In the late '90s, Subway had a campaign promoting their new range of seven subs with less than six grams of fat. It was a decent campaign. Modestly successful.
Then came Jared.
Jared weighed 425 pounds. He had a 60-inch waist. He picked his college classes based on whether or not he could fit into the classroom seats. His dad didn't think he was going to live past 35.
In an effort to improve his health, he tried to give the low-fat subs a try. He started eating Subway every day. Then multiple times a day. Eventually, it was Subway for breakfast lunch, and dinner.
In 3 months he dropped to 330 pounds. Almost 100 pounds lighter. He started walking more regularly and continued the diet for several more months and eventually hit 180 pounds, all from eating Subway sandwiches.
His weight loss journey caught the attention of the college newspaper. The local article was then picked up by a larger national publication covering 'crazy diets that work'.
A Subway franchise owner read the story about the Subway Diet and saw its potential. He tracked down Subway's creative director and tried convincing him to turn it into an ad campaign.
I couldn't find the first ad but here's the earliest one I could find to get you a sense of the original campaign
The campaign was an instant hit. It became nationally recognized. Jared appeared on Oprah. Jared's story blew the "seven subs" campaign out of the water.
Last week I read a book called 'Made to Stick'. It was about what makes ideas compelling and why some stories do so much better than others. Chip and Dan Heath explain an idea's 'stickiness' through six principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories.
Simplicity doesn't mean dumbing an idea down – it means finding the essence of what you are trying to communicate. This means paring down to your single most important message and not communicating everything else you want to say. Both campaigns were simple, Jared’s was just a lot more interesting.
'Interestingness' here hinges on subverting expectations; people don't usually associate fast food with weight loss. Jared’s transformation stood out from typical health improvement narratives while the “seven subs” idea didn’t offer anything unexpected.
The third principle is concreteness. This is about providing vivid details and specific numbers related to each campaign - "seven" sandwiches and "6 grams" of fat versus losing "245 pounds" or Jared picking classes based on whether he could fit into the classroom chairs, made both messages tangible for audiences.
Both messages were simple and concrete, but only one was surprising. And the more unexpected a message is, the more important credibility becomes, otherwise no one believes you.
No one doubted the first story because there's nothing unbelievable about Subway offering a variety of low-fat sandwiches. The idea that you can lose weight by eating fast food, backed up by a personal story of transformation makes the whole thing remarkable. Typically, credibility is established through experts or celebrities. In this case, door number three is the anti-celebrity. Lung cancer patients talking about the dangers of smoking makes for a powerful message.
Emotional resonance plays a crucial role in effective messaging. The "7 subs" campaign scores zero on emotional resonance when compared to an inspiring story of an underdog overcoming ridiculous odds and achieving something meaningful.
Emotional resonance is what makes people care. There are two competing schemas for why we care about stuff. The first is self-interest. Tell people what's in it for them. When appealing to people's self-interest doesn't work the alternative is to appeal to their sense of identity. Here, the idea is that people tend to base decisions on 3 questions:
Who am I?
What kind of situation is this?
What do people like me do in this kind of situation?
This appeal to identity helps explain the success behind the 'Don't Mess with Texas' anti-littering campaign. Showing tough Texans that other tough Texans don't throw trash around helped significantly reduce littering in Texas. Interestingly, they revamped the campaign for young people about 2 years ago, using the exact same principle. Here's a quick video of the campaign :
So, both Subway stories were simple, concrete, and credible. But only one was unexpected and emotionally resonant. This just leaves the last principle - One message was expressed as a story while the other wasn't. Stories are a powerful way to convey ideas because good stories effortlessly organize all the other previous principles into a format that our brains love to soak up. Human brains are strangely receptive to narrative structure. Information presented as a story will always be more memorable than the same information presented as facts.
I should add that, in this case, Jared's story aged terribly. In 2015 he was convicted of child sex tourism and owning child pornography. Last week's book was first published in 2007 so the story made for a better example at the time.
The last thing I love about this book is that it encourages you to find your messages rather than create them. Yes, you could reverse engineer your messaging and make sure that it's simple, unexpected, and has concrete details, etc. But the authors are more interested in getting people to keep an eye out for existing stories that have all of these characteristics and use them instead – much like what happened with Subway's ad campaign. Subway didn't invent the Subway diet, they stumbled onto it and amplified it instead. Understanding the contours of what makes some messages more powerful than others helps you spot and use great stories, ones that are already out there in the real world.
I jumped on the opportunity to apply everything I learned from this book when my co-founder spotted a great message embedded in ChatGPT's new enterprise-tier announcement.
Our product is a workflow editor that lets you build ChatGPT templates. This announcement did a great job of expressing the value of a ChatGPT template in one succinct sentence. I used the messaging to put together a Meta Ad and did my best to apply the 6 principles where I could. This was my first attempt, I'll be spending most of this week refining what I've learned about crafting a compelling message.
We're going to run this ad against our current best-performing visual to see if it does any better.
Clicking on the ad leads to a short demo of the product where you can then sign up to become a beta tester. If you'd like to see the demo or become a beta tester you can watch the video here:
P.S. - We're on Week 3 of my 10-week deep dive into building Marketing funnels. Week 1 was about understanding buyer personas and who you should be selling to. Last week was my birthday, so I didn't manage to get a post out. This week is about crafting a compelling message. Next week I'll move to the top of the funnel and draft a content calendar for the upcoming month.
About Josh Pitzalis
Building effective marketing funnels for software businesses.
