When I’m bored, I check the promotions tab of my email. (We’ve discussed this before.) I’ve found gems in there, like Madewell spelling its own name wrong:
(Yes, that’s a paid ad in my promotions tab. Paying… to go to the junk tab… sometimes advertisers dream so small it hurts my heart.)
More recently, I found this:
Lol, okay. So this is a “play” (?) on the beginning of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” which has taken over the charts and TikTok and children. (I like the TikTok I linked because someone runs through with a literal bucket and mop at just the right time! Give that woman a best supporting actress Oscar.)
More broadly, though, this email represents something I have started to think of as Mad Lib marketing. It’s like… if I cram my message (buy candles!) into something demonstrably popular (“WAP” lyrics!), it’ll be… a hit?
I really don’t think this works. It sounds like something that would work to people who don’t love language, or think of language as a machine. And sometimes, something takes off that sort of looks like Mad Lib marketing at a glance.
Take this tweet:
This is killer social media marketing. Most marketers will tell you it pays to turn customers into “brand evangelists,” who recommend your product to their friends. But this ^ is some next level shit — getting people who’ve never even tried your product to recommend it? 5,000+ of them? That’s insane.
The way Jasmine Allen did it almost looks like a mad lib, too — but it’s not. If Dell tweeted the same thing, but swapped out “Black owned yoga product company” for “on-demand access to a PowerEdge Tower Server,” I would not retweet that in one million years. It would be bizarre, and totally out of character/Twitter voice for Dell, which is more likely to tweet a bulleted list masquerading as a paragraph than directly ask for retweets.
That's not the only reason I think Allen’s tweet isn't a template for other people/brands. Here is my non-comprehensive list of reasons I think it worked for her specifically:
It feels human.
The tweet is written in the first person, which creates a certain kind of intimacy. A corporate Twitter account can’t pull this off.
It solves a legit problem.
If you want to buy yoga products from a Black-owned business, your life is hard. The internet hasn’t cracked the case yet. If you search “Black owned yoga product company,” Google turns up a bunch of general wellness listicles, and they’re not great — the #1 result is, as far as I can tell, a roundup of paid advertisements.
Google did recently roll out a way to highlight that a business is Black-owned via Google profile, but I’m not sure how widely it’s been adopted yet, and it seems (maybe?) restricted to brick-and-mortar stores.
It makes a certain kind of white yogi feel bad, but not too bad.
“Black-owned” and “yoga products” fit together in a very specific, compelling way in this tweet.
The Venn diagram of people who are into yoga and people into ethical consumerism is… close to a circle. But ethical consumerism, for most yogis I know, is more about going to the farmer’s market (a must!!) or making sure bees weren’t harmed in the production of their hemp yoga bolster (bees are dying!!!) than shopping at Black-owned businesses. This could reflect philosophical disagreement with Black capitalism but I think it’s more obliviousness.
Meanwhile, yoga practitioners are 80 percent white (according to a very old stat in the Atlantic that still feels true to me) (also much anecdotal evidence, like the great essay “White Women Drive Me Crazy”). This is a source of ambient racial guilt in many yoga studio ~communities~, especially because yoga originated in India — it’s crazy how quickly and thoroughly Americans whitewashed it!
So while Allen isn’t talking to white yogis specifically, her tweet probably sparked a whole bouquet of guilty feelings for them — about the ultra-whiteness of their hobby, and the maybe-incomplete “ethics” of their ethical consumerism.
Then she gives them an easy way to resolve the guilt: Just RT! You can be part of the solution without even buying from her! Incredible.
Cute pix.
The pictures of her products are cute, well-lit and Insta-friendly. (I like the blanket!) They suggest her product is good, or at least looks like other good products look online. This is important to her astonishing RT situation because in my experience, there is a huge swathe of (again, mostly white) people who want to be anti-racist and support marginalized people and close the racial wealth gap… but not so much that they will signal boost a dark or out-of-focus photo. I am not proud of them but they’re out here.
***
So… I’ve now written a lot of words about a tweet, but basically, there is no foolproof template for marketing anything, imo. Ripping off Allen’s viral tweet probably won’t make someone else go viral. Ripping off “WAP” probably didn’t make Boy Smells rich.
Don’t get me wrong — I love Boy Smells candles. I have a Hinoki Fantome from them, and I have no idea what it smells like but I like it. (Its main ingredient is “resin”????) There is just something deeply disturbing about the combination of uh… burning… and wetness… suggested by their email. To refresh:
I guess heat and liquid both sort of signify lust, but I don’t want to think about anyone putting a lit (or unlit!!) candle in a WAP. You know?
The email is further confused, my friend pointed out, by the fact it isn’t just shoehorning artisanal candles into the lyrics — it’s also trying to make them seasonal. “Especially in fall”?!?!? This is where the disrespect to “WAP”’s rhyme scheme really shoots off into the stratosphere. It’s too much! We live in a bricolage culture, or whatever, but I still am a big supporter of marketers, and everyone, writing their own, original words. From scratch.
This is good though. >:)