It’s always a problem arguing with the marketing department. They have the data. They have the demographics. And they are a marketing department. They’re persuasive and know how to push your buttons.
Early in my career, the marketing department at Walt Disney Studios called an emergency meeting. It was a three-alarm fire, and every senior executive showed up ready for battle.
“You can’t release the movie with that title,” the head of marketing declared, throwing down his gauntlet across the boardroom’s oak table.
“Why?” we asked.
“Three problems,” he said. “Dead. The first word is Dead. Nobody goes to a movie with the title Dead. Now, we love the movie, of course, but nobody goes to a movie with the title Dead.”
“What’s the second problem?” we asked.
“Poets,” he declared. “Poetry? Do you think people who read poetry go to the movies? And then there’s that third word. Society. Is this the opera? Is this an elitist film? Change the title!”
In the silence that followed, we eyeballed each other. Then we replied, “We’re not changing the title. It’s our job to make the movie. Your job to market it.”
The formula I have learned across 40 films and 400 attempts is invariable:
Quality x Acceptance = Effectiveness.
And it is multiplicative, not additive. If the acceptance level is zero, the effective outcome becomes zero too. It doesn’t matter how good the quality is. Zero times anything is zero.
In this case, the movie was indeed terrific, and I’m sure you’ve seen it. However, because the title was considered uncommercial and the subject matter considered inaccessible, the film’s transmission challenge began before a single frame was shot. By the time we decided to make it, every other studio had passed on it three times. The marketing department’s instinct was data-driven, correct about the data and absolutely wrong about the audience.
Here the transmission problem was an internal one. The audience was ready for the movie. The institution through which the movie had to travel to reach that audience was not.
Companies face this constantly. Sometimes those transmission problems are external when you’re talking to shareholders, regulators, investors or vendors. But often they are internal, as they were at the studio that day, when the strategy at the top doesn’t transmit to operations throughout the organization. The gap was not between the strategy and the market. It was between the strategy and the system that has to carry it there.
Consider what happens when that gap is ignored.
Burger King’s Satisfries was a technically elegant name, a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “fries,” promising tasty, crunchy French fries with 40 percent less fat and 30 percent fewer calories. Quality? I guess so, if you like fast-food fries. But the transmission failed because nobody had solved the acceptance problem first. Customers weren’t asking for healthier fast food. Satisfries satisfied nobody, and were discontinued in less than a year.
CNN+ was a structurally perfect streaming name, instantly communicating CNN with extra depth, exclusive shows, premium content. The plus-sign addon had proven history, with brands like Apple+ and Disney+. But Pay-TV distribution contracts prevented CNN+ from carrying its primary asset: live breaking news. The one thing subscribers would have paid for was unavailable. A gaping acceptance flaw was built into the architecture before the product launched. It shut down in 32 days with a $300 million loss.
Now consider what happens when someone gets the transmission architecture right, even when the name seems completely wrong.
Liquid Death. In the crowded, sophisticated, bottled water industry, that name should have been dead on arrival. But its founder, Mike Cessario, knew exactly which audience needed to accept it first: concertgoers, festival denizens, people who wanted a non-alcoholic option that didn’t look like a plastic water bottle. He solved the acceptance problem for that target core audience first, and then they became superfans and transmitted it to others. At its last funding round, Liquid Death hit a valuation of $1.4 billion.
So, obviously, there’s life in death.
The difference between CNN+ and Liquid Death is not the quality of the product or even the quality of the name. It is whether the founders understood which audience needed to accept the signal first, and designed a transmission architecture for that initial audience before worrying about everyone else in the world.
John Keating, the professor in Dead Poets Society, had the same problem the marketing department at Disney couldn’t see. He knew what he was teaching and why. However, Welton Academy, the boarding school institution through which he had to transmit it, had no capacity to accept his gifts. He was carrying a brilliant signal through a system designed to resist. And at the end of the film, Keating’s signal had changed his students’ lives forever, but cost him his position.
That is what happens when quality is undeniable and institutional transmission systems are not solved.
Here is what I have learned from 40 films, 400 attempts and a career spent watching brilliant ideas either transmit or disappear:
- The institution through which your strategy must travel is not neutral. It has its own priorities, its own language, its own definition of what success looks like and, quite probably, its own marketing department. Design for the resistance before you begin your transmission. Observe resistance not as an obstacle, but as information about where the acceptance gap lives.
- First impressions matter. Whether it is the name of the initiative, the subject line of the announcement or the first sentence of the memo, that first signal tells your audience whether to lean in or scroll past. Most organizations spend months on strategy but mere minutes on the signal. In my world of movies, the title and the poster image instantly incite interest or I’m-scrolling-on.
- Find the primary target audience whose acceptance carries the signal forward. Dead Poets Society did not need the marketing department’s acceptance to reach its audience. It needed the audience’s. Liquid Death did not need the mainstream consumer’s acceptance first. It needed the metalheads’. Every strategy has a first audience whose acceptance determines whether it travels further. Design for that audience as you design the transmission.
No matter where I travel in the world, someone has seen Dead Poets Society, and they share how it made an indelible mark on their lives. That would never have happened if the title had been what marketing suggested that day: Mr. Keating’s Workbook.
So here is the question to take into your next leadership conversation: When you think about the strategy your organization is trying to advance right now, do you know who needs to accept it first? And have you designed the transmission for them?
If the answer is no, your strategy may be grand, but you will have a transmission problem.
