Snake Oil Salesman or Pastel Artist
Neil Gonsalves discusses the trendy 40oz Stanley Quencher H2.0 Flowstate and the upside of recognizing when you can avoid reinventing the wheel by merely slapping some pastel paint on it
Written by Neil Gonsalves for Seeking Veritas on Substack
“Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others”
- Says everyone while misquoting Winston Churchill quoting someone else about democracy in some House of Commons speech.
“I am an unapologetic capitalist”; how often do you hear a phrase like that from people under the age of 40 in North America? I have an opinion about that; I know, shocking!
For starters age 40 captures the oldest in the millennial generation and all the Gen Zs now in high school, more relevantly it captures those in the age of the smart phone, and social media influencers. Too young to care about Marshall McLuhan, yet technologically addicted enough to demonstrate that the medium is the message.
I smile at the irony and tragic comedy on full display when someone wearing retro AIR Jordans, carrying a Lululemon cross body bag, and sipping out of a Stanley Quencher H2.0 Flowstate containing 40oz of a quad long shot salted caramel mocha latte with 2 pumps of white chocolate mocha, half whole milk and half breve with no whipped cream, extra foam, extra caramel drizzle, extra salt, a scoop of vanilla bean powder with light ice well stirred, lectures strangers about the perils of consumerism and the evils of capitalism. I admit it’s more obnoxious when you are directly behind them in line at Starbucks but still somehow equally entertaining.
Remember all those commercials about the evils of bottled water and the plastic pollution. I guess the Stanley Quencher H2.0 Flowstate means no more plastic (As long as you can afford the cup… in all the pretty pastel colours… because how can anyone keep reusing just one reusable mug?) - I haven’t got the memo yet but I think YETI is out and STANLEY is in now.
Regardless of how you feel about the cup itself you have to appreciate the business savvy behind the marketing and the company’s ability to stay relevant after more than a 100 years in business. Over a period of three years the company went from $73 million to over $750 million in sales, now that’s revenue growth. What is more impressive is that they did it by reviving a discontinued line that failed once before, without creating anything new or innovative to the product itself. Unless you consider adding pastel colours revolutionary. For Stanley it was!
The company changed their target demographic from working blue collar men with a need for a durable thermos, to suburban female millennials and Gen Zs who need to signal their conformity to the latest viral trends.
Now I’ve heard people talk about influencers like clairvoyant forecasters who will help you identify the current (albeit fleeting) symbols of your pop cultural relevance. But in all reality it’s a socially engineered cultural relevance sponsored by corporations and sold by “truth tellers” who influence you with their honest and unbiased affiliation with the over priced brands you just must have too. - I don’t have a problem with any of that, corporations exist to make a profit; it’s the gullible public with their willful blindness that annoys me.
Would a teenage girl or young women by a Stanley if they saw the old construction commercial? Would they care about the utility of having the lid double as a cup? Well of course not, so a new strategy was employed. Ever notice that social media influencers share their content for free? Andrew Lewis the Freelance Content Marketing Strategist would tell you, “If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.” Social media influencers sell you, the consumer, to the companies by manufacturing demand.
Stanley also partnered with companies like Olay and Starbucks to tap into the customers who already use or align with.the symbols of virtue signalling on offer. Stanley’s VP of brand marketing Jenn Reeves said in an interview,
“The Stanley Quencher has transcended a water bottle and become a lifestyle accessory… we combine [functionality] with color that they can match with their clothes, their nails…”
According to media sources, Stanley leaned heavily and unabashedly into gender based marketing when many companies sought to be gender neutral in their strategy to avoid public shaming. Stanley seems to have embraced the social media influencer as a means of engaging would be customers. They collaborated with influencers and other popular brands, which brought them approximately 10 million views. They drove new interest constantly by encouraging consumers to buy the latest colour. As an added bonus people have a tendency to take pictures of everything they buy which then serves as free advertising for the company.
Stanley owes the success of the Quencher H2.0 Flowstate in large part to Ashlee LeSueur, Taylor Cannon, and Linley Hutchinson, who own and run ‘The Buy Guide’ an e-commerce blog and Instagram account, where the Quencher tumbler was among the first products they featured
“We promise you, it will sell. We will introduce this cup to an army of other influencers on Instagram, and it will blow your mind what women selling to women looks like… Every time we linked it, it would sell out so quickly... We got so many pictures from teachers who all have them in their classrooms and from nurses stations with cups overflowing in different colors, and we knew we were onto something.” - Ms. Ashlee LeSueur
The bloggers were able to convince women and girls everywhere that they needed to fit in, they needed to hydrate, and they needed to do it from a pretty pastel cup! How convincing were they? Stanley would tell they were so convincing it brought them $677 million dollars. The best part was they got all that extra money by convincing a bunch of people they have to line up and buy the same product the company has made for decades.
A Forbes article presented data from recent studies showing that influencer marketing is worth approximately $15 billion annually. Yet there is almost no oversight or regulation compared to traditional advertising.
Psychological manipulation, high speed internet, and uninformed consumers contribute to the perfect conditions for rapid revenue growth or at least another opportunity to dupe a gullible market.
My suggestion, get informed and then buy whatever you want no matter how frivolous because you choose it. Or, at least don’t conform to every passing trend because you know us unapologetic capitalists are coming for you.
About the author: Neil Gonsalves is an Indian-born Canadian immigrant who grew up in Dubai, U.A.E. and moved to Canada in 1995. He is an Ontario college educator, a TEDx speaker, an author and columnist, a recreational dog trainer and an advocate for new immigrant integration and viewpoint diversity.
Notes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2019/12/20/can-we-trust-social-media-influencers/amp/
Really enjoyed this article and how it was put together. As someone who has an old thermos (I do love that the lid doubles as a cup), but little familiarity with Instagram, and even less familiarity with this "influencer" business, this was an informative and eye-opening read. (To be honest, it was worth reading just for that latte description.)
I could not believe that whole Stanley cup thing. It seemed to come out of nowhere and now people are asking $10,000 for one cup on Ebay. Uh-huh. It's like Carhartt and even Converse suddenly being "discovered" by a generation that hates boomers but seems to love the stuff they use. Ah....what a time we live in