3 Brilliant Business Lessons Peeps Can Teach You About Starting and Scaling Your Company

‘Meh’ doesn’t inspire people to part with money. If you want to move people to action, you have to move them to feel something.

Whether you love ’em or hate ’em, you have to admit that Peeps are insanely successful. People have been buying the marshmallow confection produced by candy maker Just Born for over 70 years and currently consume around 2 billion of them each year (1.5 billion during Easter alone). As the saying goes, “success leaves clues,” so what can we learn from Peeps?

1. Don’t be afraid to go narrow.

It would be great to be able to sell to all people all the time, but trying to be all things to all people usually results in meaning nothing to anybody. The reason experts suggest narrowing things down and choosing a niche is because in today’s world, people have a lot of options. They want to buy from companies that resonate with them, match their values, or reinforce their identities. The more you focus on one group (or one holiday, in the case of Peeps) the more you can specialize, become wildly popular, and “own” the category.

2. Don’t be afraid to be hated.

I attended a large marketing conference where this point was really driven home. A speaker gave each of us three flags and then played marketing videos on a big screen. She told us to wait until the end of each video and then wave the green flag if we loved it, the red flag if we hated it, or the yellow flag if we felt, “meh.”

Video after video we witnessed just two outcomes. We never saw all green or all red flags being waved. It was either roughly half red and half green with a few yellows, or a complete sea of yellow waving across the room. The videos strongly divided people or didn’t move them at all.

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If you think that getting all yellows is better than getting any reds with your greens, you couldn’t be more wrong. “Meh” doesn’t inspire people to part with money. If you want to move people to action, you have to move them to feel something.

If your brand has personality and character and takes a stand against something, you’ll probably get a lot of green flags. But if you’re bold enough to get the greens, you’re sure to get some reds. If you develop devoted fans, you’re sure to attract detractors (who might even post about you online). That’s just how it works.

Patrick Hanlon, in his excellent book, Primal Branding, explains that customers of great brands consider themselves “insiders” and everyone else “pagans.” Haters don’t scare away fans. They inspire them to be even more devoted. If Peeps didn’t make half of us question the sanity of the other half, they probably wouldn’t sell in the multibillions.

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