‘Today I Lit A Candle With A Spoon’

This is a true story. It has nothing to do with Uri Geller and his “ability” to bend spoons. (For more on that, see “The Stargate Folly—It’s Never About The Science, It’s Always About The Funding,” Mendon-Honeoye Falls-Lima Sentinel, April 28, 2022).

Well, maybe it is. In a metaphorical way.

The family went to a cousin’s wedding reception this weekend. The location was phenomenal. They held the party in a custom-built barn specifically designed as a wedding venue. It looked original. Its solid timber frame (including the use of wooden pegs to connect joints) gave the appearance of a 19^th century construction. I used to work in a renovated building erected in that era. It looked similar. It wasn’t. But it could have fooled me.

What do you call something like this? Yes, the word “retro” fits. But I’m thinking of something more meaningful. It’s not quite “thinking outside of the box.” It’s more “thinking inside from outside the box.” It’s recreating an old theme from a perspective well apart from that theme.

It’s a sort of weird “variation on a theme” idea.

Maybe not that weird.

When you think of a “variation on a theme” strategy, it usually means taking a pre-existing item and adding a slight twist. You see this in music all the time.

No, I’m not talking about Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself” use of the main theme from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18. Sure, Carmen added lyrics and created a new arrangement. The trouble was, Rachmaninoff’s music was still under copyright protection in some countries. Carmen agreed to give Sergei Rachmaninoff co-writing credit, more than 30 years after the classical composer’s death.

This is the trouble with employing a “variation on a theme” strategy to content. Unless the original composer specifically asks you to develop a variation of his work That’s exactly what Anton Diabelli did in 1819. A well-known music publisher at the time, Diabelli shopped a piece he wrote to other composers in the Austrian Empire. Beethoven took up the offer and wrote 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120.

If you really want to find good examples of a “variation on a theme,” you need look no further than your grocery aisle. Look at the shelf that holds Pepsi. Not only will you find the original Pepsi, but you’ll find different variations from Diet Pepsi to Pepsi Zero Sugar (a.k.a. “Pepsi Max”) to Pepsi Wild Cherry. If you’re lucky, you may even discover a Pepsi Mango here and there.

Companies use a “variation on a theme” strategy for their brand positioning marketing strategies. When they have a winning product, they know product sales will eventually plateau. They also know that any single product will never capture 100% of the market. For example, those who drink only diet pop will never buy regular Pepsi.

How does Pepsi address this? Well, they could make regular Pepsi a diet product, but that risks losing consumers who prefer non-diet pop. As obvious as this sounds, too many companies continue to tweak their most popular existing product to appeal to those who haven’t yet bought it.

That’s why you see “new and improved” so often on your favorite brands. That tagline isn’t meant for you or anyone else who already buys the product. It’s meant to entice those who have yet to try the product. Have you ever purchased something you’ve never bought before because it was “new and improved”?

Here’s the problem for organizations if they take this too far: they turn off their biggest fans. Would you like to see an example of that? Consider the fate of your once favorite radio station. You used to listen to it without hesitation. Why don’t you listen to it anymore?

The answer lies in the statistics gathered by corporate bean counters. They’re always searching for ways to get more people to listen to their station. They’ll tweak the format of the show a little bit here and there to bring in a new audience. Eventually, those tweaks add up over time. Before you know it, for example, your favorite “classic rock” station is now playing new music (what they lamely might call “the next generation of classic rock”).

Here’s a better way to handle this. It’s what Pepsi and many other consumer-oriented companies did. Instead of tweaking the most popular product, they leave it alone. Sure, they’ll tweak it, but that new tweaked version will be branded as a secondary product (e.g., “Pepsi” and “Wild Cherry Pepsi”). This satisfies their core audience who can remain confident the product they’ve been buying since they were kids won’t change. It also brings in a new audience who prefers the secondary brand.

Perhaps the best way to prove the validity of this strategy is to bring up an example of one of the greatest failures in marketing history: New Coke.

Facing market share losses because independent tests showed people liked the taste of Pepsi better, Coke’s management decided to change its old standby to taste more like Pepsi. That blew up in their face. Very quickly, they reversed that decision and brought “old” Coke back.

OK, so these are examples of pure “variations on a theme.” They don’t quite measure up to “thinking inside from outside the box.” For that, we’ll have to return to the creative business.

Normally, a “variation on a theme” in the world of the arts means paying homage to the original creator. Architects Alfred Fellheimer and Steward Wagner most certainly drew heavily from the Art Deco movement when they designed Buffalo’s Central Terminal (built in 1929). Still, they had room to acknowledge the significance of Eliel Saarinen’s use of Romanesque style and prominent arches in the Helsinki Central Station (built in 1919).

This represents an example of literally “thinking inside from outside the box.” Fellheimer and Wagner were creating the box (i.e., Central Terminal). By definition, they were outside the box. Yet, they had to imagine what the inside of the box would look like. They used the “inside” of the Helsinki Central Station as their inspiration and applied it to their plans.

It’s like lighting a candle with a spoon. You’re sitting at a table at the wedding reception and see one of the candles has gone out. You’re on the outside looking in, wondering what you can do to relight that candle. You can’t use one of the other candles because they’re small, fat, and floating in water. A match would be perfect, but you don’t have a match.

But you do have a spoon.

And that’s what you use to light the candle.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention the spoon is made out of wood.