Archives / August 2006

One of my favorite stories concerning traditional marketing is about tuna. It's almost certainly apocryphal (see [1] below), but it teaches a useful lesson about customer experience.

Years ago, the Acme Tuna brand had fallen on hard times. Sales were down, new competitors were entering the market, and Acme had a marketing challenge: no one was buying its new product. Most tuna on the market was gray, but Acme had begun selling cans of white tuna. White and gray were the same in taste and nutrition; nothing was different except the color.

Acme's transformation finally came from its clever marketing director, who created the slogan that conquered the tuna market for Acme:

"Acme tuna: it never turns gray."

Seeing this slogan, customers turned away from gray tuna, believing that the white tuna was fresher and safer to eat. The slogan - while technically truthful - cleverly deceived customers into believing in the superiority of Acme's product.

In other words, Acme played a game with perception and changed the reality of the market.

Whether or not it's taught explicitly in marketing training today, it often seems that the Acme case study is guiding many companies' marketing plans. Spinning a message, "positioning the brand", launching a shiny new logo and no other improvements - all of these are just playing games with perception, rather than improving the company itself.

And here's the thing: it does sometimes work. There is money to be made by shining things up, painting a rosy picture, even sometimes bending the truth (just a tad, of course!, and only with technically truthful statements). Especially in the short term, one can do quite well with the spin on "white tuna".

I want to state, however, that as profitable as that strategy might be (in the short term), I have very little interest in exploring it, teaching it, or practicing it. There are probably some very good resources out there for learning these "tips and tricks", but they're not here. Creating a good customer experience generally doesn't have much to do with changing the superficial perception about a product.

Instead, good experience means focusing on what really matters to customers, in the long run - offering genuinely useful, effective, or healthy products and services - and marketing them in a way that is honest and transparent at every step. It requires a long-term view, and a good deal of patience, especially as competitors might win short-term gains with less customer-centered strategies.

Of course, the customer experience approach is more appropriate for companies that offer some substantive experience. For a soda company (selling fizzy sugar water), or perhaps even a tuna company, there's not much to do with the experience except play with the label, the slogan, and the location in the grocery store. (I wish them luck.)

However, companies offering an experience where there's something at stake - banks, hospitals, schools, hotels, airlines, retailers, e-commerce sites, technology firms, informational websites, nonprofits and socially responsible companies, and on and on - should invest in the customer experience, not the new tuna slogan.

Best of all, the customer experience approach really works - there are plenty of case studies, on this site and elsewhere, proving it. Besides, it feels good to treat customers right. Why would you want to spend your career doing business any other way?

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[1] The ever-useful debunker of myths, Snopes, shows that the story has never been reliably sourced but has popped up in a number of places: Link