The Thurber For The Thing Thurbered

I really like Keith Olbermann. I have reasons: He wrote for me on occasion when I was editing sports periodicals, and he's a wonderful writer, as clean and crisp as someone who's written for broadcast all his life should be. His knowledge of sports cards is encyclopedic, as I found out whenever I confused my Turkey Reds with my Ramlys. I also admire his politics, and the fact that he doesn’t have to resort to a “This Machine Kills Fascists” T-shirt to get his point across.

I like Olbermann doing the highlights on Football Night in America (the best thing to happen to football since Hardy Brown invented the snot-knocker), I liked him on SportsCenter, I like his tweets, I like him in a box, I like him with a fox (but not at Fox) ... you get the idea.

Another reason I like Keith Olbermann: He loves James Thurber and is committed to plugging Thurber to readers and Tea Partiers alike. Hey, so am I. In fact, one of my favorite Thurber pieces is the subject of today's column.

No, it's not "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" or "The Night The Bed Fell." This piece is called "Here Lies Miss Groby" and is about that all-time knee-slapper, parts of speech.

Thurber writes about how his English-composition teacher, Miss Groby, spurred his obsession with that part of speech known as The Container For The Thing Contained -- and its rarer sub-species, The Thing Contained For the Container.

His example of the former was, "Friends, Romans, countrymen -- lend me your ears." His example of the latter, which he thought up hisownself, was, "Get away from me or I'll hit you with the milk."

You gotta read the piece. You'll laugh.

Thinking about that piece the other day made me wonder: How much of your marketing effort should go toward selling the container, and how much to the thing contained?

At first blush, that doesn’t seem like much of a question. If you run a dairy you’re in the business of selling milk, not the bottle.

Oh, really?

Eighty percent or more of milk is water, and in this case at least, water is water. Without marketing, the remaining 20 percent is an assortment of subtlties so subtle that you could be presented with a lineup of milks from a dozen dairies running the gamut from Sunshine’s Hand-Milked Holsteins to BGH Acres and not be able to tell one from the other.

You can take this too far in the other direction, too, and place so much equity in the Container that you forget the Thing Contained has virtues as well. It’s easy to get so wound up in the fact that a Rolex screams six-figure income that you forget it does a hell of a good job keeping time under extreme circumstances.

Now that we’ve established the extremes let’s head to the middle, because that’s where the interesting stuff is.

When you’re given a product or service to market you invariably start with the product attributes. Some may be The Thing Contained and quite tangible – this garbage disposal has titanium blades – while some are the less-tangible Container – our airline is renowned for personal service.

Now, neither The Container nor The Thing Contained guarantees anything beyond itself. The titanium blades may be attached to a motor made from dental floss and spittle, for instance, and the airline that prides itself on personal service needs to deliver personal service because all its planes are two hours late.

If you over-promote The Thing Contained you run the risk of being copied. Other companies can make a disposal with titanium blades, and make the motor out of cardboard and malted-milk powder to boot.

If you over-promote The Container you effectively place a halt on progress. Think of the hoohah that ensued when Kentucky Fried Chicken got a face-lift. You’d have thought they replaced the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices with D-Con.

The answer, then, is to put everything where it belongs. Put The Thing Contained in The Container.

Oh, sure. Put The Thing Contained in The Container. Will do – right after solving global warming and finding a cure for cancer.

Here’s what I mean. Promote the product attributes as a subset of the brand attributes. Orville Redenbacher’s microwave popcorn tastes great because it comes from Orville Redenbacher. The cheese experts at Kraft make Kraft macaroni and cheese the cheesiest. You’re not going to die in a T60 because it’s a Volvo.

My favorite example of this is the Southwest Airlines “Bags Fly Free” campaign. Southwest took a hot-button issue – charging fliers for every bag they put on an airplane – carved out a unique position – we won’t charge for extra bags – and tied it to their overall brand identity – because we’re Southwest.

Bags fly free on Southwest. The Thing Contained squarely in The Container.

This is slam-dunk marketing, but it requires some ingenuity on a marketer’s part to weave a product’s attributes into a brand’s attributes. You can’t always say, “X exists because of Y.”

Let’s take an example where this sort of marketing is rarely done: beer.

A lot of beer advertising is built around the theme, “Our beer tastes better when you spit it out your nose ‘cause you’re laughing so hard.” How much more effective and long-lasting would the message be if instead beer marketers said, “We’ve been helping you have fun for the last 150 years. We’re gonna get this right”?

You can argue drinkability versus triple-hops brewing all you want. You can’t argue with 150 years of hangovers.

Just like hitting your spouse with the milk, The Thing Contained is almost always more effective when it’s in The Container.

James Thurber would understand. So would Miss Groby. And I know Keith Olbermann gets it.