Marketing to Martians

August 20, 2007

Picture it. Mars, 2020. You have been selected to be brand manager for Coca Cola, Mars Division. You step out of the spaceport and are greeted by your travel pod driver, a green creature half your height and with one eye. No nose. No mouth.

It turns out, due to some terrible glitch in marketing research, that someone has overlooked the fact that Martians have no sense of smell, and no taste buds. They imbibe through a rather rude suction organ located somewhere fiendishly strategic – eating and drinking is purely functional and gives them no pleasure whatsoever.

You’re on Mars. Selling Coca Cola. To Martians who will never “Taste the real thing.”

What do you do?

You set up a Pepsi vs Coke taste test, thinking “Hey, if it worked on Earth, it’s gotta be sensational here”. Martians, it turns out, have a sense of humour, and the test subjects, having taken a swig from your polystyrene cups, reverse their suction devices, showering you in a spray of “The taste of a new generation” as well as “The real thing.”

Plan B. You think back to your old marketing text books. Chapter four. Sell the benefits, not the features. You look around you, wondering what benefits a tasteless (sic) Martian will get from fizzy sugar water. No taste buds, no real thing.

Life-sustaining refreshment? Well, those Martian polar caps ARE actually made of ice, and it is clear that Martians, like people, will soon die without H2O. Refreshment on Mars, as on Earth, comes from WATER.

Caffeine makes Martians cranky (you find out the hard way). And sugar just makes Martians fall over. No benefits there…

You remember reading on the Internet somewhere that Coca Cola used to contain cocaine. That was so 1800s…You ponder the effects of cocaine on a Martian and shudder. You stop that train of thought immediately.

You also read somewhere that Coca Cola was originally green – that would have suited Martians quite nicely, but you have HUMAN Coca Cola to sell, so no luck there.

You’ve had it with this miserable red planet. In disgust, you throw a bottle of Coke against a nearby rock. It breaks and the black stuff pours out onto the rich Martian soil. As the Coca Cola seeps into the soil, the earth (Earth on Mars! On Mars this “earth” should probably called “mars”) starts to bubble and foam, leaving a six foot deep hole. You step back in wonder. Your brain ticks over.

Feature: Coca Cola is to Mars soil as a soldering iron is to marshmallows.

Benefit: Make holes fast.

Target market: Miners, construction workers, gardeners and undertakers.

You email Earth headquarters and place an order for 50 billion litres.

Now, if you could just get that damn dynamic ribbon device copyrighted on Mars…

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