Marketing To The Misunderstood. There has been a lot of back and forth about linking Product Identity with Consumer Identity since we presented the Doublethink "Cool American" campaign a few weeks back. Marketing to young, hip, urban adults; the counterculture was thought to be the only way to go in soft drink advertising. How dare we beg to differ?

Well, since I was a member of the first creative team to market soft drinks to the so-called counter culture, I thought this might be a good time to remind folks where all this hipper-than-thou crap got its start.

The year was 1969. Our team at Y&RNY was given the task of expanding the regional, rural market for a certain soft drink into the urban centers of America. Our Marketing Solution, tap into the feelings of disenfranchisement of our targeted counterculture market, and use their own alternative media for the purpose of building our brand franchise. As a result, Dr Pepper became the third most popular soft drink in America.

Baby boomers were still being regarded by the mainstream as the "counterculture." But merchandisers had started to recognize that counter though they may be, what this large audience thought about and considered important counted a lot toward the success or failure of many products and services. So when the soft drink company Dr Pepper, whose primary customer base was southern and rural, wanted to expand its reach in the Northeast and Midwest, it decided to go after the young urban, hip, bored-with-cola crowd--which was then also being aggressively by courted by 7UP, the Uncola.

Dr Pepper, an independent company, knew what it was up against. So, to get a foot in the door, its management convinced Coca-Cola Bottlers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to bottle and distribute its soft drink. In return for their considerable clout, the Coke bottlers required that Dr Pepper support its expansion with a national advertising budget. To avoid conflicts of interest, McCann-Erickson, Coca-Cola's advertising agency, recommended that Dr Pepper use Young & Rubicam.

This was a logical choice, since Y&R had a jump-start in the forms of Burt Blum, an agency art director who was also freelancing for a Coke-owned Dr Pepper taste-alike called Mr. Pibb, and Jim Millman, another Y&R art director who had freelanced a spectacular Dr Pepper campaign for the Burt Wells Agency.

In addition, Y&R was given a creative free reign. We knew that advertising had to talk to its market, not its makers, because Y&R was a pioneer in the field of segmented, marketing, thanks in great part to the work of George Colon, Jim Harold, Helio Gonzalez and myself in forming Y&R Bravo to service the Eastern Airlines and General Foods minority marketing business.

There was just one problem. Defining the Indefinable. Y&R had never handled a soft drink account. We had no experience or knowledge of the category. That had to change in a hurry. Then there was the matter of money. Mediawise, there would not be a lot of it--no network prime time to clear up America's misconceptions about this soft drink from the sticks.

Whereas mass marketing must deal in lowest-common denominator terms to ensure an all-inclusive reach, selective marketing, as I call it, aims only at a selected prospect. This allows us to fine-tune a campaign as we go. But what the creative team at Y&R didn't know about the traits and habits of the typical Dr Pepper consumer, they certainly knew how to find out. For me, one of the first objectives of any program is to become a part of the targeted consumer's way of life. Working at the edge of a trend-setting market segment requires keeping up with your customer's ever-changing wants and needs. The Dr Pepper brand group under Robbie Harrington, conducted one of the most extensive research studies of the soft drink industry ever launched.

It didn't take long to recognize that we had our work cut out for us. We learned that much up front. Most people who were polled could not describe what Dr Pepper tasted like. It was variously compared to everything from medicine to prune juice to pepper sauce. Nothing else tasted like Dr Pepper and Dr Pepper tasted like nothing else. Many respondents said their only knowledge of the brand came from the "HOT" Dr Pepper commercials done by Dick Clark on American Bandstand in the 1950's

No one surveyed understood the significance of the 12, 6, and 9 on the label. No one had a clue of what it was made of, or that it wasn't the oldest major Soft Drink brand in America. Meanwhile, downstairs in the creative department, as I and my colleagues pondered what to do with all this research that told us nobody knew anything about the brand , Irv Weinberg cradled a bottle of Dr Pepper and jokingly said, "Aww, poor baby; so misunderstood." From his lips to the lips of a million consumers! We had our tag line: Dr Pepper : America's Most Misunderstood Soft Drink.

From there, it was just a matter of plugging in the pieces. Our Misunderstood Market Segment: Young, hip, disaffected urbanites in the Top 10 markets. Misunderstood media: "Alternative" publications such as the Village Voice, Chicago Reader and LA Weekly. As for television, it was Saturday Night Live, period. Misunderstood event marketing: Rock promoters.

The Dr Pepper targeted prospects were defined by media choices. Their media dictated what they wore, where and what they ate, and when they were expected to move to the next trend. Their media helped them to reinforce their ethics and allegiance to the precepts of their crowd. Thus our strategy was to play the "Misunderstood" theme to the audiences of the Village Voice and Chicago Reader and Saturday Night Live. We had Dr Pepper drinkers hiding in closets, or surrounded by cases of Dr P in a room decorated with Dr P memorabilia. In short, we took what our research told us was the public perception of the brand and threw it back at them--but with the message that something (or someone) could be misunderstood but still be part of a group.

It's important to point out that while selective marketing could accurately position Dr Pepper as "America's Most Misunderstood Soft Drink," without just the right tone of voice, just the right amount of irreverence, just the right touch of offhanded sarcasm, it would not have rung true and succeeded. Achieving those nuances required developing an insider's understanding of a targeted market segment, and Y&R management went about it in the most logical way: they composed the creative team of members who fit the selected target profile--essentially market "insiders"--and put them to work on a brand that wanted to be the insider's soft drink. It worked.

Sometimes the market segment is you and when that's the case, remember, self-analysis is helpful, but don't stop there. Talk to enough other market representatives to find the full range of values consumers like you identify with.

By developing an insider's understanding of their target market's sensitivities through the work of Y&R's "downtown" creatives, the "uptown " suits in account management were able to convey the client's product as both different and better than the competition--- an alternative for the alternative culture. When you target a customer who considers him- or herself outside the mainstream, your marketing campaign must have two goals. First, you damn sure better ensure that your consumer understands the sales message. Second, you absolutely, positively have to convince the consumer that you understand his or her specific wants, needs and desires.

In the case of Dr Pepper, the consumers came to believe that "the misunderstood soft drink" was a better, or at least different way, to quench their thirst, and they felt Dr Pepper validated them as individuals. The danger inherent in targeting a young, "hip" consumer is losing sight of the fact that as the consumers mature, their wants and needs change. Simply, the hipper the advertising, the more quickly it becomes outdated. So, in 1973, Y&R realized it was time to test for the targeted segment's current needs and wants. "Endless consumer dialogue," we called it .

At Y&R, it was time to put a new team to work on what had essentially become a "new" target market. It was determined that the target market for Dr Pepper had expanded, as did the audience for Saturday Night Live. A broader audience required a broader positioning. And so the next phase of the Dr Pepper expansion campaign was to create parodies of great films. The new theme was "America's Most Original soft drink, Ever."

This go-around, money was no object. The new team, was headed by a young art director who had just arrived from McCann with a knowledge of film that would stagger Scorsese, Dominick Rosetti. Dominick's budgets exceeded the cost of some of the most popular feature films of the time, such as "Easy-Rider" or "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." It was considered well worth the expense when Dr Pepper edged 7UP out of the number three spot in domestic soft drink sales. Ironically, Dr Pepper, once so misunderstood, began to enjoy mainstream recognition. Its fame peaked with the now-famous " I'm A Pepper, You're A Pepper " campaign, which had the whole nation humming the refrain. Good-bye selective marketing. Hello mass marketing.

The most important lesson to take from the Dr Pepper experience is to stay abreast of changes, in your selected market, in the creative team working on the project, in society as a whole. All can signal the need to reevaluate your marketing campaign. Selective marketing is one proven method of keeping up with, and when possible, staying ahead of consumer changes, but it' not the only way. We will spotlight others from time to time.