In 2001, Dennis Tito, a financial analyst with a background in aerospace engineering, became the world’s first space tourist. He bought a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft and spent a week cruising in the weightless environment of the International Space Station. He paid $20 million for the trip.
It sounds like a dream vacation, a chance to experience zero-gravity and enjoy an alien’s eye view of the planet. If the price ever comes down to an earthly level, the tickets would almost sell themselves.
Almost… because a marketer of space adventures would have to hide the hospitality details in the small print. The only drink available on the International Space Station is fellow passengers’ urine. The space station uses a closed water circuit. All water used on the spacecraft is cleaned and recycled, ready to be drunk again.
A week spent floating above the Earth is pretty good compensation for drinking coffee that a shipmate drank twice that week already, but the bar at the International Space Station isn’t the only place with an uninviting menu. As the sharing economy grew, we all became accustomed to using products and services that we might otherwise have found distasteful.
Book an Uber and you’ll know you’ll be riding in the back of a stranger’s car while making small talk with someone you’ve never met. Rent an AirBnB, and you’ll be staying in someone else’s apartment, sleeping in their bed and using their bathroom. Fashion rental services let women wear designer gowns that were previously worn and sweated in by other women at a host of other events.
Each of those sales requires a customer to overcome their aversion and agree to buy something they might otherwise have considered “dirty.” So how do marketers overcome that negative reaction and turn dirt into an asset?
The Appeal of Meal Worm Tofu
Spencer Huber Harrison of France’s Instead Business School and Samir Nurmohamed of the University Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School have been looking into the selling of dirt—or as anthropologists call it: matter out of place. The researchers were investigating radical creativity. As they interviewed entrepreneurs and designers who had won international design awards, they came across creative workers who had designed a protein bar made of insects.
Generating the idea for the bar had turned out to be the easy part of the work. The most creative efforts went into normalizing the product and persuading people to buy it—what the researchers called “dirty creativity.”
They sought out other people involved in the manufacture and marketing of products whose characteristics were intrinsically undesirable. Eventually, they talked to 48 sellers of insect-based food, clothes made of algae, and products made of recycled waste. They also tested the products themselves, eating a variety of cricket and meal worm protein bars, cookies, chips, granola, lollipops, dry-roasted insects, and milkshakes. Using insect flour they cooked up pancakes, waffles, and cookies. Their case studies included meal worm mash called Worm Tofu, handbags made of cow stomachs, and cricket-based snacks.
They found that marketers faced a dilemma. The key characteristic that made the products stand out from their competitors was the very thing that could put off buyers. Creative workers, Harrison and Nurmohamed found, had “to develop tactics for drawing attention to dirtiness while doing so in a way that mitigates the potentially catastrophic downsides of doing so.”
The marketers they spoke to used two strategies.
Moving Dirt and Flinging Dirt
First, they relocated the dirt, making “the dirty design feel like it belongs within the normative bounds where it is introduced.” They tried to make the “dirty” characteristic of a product feel familiar and normal so that eating crickets or swinging a sheep’s stomach over a shoulder was no more strange than a prawn salad or a leather pouch. That happened through both changing the language and by changing the form.
The idea isn’t new. Butchers sell “beef,” not “cow.” Chicken comes plucked and beheaded so that it looks like pink slabs rather than a dead bird. By changing the language and the shape of a product, the least desirable aspects of that product—its dirt—are cleaned and sanitized.
The manufacturers of insect-based food had to create that language themselves. Mashed meal worms became a form of “tofu,” a familiar food product. Crushed crickets became Insect Flour.
“We try and relate it to things that are very common in everyday – very common in people’s lives, like powdered sugar or stuff that they use on a daily basis,” the maker of Insect Flour told the researchers. “I think that’s like cricket flour—the word itself, flour, actually is a benefit. I think that’s where you can get that association and it’ll help with [adoption].”
Other terms creative workers came up to familiarize the consumption of insects included Desert Lobster, Verminous Haute Cuisine, Butterworms, Sky Prawns, and Land Shrimp.
The terms also related to the form. Turning insects into a powder obscured their needle-like legs and hard exoskeletons and made the crickets look like the kind of product everyone has on their kitchen shelves. The designer of Worm Tofu had some success after he turned his mash into ice cream.
“People are pretty excited to try meal worm ice cream when it’s available to them,” they told the researchers. “I can definitely say we get more people tasting worm tofu than we would if we just showed up with a plate of steamed worms.”
The other approach recast the dirt as a value in itself. The designer of Stomach Handbags explained that she’d grown up with nature and animals, and knew how to skin and prepare a carcass. For her, an animal’s organs were a composition of different materials, colors and textures. She wanted to bring that aesthetic out in the design of her bags.
“That’s something that design can do,” she said. “You can make something very valuable or use aesthetics to get the people’s attention, to frame something in a certain way. When I am presenting the stomachs, people are really interested in it, and they want to touch it, and they don’t know what it is.”
Design can bring out an intrinsic value in something otherwise thought of as dirty in the same way that a tanner turns an animal skin into expensive leather.
Use cases can have a similar effect. The inventor of Pollution Ink, a material made out of pollution sucked from the city’s air, worked with artists to create giant billboards that went up around London’s Piccadilly Circus. Converting the product into something creative made it beautiful, the inventor argued, and people started seeing pollution not as waste—or “dirt”—but as a resource that could be harvested.
And clear standards help too. The makers of insect-based food have campaigned for the industry to abide by high food standards as a way of both reassuring consumers that the product is safe and preventing any small accident that could seriously damage the development of a sensitive industry.
So the strategy for a business promoting a product that causes customers to recoil is first to reframe the product so that its strangeness becomes familiar and only a single characteristic is left to stand out from the competition. The founder of one cricket protein bar company told Harrison and Nurmohamed that their goal was to “not innovate too much.” Eating insects was innovation enough. Everything else—from the form of the product to its name—needed to be safe and recognizable.
Having hammered out a form that’s familiar and a name that at least hides the strangeness of the product, the company would then highlight the benefits of its undesirable quality. Marketers might focus on the product’s health benefits, its unique but innate beauty, or its cost-effectiveness. The fat vein running across the surface of a handbag made of a cow’s stomach becomes not a reminder of the product’s origin but of its proximity to nature.
And the company should also work with competitors to create a standard, even when the government doesn’t demand one. The use of organic standards did much to reassure buyers that the expensive, wonky fruit they were buying in Wholefoods was both genuinely pesticide-free and overseen by a body they could trust.
As industry moves away from a sharing economy in which we travel in each other’s cars, sleep in each other’s beds, and choose outfits from the same closet, and drifts towards a new economy empowered by artificial intelligence, those two approaches to removing dirt are going to become increasingly important. If the public sees AI-constructed songs, books and other products as stained by the absence of a human touch their manufacturers will need to find ways to make them familiar and their algorithmic content valuable.
The challenge will be to make artificial intelligence as appealing as mashed meal worm ice cream and a cup of astronaut urine.
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