Torment Your Customers (They’ll Love It)

Customers: Don’t love them! Don’t pander to their every whim! Why? They don’t know what they want. Never have. Mindless devotion to them only spawns me-too products, copycat ad campaigns, marketplace stagnation.

What do customers want? To be teased, tantalized, and tormented by insatiable desire. They’d much prefer a blatant but lovable huckster to an earnest, fawning marketer.

How do you really make them happy? By retro-marketing—getting out the snake oil and using tricks from the days when marketers ruled the world with creativity and style. Retromarketing is based on an eternal truth: You get more by playing hard to get. And customers love the ironic art of a well-crafted sales pitch.

Here’s how to hit consumers with the hardest of sells—all the while letting them in on the joke.

The Idea in Practice

Retromarketing Tricks

1. Exclusivity. Hold back supply and delay customers’ gratification—you’ll avoid excess inventory and make buyers feel lucky. Example: 

By coupling capricious production runs with ruthless “retirements,” Ty Warner fanned desire for soft-toy Beanie Babies. Ostensibly priced at $5-$6 each, Beanies fetched $3,000+ at auction and triggered fistfights among frenzied fans.

2. Selective Secrecy. Get customers asking, “What could it be?” “Why all the hush-hush?” Example: 

Scholastic withheld title, price, plot, review copies, and author interviews before launching the fourth Harry Potter book—and hinted at a possible printing shortage. This customer-torment tour de force created a blockbuster.

3. Amplification. Never keep the existence of a secret concealed. To make your secret successful amid incessant commercial chatter, amplify its allure. Ensure that your “hot ticket”—and any buzz it generates—get talked about. Example: 

Internet-propelled speculation about inventor Dean Kamen’s latest creation has the media scrambling to report on media reports of the mysterious device. No one knows yet what the invention—known as “IT”—actually is. Yet people consider “IT” so revolutionary that “entire cities will be retrofitted to accommodate it.”

4. Entertainment. A sense of fun powers the best retromarketing. Make your pitch engaging, amusing, flirtatious. Example: 

Promoters of Spielberg’s movie A.I. know that a movie’s fate hinges on its first two weeks of word of mouth. So they designed a surreptitious campaign: They inserted a fake name in the trailer credits—then got fans searching the Web for it. Fans discovered additional Web sites, a “murder,” and proliferating clues. Result? Successful buzz just before A.I.’s premier.

5. Tricksterism. Play your customers with panache, exaggeration, chutzpah. Clever tactics aren’t necessarily elaborate or expensive. They do give customers the mischief and mystery they want. Example: 

The U.K. makers of Tango, a fruit juice soda, presented a “public service announcement” warning viewers that supermarkets were selling a nonfizzy knockoff, and asking them to report miscreants. When 30,000 people phoned, they found they’d been tricked (“Tango’d”): The company was actually promoting a noncarbonated version of the drink. The tactic amplified the launch and Tango’s irreverent image.