This Little Pita Shop Understands Marketing Better Than Us
As I mentioned in my last essay, I spent last week in Odense, Denmark, where I gave the opening keynote to a conference of marketers and business owners, the Content Summit.I had a wonderful time exploring this quaint city, known for (appropriately for our event) storytelling! It's the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote stories like The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Pea, The Ugly Duckling, and more.
The city is about 90 minutes west of Copenhagen by train, and it's definitely worth a visit. However, if you ever do make the trip, there's one hidden treasure you must experience. One place to visit. One thing to try. You see, inside the city's food market is something pretty amazing:
The world's best pita.
Yep.
Itâs called Yazzyâs, and itâs the worldâs best pita.
And the rest I know itâs the worldâs best pita is because ⌠they say so on their sign.
But, um⌠do we believe them? Does anyone believe any business or any marketer claiming theyâre âthe bestâ at what they do? Iâm reminded of the scene in the movie Elf where Will Ferrell visits NYC and sees a sign in a diner window saying, âWorldâs best cup of coffee.â He bursts into the diner and screams, âCongratulations!â Everybody stares blankly. The joke is that you'd have to have grown up in the North Pole cut off from society to not understand: any business business making that claim isn't to be taking literally. Not even they believe their own claim.
To say âWorldâs bestâŚâ is just ... well, it's just marketing, nothing more.
THAT is the joke. THAT is the truth.
Yet we routinely make these claims!
Itâs not just Yazzyâs.
It's real estate. đ
I live in a town outside Boston, and in my town, thereâs a woman who advertises herself as the townâs âbestâ real estate agent. She puts little trophy emojis next to the claim and runs paid ads on social media and everything. But is she really the best? I have no idea. I just know that once she claims to be the best, I immediately donât believe her.
It's software. đŠđžâđť
Have you ever purchased software for your business? Every single software company on the planet seems to declare that they are the best. I mean, someone isnât telling the truth. (I worked inside some of these companies. They literally bribe customers with gift cards or discounted access if the customer leaves 5-star reviews on ratings sites. Meanwhile, there are enough review sites and categories to win and pay-to-enter awards programs that every software company everywhere can find a way to "honestly" claim they are, in fact, #1 in something.)
Itâs ridiculous.
Itâs pita. Itâs real estate. Itâs software.
Itâs also authors. đ
Oh man, this one gets to me.
Everyone who has ever published a book immediately claims to be a âbestâ-selling author. It goes right in their bio, right away. But are they? According to whom? The New York Times? Fancy! But known to be highly gameable, as authors and organizations routinely buy up boxes upon boxes of books to juice the numbers. They sit idle in storage units.)
Or maybe you're an Amazon bestseller? I'm proud of you, but in the same way Iâm proud of my son who just scribbled on a sheet of paper for 12 minutes and shows it to me. At first, I'm genuinely proud. After the 567th time in the same day, eh, I've got some questions.
Pita, real estate, software, books.
It's even pencils. It's even freaking pencils. âď¸
The brand Ticonderoga has a slogan on their boxes: âTHE WORLDâS BEST PENCIL.â
Itâs thanks not to their quality (though I recognize customers love them) but thanks to their lawyers. Next to the word âPencilâ is the little (R) symbol. Itâs a registered trademark phrase. This means they went beyond the basic (TM) which anyone can put on anything to signal your own belief that something is proprietary. No, Ticonderoga took the extra step to file the phrase with the US Patent and Trademark Office, thus preventing competitors from claiming to be the worldâs best pencil on their packaging.
Hmmmmmmmm.
But what if Ticonderoga's quality dips and another pencil comes along which is truly better? Doesnât matter! The lawyers said so. Ticonderoga is "the best."
Fine, if thatâs how we have to market our businesses, then hereâs my message to you:
If you need a speaker for your next event, hire me, Jay Acunzo, the worldâs best speaker.
And the reason I can make this claim? It says so right on my mug!
Shoutout to Ann Handley for this truthful mug. đ
âWeâre the best.â âIâm the best.â âPick us!â âPick me!â âThe worldâs best!â
This. Is. Silly. Not just the goof you see in the image. Itâs silly to run around the world claiming to be the best, as if thatâs believable, determinable, or effective in your marketing.
In Odense, I asked the crowd of marketers and business leaders to think about why this approach is so silly by first asking them to answer a silly question.
âWhatâs the best Disney film of all time?â
After a quick moment to picture our ideas, everyone shouted out their answers together, and everyone ⌠was wrong. Because thereâs only one objectively correct answer to the question.
A Goofy Movie.
(Obviously.)
(If you know, you know: Powerline! The pop star in the movie. Legit great music. Iâm still waiting on his albumâŚ)
Thatâs of course a silly question to be asking, not only because I asked it at a marketing conference to hundreds of people thinking about their businesses. Itâs silly because we canât actually answer it correctlyâbut that wonât stop us from trying.
And thatâs exactly how we treat our marketing! We act is if thereâs any actual, objective way to declare ourselves âthe best,â when thereâs not. The thing is, it wouldnât even matter if there was, because we humans are not rational creatures when we make choices. Weâre subjective first, then rationalize what we did later.
Something revealing happened in Denmark when I asked that question to the audience: They didnât actually answer it.
I said to them, âWhatâs the BEST Disney film?â But how did they hear it? How did they respond to it?
âWhatâs MY FAVORITE?â
Because that is how we actually make choices.
You donât need to be the biggest or the best to stand out, get picked, get referred. You need to be their favorite. Their personal, preferred pick for a specific purpose.
Think of your favorite things. Your favorite food or restaurant, brand or city, drink or animal. These are parts of our identity. If I said to you, âThatâs my favorite podcast,â or, âThatâs my favorite city,â Iâm self-expressing. Crucially for us to realize, thereâs nothing objectively âthe bestâ about my choices. My favorite shirt isnât the best-made shirt that exists. Itâs not even the best-made shirt that I own. But it feels irreplaceable to me. What if we felt the way to our audience?
My favorite team? The New York Knicks. If you know anything about basketball, you know that for decades of my life, they were among the objective worst picks. Terrible organization, run by awful executives, making all the wrong choices, not winning a thing. During one stretch, they lost more games than almost any teamânot just in the NBA, but in professional sports! But they were my pick.
I canât believe we just won the championship. It only took them FIFTY-THREE YEARS. Iâm 40! And for my entire life, they were my pick. Does that sound like rational decision-making to you?
Nope. But it is human decision-making, and guess what your audience is made of.
When your audience makes choices, they play favorites. The real question you need to ask (Disney films aside): Are you one of them?
Donât be the best. Be their favorite.
* * *
I actually think Yazzyâs understands this. Yazzyâs seems to convey that they in fact recognize how people make choices. Because I wasnât completely truthful before, showing you their sign. Unlike what most businesses might do when declaring theyâre the best, Yazzyâs doesnât put an exclamation point at the end. They donât even put a period. They put a question mark:
Itâs like theyâre saying, âWorldâs best pita? YOU decide.â
Exactly, Yazzy. Exactly. We decide. The audience always decides. And if a tiny pita shop (which may or may not be the worldâs best pita) in a quaint little city in Denmark understands this hard truth about marketing, I guess I have to ask another silly question:
Why donât we?