity. And I walked into Dick's office and I said, I think I know where Jack got all these ideas from in Simplicity. They come from the book, Dick, that you gave me called Obvious Adams. Because Dick had handed me that Updegraff pamphlet a couple of years before. And I said, I'm sure Jack read this book because there's just so much similarity. And then when Jack was in our offices later for that event, Dick mentioned Obvious Adams to him and Jack had no idea what Dick was talking about. And so Dick, of course, reached to his bookshelf and pulled it off and handed it to Jack and voila, Jack was taken with the book and then therefore dedicated his book, In Search of the Obvious, to Dick and the agency, which was just great. The other book that Updegraff wrote is this one called Old Specification. and it's storytelling mode again. And I think we can come back to how important this book is for anyone in running a business and particularly in client services at an agency. But we can come back to what the key nugget is in that book a little later.

Mark Vandegrift:
Excellent, excellent. Well, let's dive into the five tests of obviousness from the story. The first is: the problem when solved will be simple. This obviously is nearly always simple, so simple that sometimes a whole generation of men and women have looked at it without ever seeing it. Lorraine, why is this simple truth so powerful for those of us in marketing?

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, quoting the great Lee Clow, the creative director, who's most known for the ‘‘1984’’ ad for Apple that I think ran in a Super Bowl, is an ad should be an appetizer, not a buffet. So if you can't summarize the idea in a simple, effective way that gets into the mind, you're not going to win. Minds just are necessarily and biologically limited, right? 

I mean, this little container, the gray matter, is very limited. We can, it is, has a finite capacity as to what it can take in. So even though advertisers have an ability to push out more and more messages to the infinite degree, the mind doesn't stretch to that. 

And in fact, there's a part of the brain that actually prevents us from overloading, right? So with too many messages, you know, everybody quotes different numbers, but let's just say, when you think about everything you see in a day where there's a message on a bench, on a billboard, TV, a radio, even packaging, you know, you're seeing between 6,000 - 10,000 messages a day, if not more. And what that does is it doesn't... increase attention that people are spending. Oh, there's more ads, I've got to pay more attention. We're actually paying less attention. And in fact, the brain has a self-protective mode that says, I'm just going to tune this stuff out. I'm just not going to pay attention at all. 

So the reaction to overstimulation is a kind of a stupor. So when you're thinking about that, and the more you put in an ad, the more likely it's to be ignored, the more it's going to kind of drone down. So you got to keep it simple. And I've said this before, that advertisers are trying to influence, don't think as deeply about the brands as the advertisers and marketers who are creating these ads. It's what's called their system one and system two thinking. And if you want to learn a little bit more about it, I would encourage our listeners and viewers to look up a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli-American psychologist. He won a Nobel Prize for this book and this premise. 

What does thinking fast and slow mean? Well, we have a system one and a system two thinking. System one is instantaneous automatic thinking. It's based on experience. It's what we call gut instinct/impressions. We use this probably 95% of the time every day. We use very little energy, which conserves the rest of the body, and we make very quick decisions, and often we have to make them that quickly. The problem is that sometimes you need system two thinking, which is where I think advertisers and marketers are when they're creating campaigns. They are now what? They're very analytical, they're spending a lot of time digging deep, maybe into research and insights. They're analyzing that data. They're problem solving. It's a very conscious versus unconscious state. This is the system two. And that's where advertisers and marketers are creating ads. But where system one, our consumers are digesting it, is system one. So we can't, at the end of system two, get to a system one solution. Your advertising is going to fail.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, and it's funny because we use this principle all the time, but it's called the KISS principle. Keep it simple, stupid.

Lorraine Kessler:
Right.

Mark Vandegrift:
And that's really a good way to summarize this very first test of obviousness, right?

Lorraine Kessler:
Right. And the interesting thing about the system one, system two thinking is the reason there's a thing called confirmation bias is because system one is so dominant that instantaneous, quick kind of thinking that we're used to. It's so dominant. It actually tells system two when to stop thinking because it's already has a solution. So that confirmation bias comes from system one. So the real governor is system one thinking, right, over system two. It's really hard to stay in system two mode. 

Anyway, so I think that's kind of important. Now, I said I'd come back to this book, Old Specification, which there's one simple premise, simple premise. The little story, which is an anecdotal story here, says that researchers and account folks and advertisers, strategists, the writers, the designers… When they're in the formulation phase of campaigns, they're thinking about WHAT to say. Like, what should we say about this product or service? And that's WHAT with all caps. WHAT is the problem we're trying to solve? WHAT are we trying to say? 

But what has to happen in advertising, and this is where the genius, the magic, and the simplicity has to happen. is when it gets in the hands of the creative, the writers and the designers and the people have to actually communicate the what, they have to think of the HOW. HOW do I convey the idea, all caps, in a way that's going to stir people, right, that's going to engage them. And so when you get to the HOW, simplicity rules.

Mark Vandegrift:
That's great. That's really good insight. Well, the next test of obviousness is: does it check with human nature? We like to characterize this test in this way. If you can explain it to a 10-year-old child, it's obvious. If you can't, then it's probably not obvious, nor you may not even understand it yourself. I like to think of it this way. If you can teach it, you understand it. Lorraine, this is a straightforward test, but it seems to be the one that maybe we fall down on the most. Why do you think that is?

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, I think a lot of times that we get some right things in the wrong order when we're thinking as a company about who we are, what we should be about, our purpose or mission, right, and our values. And we think that that's what customers or consumers buy. And while I wouldn't say that these things are not important, I think they're not the reason why people buy. A mission statement, let's call it a purpose… it, and in the words of Simon Sinek, it might be the belief, right? It's really important in helping you frame the type of product and service that you create or deliver and how you support it. It's, you know, what you care about has enormous value to the organization, to the people in the organization and to kind of being a North Star for guiding the end benefit, but it is not what customers ultimately buy. They're going to buy a product or service that is differentiated in a way that they care a lot about. 

So what happens is I think that some companies get this mission, this value language, and you and I have seen these and they, first of all, they end up sounding all like. But moreover, right, words that no one in a real, communication would ever, a real conversation would ever use, right? The minute you ask someone to write a mission statement, it's like this, it's like the system two thinking takes over for that moment, and what you get is just a bunch of pap that just doesn't work. It's just highfalutin stuff. It's blabber. So I think what I've seen is that the more high-minded these mission and beliefs and values, like save the world kind of stuff. The more distance you'll get from marketing as a reality, and we have to have advertising that lives in reality. 

And big brands, we can see how this has played out, big brands like Coca-Cola and Starbucks for all their high mindedness, who've delved into race relations and making the world a better place and social commentary. There's almost a correlation between the more they do that, the more trouble they get in. I mean, right now, Starbucks, right? You did this thing where they wanted baristas to start a conversation with people over race. Well, now they have the union against them. They have union troubles. So apparently, they want their baristas to fight for dignity and equality with their customers, but they don't want to pay them. you know, a wage that says we value you. 

So, you know, they think people aren't seeing these, this, I don't know, what do you call it? Disharmony, what they do. So my answer is just get back to the real job of real branding and reality and advertising.

Mark Vandegrift:
Yeah, that's good perspective. And don't you think at some level, you could say that people are trying to justify their jobs a little bit when they're part of the path, right? So if it takes five people to create an ad, and that's a simplified process, but it seems like there's certain people in that path in most of these companies that feel that the more they add to it, the more they're justifying their position when the really hard work is actually, I think you mentioned on a podcast or two ago, that Dick Maggiore always talks about is, what can we take out to make it better? And that's the harder work. It's like writing your own stuff and then saying, was it Mark Twain that said, I didn't have time, it would have been better, but I didn't have time to edit myself down, right? And that's an example, I think, of why this second test of obviousness fails, is, there's so much glommed onto it all for the sake of someone justifying their position.

Lorraine Kessler:
Yep. I agree 100%. And it's, Mark Twain also said unpack the backpack, you know, it's kind of like, get it to its most simple denominator, and you'll do much better.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, the third test of obviousness is, can you put it on paper? So what you do is you write out your idea, you plan or project in words of one or two syllables. That's it. And once the explanation becomes long or complex or highfalutin, then it's likely not obvious. You and I see this a lot when companies do their mission statement. You mentioned that just a moment ago and they use that to do their marketing. Well, if the mission statement barely makes sense, how can their marketing make any sense? It's just going to be utter confusion. Would you say we see this often in nonprofits and B2B organizations the most? And if so, why do you think that happens?

Lorraine Kessler:
I think, yeah, you do see it a lot in nonprofits because they're cause-related, okay? And so it's easy, and as I talked about, it's easy to fall into the belief that people are buying our mission. What they're really buying is how their mission is delivered to them through your product or service that has value for them. So you have to dig beyond the mission statement, why we exist beyond making money, to get to... What are we really doing that's changing people's lives, that making their lives better, to making them more, to helping them with anxiety, let's say, to become more emotionally intelligent, to make better decisions. Now that's could be a nonprofit, but you're not going to find that in a mission statement. What you're going to find is the real solution that helps people. So they have to get down closer to the customer. 

You always talk about this, right? You have to get really close to the customer and think like they think, not think the way the organization thinks at that level. So I think what happens is it's not that mission statements are terrible or bad to write or purpose statements or belief statements. I said they have a value, but you have to go beyond that to say, now, from the perspective of the person on the street, what does this really mean? And one of the things I think that companies should do is... actually talk to people on the street and kind of test their concept. 

And I'm not talking about researchers because researchers will fall into the same trap that we do because we have predictable ways of talking as advertisers and marketers and inside baseball, researchers join us in that band. I'm talking about actually going on the street and saying, hey, we have a product that does this. What do you think about that? And getting a real, well, I don't understand what that word. That word there, I don't get what that means. Well, you'll get a read, you'll probably be surprised at how shallow people really do think and how simply they really think, but it will really help your ad campaign.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, that makes sense because we're consuming so many messages. We don't have time to do a deep dive. We can't get to that system two thinking. And, you know, when we do our Appreciative Discovery® sessions, the most important people we usually feel that should be in there are the salespeople. Why? Because they are the ones talking to the customers. And it's funny because they're the ones that typically dig in their heels the most, but they also right the ship sometimes when things are going awry if the rest of the conversation isn't making sense for the idea. And they also like simplicity. So being able to get that idea down on paper in three to four words is tough, but that's really what's required for this third test of obviousness.

Lorraine Kessler:
And I would say three to four right words, right?

Mark Vandegrift:
Yes.

Lorraine Kessler:
So, I mean, you could have three to four crummy words or you could have three to four pristine, beautiful words. And that's the challenge.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, we had an AD yesterday and it was interesting because it was what we would call new news to them because most people are not living in the world of positioning like we are, but we went through a couple different brands and just said, who are these brands? They were able to name them every single time based on two, three or four word concepts, singular ideas, but two, three or four words. It kind of made them wake up to realize, okay, we're really dealing with a very simple concept that we want to own in the mind. And then we explained how creatively you have to dramatize it to get it into the mind. 

But figuring out that very basic concept first is the first step in positioning strategy. So this third test of obviousness, we really work hard on that, because if it's not simple and you can't get it in three to four words, then it's probably not going to work. 

Good, well our next test, our fourth test of obviousness is, and I know you love this one, you coined a term recently, I don't know if it's, if you stole it or not, but the test is this. Does it explode in people's minds? If someone says, why didn't I think of that before? You can feel pretty confident in the idea, right?

So I think you have used this phrase, and this is the one I was referencing: emotional voltage. You used that I think just in our last podcast. Doesn't this resonate with this fourth test of obviousness pretty well?

Lorraine Kessler:
That is a great term and I forgot about it: emotional voltage. And if I used it, I'm sure I took it from somewhere. I stole it. And here's my rule on plagiarism for all those listening, is just steal good stuff. Don't steal the bad stuff. Right? No one knows where it came from. It's all iterative anyway. 

But that's a great term, emotional voltage. Because people in a time tax society, and an information overload society, right? They value feelings more than thinking. So how I feel about it. So where's that emotion or feeling conveyed? It can be conveyed through design and certainly that's a part of it because how I feel about a design invites me or not. But really there's this emotional language. Language can be very powerful as we know because the English language creates images in the mind. So this idea of exploding in the mind, which I think Trout talks about in the search of the obvious, I think I know where he got this. Now I was wrong about obvious atoms. I could be right about this. But he did work with one of the great creative directors, George Lois. And George Lewis was the creative director who people recall for Volkswagen, think small, that campaign. But he also created the campaign for Haugahyde when Jack Trout worked for Uniroyal and made Haugahyde the category leader and number one in vinyl upholstery. And so George Lewis was famous for saying, you better have an idea that explodes in the mouth. That's in his book, What's the Big Idea? Great book for anybody who's on the creative side of things, who really wants to tap into that. 

So I think he got it from him. And this is where the magic of advertising really rests. You know, when you have something that explodes in the mind, what ends up happening is the language itself, the advertising itself, makes food taste better, makes cars run smoother, makes shoes that you feel like you can run faster in this is the magic of advertising It's totally the power of the creative conveyor to get this across. So again, if the strategist that finds the what as I go back to you know Old Specification if the researcher and analyst and system to thinker defines the what? The creative have to define the how and in the how is where this emotional element is and it's the how that creative genius rises up.

Mark Vandegrift:
Good. The thing I always think of is when I'm using something and it's like the most basic idea. And I go, why didn't I think of this?

And that's exactly, you know, how simple the idea has to be. But it has to just make someone go, oh my gosh, this is so like, how could someone not have thought of this before? And yet don't we see that on almost an everyday basis? We, we run into products and go, man, that solves such a obvious problem and someone was really paying attention to think of it. 

So the final and fifth test of obviousness is this, is the time ripe? We've already discussed a ton of products that were before their time. We've mentioned those in the past on past episodes, but an idea itself can be before its time. Why do we need this final check before we know if an idea is right or not?

Lorraine Kessler:
Because resources dictate strategy and resources pay for the tactics to get an idea into the mind. So if an idea is too soon and history has shown that the newer the category, like if it's a whole new kind of subcategory or category, it takes 40 years for that new idea to gain maturity. And why is maturity important? Because when maturity is reached, economically you get volume. When you get volume, the price can come down. So this can be something that becomes a mass product versus a very niche product for the very wealthy. 

And you can see this in the car industry, you can see it in trains. I mean it's almost an immutable. And you take the PC for example. In 1983, Time Magazine, instead of doing Man of the Year, did Machine of the Year about the and how this was going to be in everybody's home and they had like a kind of a figure of a person with this computer. Well, interestingly enough, by 1997, only 35% of households had a PC. And it wasn't until 2004 that 67.5% of households had a PC. So look how long it took for that adoption period. 

The point is if a product or an idea is too soon. The marketer's going to have to spend a lot of money just to educate on what this new device is all about and what can it do and the benefits. And education's a slow boat. I mean, it just isn't done quickly. Now, if an idea is too late, now you've got other problems, conversely. You've got what Michael Porter calls, you know, kind of the five competitive factors to consider. You have cost of entry to come into the market. You've got to get in against established competitors, so competition. You have the risk of substitution. You get your idea out there and you could be leapfrogged by another new technology or another new idea. You then have the bargaining power that both buyers and suppliers can have, right? And they could drive prices down or make it very difficult for you. So these are all huge buzz killers if you're too late, when you're late to the game. It's hard to find a place to play.

Mark Vandegrift:
Well, those are the five tests of obviousness. Let's apply them specifically to positioning. Here's the question. How should Obvious Adams tests and In Search of the Obvious principles resonate with our listeners?

Lorraine Kessler:
Well, I think they need to understand that in the beginning, that the solution they're seeking to the problem, like what is the essence of the problem, right? And then that should be a simple answer. And then how are we going to put, as Jeff Richards, a professor at Michigan State in advertising, I think so beautifully says, then how is the advertising going to put the wonder in the wonder bread? With that idea. So again, it's the what and the how.

Mark Vandegrift:
Good, well, we're going to bring this episode to a close. Hopefully it was obvious to our listeners why the tests of obviousness are so critical to positioning. Finding an obvious idea that differentiates you from the competition and then maximizes that relevance to the customer is not an easy task. We wrestle with that as we're going through ADs and all the work that's done to help our clients find and focus on that. And once you do find it, the question should be asked, is it obvious? 

So Lorraine, thanks for joining us again every week and thanks to our audience for viewing and listening. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and then join us for our next episode of Brand Shorthand as we discuss the core concepts of positioning. Until then, have an amazing day.