The marketing for Anacin was brilliant and studied. Creating emotion around how you make others feel was a master class of messaging.

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Dave Young:
Welcome back to The Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here, along with Stephen Semple. I really don’t have much for the topic that Stephen just whispered into my ear other than I know the brand name.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
It’s pain relief and it’s Anacin.

Stephen Semple:
Anacin.

Dave Young:
Anacin. I’m trying to remember, there’s one of those brands, it was either Anacin, or Beyer, or Excedrin, that combined a little Aspirin with a little caffeine maybe, or something like that, but I don’t know if this is the one.

Stephen Semple:
You’re actually really, as usual, David, very, very close. Pretty much on the money.

Dave Young:
All right. Okay.

Stephen Semple:
The first commercial painkiller created was Aspirin. That was created in 1897 by a German chemist and the product was branded Bayer, with Bayer, if you remember on it, Bayer was done as a cross. It was Bayer left to right, Bayer vertical, the Ys meeting in the middle and it formed this little-

Dave Young:
Like the Red Cross.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
All of that, yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Now it first falsely started. In 1897, it was a powder, and it was in 1914 that it changed to a table and had that branding on it. Bayer was marketed by promoting the product to doctors who then told patients.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
It was all about informing the doctor, the doctor would inform patients. Anacin changed the rules for marketing medicinal products forever because they came into the market and decided to advertise to the patient who would then go to the pharmacist and demand it.

Dave Young:
Okay.

Stephen Semple:
Up until this point, everything was marketed to the doctor, to the doctor, to the doctor, to the doctor. Instead, Anacin was the first to come along and say, “No, we’re going to go direct to the consumer.” We’re going to market to the patient, and the patient is going to walk up to the pharmacist and say, “Hey, I want some Anacin.”

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
If that happens enough, guess what’s going to happen? The pharmacist is going to carry Anacin.

Dave Young:
Yeah. It’s like the Wrigley Spearmint Gum story all over again.

Stephen Semple:
Wrigley Spearmint Gum story, but done in the medical space.

Again, it’s one of these things where, for so long, you could sit there and go, “Yeah, but that works for gum, yeah that works for this, that works for parcel services, that works for all this other stuff,” but all of a sudden it’s like, “But medicine is different.” Medicine is not different. We’re seeing it today. How many drugs do we see being advertised today, where it’s advertised direct to the consumer or it’s, “Ask your doctor. Talk to your doctor about this.” Because what they know is if you walk into the doctor’s office asking about it, the doctor will then make sure they know about it and likely prescribe it.

Anacin started advertising in the 1940s on the radio. Here’s what the spot claimed. “Anacin is like a doctor’s prescription, not just one but a combination of several medically active ingredients. They have the extra ingredient that’s missing from Aspirin.”

Dave Young:
Okay. The extra ingredient that’s missing?

Stephen Semple:
The extra ingredient that’s missing. It’s that whole idea like you were saying, you even said, you remembered, “Isn’t that the one where they had this extra thing?” That’s what they talked about.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
“We’ve got more, we have three medically active ingredients, Aspirin has one.” That was how they went about doing it on the radio.

Then when they went to television, this is when it really took off. The ad would show either a husband or a wife who would snap because of a headache. They would get mad at their spouse about something, and inevitably it’d be something small, but it’d be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Then an inside voice would say, “Control yourself. Sure, you have a headache, don’t take it out on them.” The voice is like, “David, control yourself. Sure, you have a headache but you don’t need to take it out on Susan.”

Dave Young:
On the kids.

Stephen Semple:
They then took an Anacin and were happy.

Dave Young:
Sure.

Stephen Semple:
Transformational ad. Then the differentiator about the ingredient would come out at the end of the ad. “We’ve got these three ingredients.”

When they started doing this, sales increased from 18 million to 54 million in 18 months.

Dave Young:
Wow. A lot of people are angry at somebody.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
That doesn’t want to be.

Stephen Semple:
Right. Now what’s interesting is this Anacin ad is very studied in marketing. I think the study is a misinterpretation because many marketers will show this ad as being, “This ad is a demonstration of the power of a unique selling proposition.” We always hear about, “What’s your USP? What’s your unique differentiator?”

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
“The unique differentiator is the extra ingredient. The reason why everybody’s buying this is the extra ingredient. See, this ad proves that unique selling propositions work.”

I don’t believe that that’s the reason. They didn’t have huge success with the radio ad. They had huge success with the TV ad and what happened in the TV ad was actually transformational. We had identification, snapping at somebody because we have a headache, a shared experience. We’ve all done it. We can relate to the person. A voice inside your head saying, “You shouldn’t take it out on them,” we’ve all felt that way.

Dave Young:
Sure.

Stephen Semple:
Then the cure for that is Anacin. Anacin is the transformation to the habit that you want, where all of a sudden there’s harmony in the family. Then they had on the end, “Okay, yeah we’ve got this extra ingredient.”

I believe those ads would have worked even without the stating of the extra ingredient. The extra ingredient was just this little extra differentiator that said, “Yeah, Bayer’s not going to quite work as well as Anacin, you want Anacin to cure this problem.”

Dave Young:
Yeah. Anacin’s going to make you feel a little different.

Stephen Semple:
Anacin’s going to make you feel a little different. But I actually believe the reason why the ads worked was because of this combination of shared experience, any time you’re able to speak to the voice inside somebody’s head, it’s killer. We’ve all had that experience where you’ve snapped at somebody and had this guilty feeling saying, “I shouldn’t have taken it out on Susan.”

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Then Anacin is the cure for that situation, Anacin being the transformation to being the person you want to be, which is the one that’s not snapping at your significant other. The part that they did that was really great is they did it with men snapping at their wives, they did it with wives snapping at their husbands. They did both. They ran that equally. I thought that that was also very powerful, especially back in the ’50s when it would have been very popular just to beat up on the female in this. They shared this burden on both sides.

I thought it was really interesting, as this early example of actually this transformational ad was misinterpreted as being, “Hey, this is an example of why unique selling propositions are really strong.” I’ve always had this belief that USPs are overrated in their strength.

Dave Young:
Same.

Stephen Semple:
In that what really sells something is emotional connection, and these ads built that emotional connection. Honestly, I don’t know that that’s totally unique, anybody else could do that. I love tying it to an emotion that you don’t want to have and saying, “This is how you get rid of that.”

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
Then you’re tying that emotion to the real source, which is you’ve got something that’s aching. It’s your head, it’s your foot, it’s something. If you could ease the pain, you might get into a different mindset.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
If a little caffeine might give you a little bump. At the same time, I think people are also experiencing just a bit of a placebo effect.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, sure.

Dave Young:
“I took the thing, I feel a little different.” I’ve read studies that say a placebo effect works even better if there’s some kind of side effect.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, yeah. It’s been proven that when we’ve put labeling on, “fast-acting,” people will report it acting so much faster. In other words, you’re feeling the effect before it’s actually even chemically possible. The placebo effect is a real thing.

Now one of the things I want to caution people on, whenever you’re marketing to pain, you have to be careful. When you associate your product with pain, that’s a real negative emotion. You have to be very, very careful and, right out of the gate, pivot to being the solution. You don’t want to be associated with the pain, you want to be associated with the transformation. You just have to be really careful when you do that style of marketing. It can blow up in your face.

But I just thought Anacin was just such a great early example of this whole voice inside the head, and being this demonstration of this transformational story that’s all one that we relate to.

Dave Young:
You could say something like, “Oh, you’re being really nice today. You must have had some Anacin.” We attribute it to your niceness.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
We attribute your niceness to the product.

Stephen Semple:
But talk about a killer campaign, when you take something from 18 million to 54 million in 18 months.

Dave Young:
Now that’s huge. That’s just amazing.

Stephen Semple:
That’s putting the ball out of the park.

Dave Young:
Aspirin, caffeine. What was the third? It was probably just chalk.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, I don’t know. That was their big thing of that, “We have these three ingredients,” in terms of a little bit of a differentiator. But it was again, that little bit of a differentiator at the end that allowed the consumer to go, “Yes, I need pain medication, but it needs to be this one for this set of reasons.”

Dave Young:
There have also been a lot of brands studied where just the wording on the package can make a difference in how people feel it was effective.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, yes.

Dave Young:
If you buy extra-strength Tylenol for arthritis, it’s the exact same product, it’s just extra-strength Tylenol in the same dosage.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Dave Young:
But it doesn’t say for arthritis on the label, so you buy the one that does that. Or for back pain.

Stephen Semple:
Language in labeling and things like that is so powerful. As you know, I used to work with a company that did consulting in the medical space. We had a regulatory division that actually worked with Health Canada and the FDA on labeling. Yeah, there are very, very specific rules and regulations around how you can label drug products and the words that you can use because what is known is it actually has an impact on the effectiveness of the drug. Yeah, labeling and whatnot is very regulated in the medical space for those reasons.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Because yes, as soon as you say this, it then carries all this other stuff. But it also speaks to how powerful words are. I think we discount how, as you said, just the fact you say, “This is for back pain,” all of a sudden if you gave that person the nonback pain one and the back pain one, they would report, “Oh no, this one works better on my back,” and it’s exactly the same. Words and language are very, very powerful. Very, very powerful.

Dave Young:
Yeah. I think of other products like Midol that’s targeted at premenstrual pain and things like that, and it’s also Aspirin and caffeine.

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Dave Young:
I think sometimes the formulation might be a little bit different, but you’re just targeting something else and stating that targeting in either the name of the product or the description of it, and somehow it magically makes a difference.

Stephen Semple:
Well, here’s the other funny thing is if you took that very same drug, and let’s say you’ve got this one drug that can actually do these 27 things effectively, and if you put on the label, “It works for this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this,” we dismiss it as snake oil. But yet, if you did the same product with 27 different packages where you say, “It works for this,” all of a sudden we’re far more accepting that it works for that.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Now some people would say it’s misleading, but is it? You’re just saying, “No, this works for back pain,” which it does, but it also works for a bunch of other things. It’s this weird thing that happens with messaging and whatnot.

The part that I want people to take is if you have a product or a service that is transformational, that takes a person from one state to another, what you need to do in your ads is take a person through that journey.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
You have to take them through that journey. You can’t just sit there and say, “It solves this pain.” No, you’ve got to take them from the pain to the product, to the solution. You have to take them through the journey and say your product or service is the conduit to take you through this place.

Dave Young:
Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
But you’ve got to take them there on the journey.

Dave Young:
Powerful message. I love the idea of taking them through that journey. Marketing-wise, there’s something that feels a little odd about this, but yet it’s true and it’s about how humans think. It’s about how we process information. I don’t think Anacin’s lying to you. I don’t think Midol’s lying to you. I think you could use the same product to do all the things that you said, but we have this weird belief. If you really want to get to the source of it, Terry Pratchett wrote a novel a while back called Wizard’s First Rule. No, Terry Goodkind. Terry Goodkind, not Pratchett. You’ve got to get to page 400-something into the book to figure out what wizard’s first rule is and it’s just basically people are stupid. That’s the Wizard’s first rule. We’ll believe a lie willingly. I don’t have to necessarily believe that it’s going to help my arthritis intellectually, I just have to…

Stephen Semple:
Believe it emotionally.

Dave Young:
Willingly tell myself, “Hey, I’ve done something for it so I feel a little bit better.”

Stephen Semple:
Yeah.

Dave Young:
There’s a big truth to that. It’s an interesting topic and I love talking about it. I’m glad you brought up the Anacin story. Next time I’m achy and I need a second cup of coffee, maybe I’ll just reach for some Anacin.

Stephen Semple:
The other lesson that I want people to take away that we talked about here, and it didn’t specifically have to do with Anacin but more some of the little branches we went off of, specifics are more powerful than generalities, and that’s always the case. That’s one of the things you see going on with some of these other labels.

I’m glad that you found the Anacin story interesting.

Dave Young:
All right, thanks for sharing it.

Stephen Semple:
All right. Thanks, David.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share with us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email  questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com.

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