Just tell people what your product is
What Little Ceasar's and Wendy's teach us about not overthinking how you message your products.
The allure of “category creation,” “differentiation,” “positioning” and coming up with the Next Big Tagline can tempt even sensible marketers to believe they need to fashion entirely new words out of raw precious metal in order to bring a product to market with a splash.
It’s the reason you see tech companies put phrases like “We embolden multi-omni-generational businesses to adopt bleeding-edge technology operations” on their homepage, incorrectly assuming complexity in a product requires esoteric language to accurately describe it.
“What do you actually sell?” Haha, ok buddy, calm down.
“What does you product do?” Lol, nice try.
Even the companies that do understand the importance of conveying the complex with simplicity often get bogged down in brainstorming hell—which is usually just a song and dance for leaders who’ve already decided what they want to say, but want to see some collaboration theater anyway.
Every writer knows the pain of spending an hour and a half in a brainstorm trying come up with the perfect title for an ebook, or a theme and a one-liner for an upcoming user conference. By minute 45, you’re trying to rewrite the entire English language because your CEO doesn’t like the word “learning” or “customer” for some reason; by minute 75, everything just starts sounding like the script for a car commercial (“Innovation at speed”…“Go farther, together”…“Invent your future”).
Allow me to offer up an alternative strategy: Just describe it. Like, literally, just tell people what it is you’re selling. And use simple language that’s been available to humans for thousands of years to do it.
Luckily, there’s a cheesy, saucy masterclass in this type of brand writing right under your nose.
Enter the Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready Pizza.
Have you ever wondered how the Hot-N-Ready got its name?
No, of course you haven’t! Because why would you? It’s in the name.
Do you know what happens when you search “how did little caesers hot n ready get its name” on Google? Nothing. There are no answers, because there’s no story. No grand moment of discovery so insightful it demanded to be told to the world.
And that’s awesome, because it doesn’t need a story! It’s just hot, and it’s ready. So they named it that.
It’s simple.
It’s maybe even a little amateurish.
But it’s also wildly effective, and one of the most brilliant pieces of corporate branding since "Just Do It.”
The company itself confirms as much: Little Caesers’ own official website charting the company’s 62-year history doesn’t bother adding any historical details between 1997 (the launch of the Hot-N-Ready) and 2014, when they opened a new headquarters. That’s literally a 17-year gap in their official company timeline! I have to assume that if something more noteworthy than the Hot-n-Ready had happened during that time, they would have included it. Nothing did.
This is because “Hot-N-Ready” is such a blunt, beautifully utilitarian piece of naming convention that Little Caesers summited Everest on their first try. They named a product with such perfect fidelity to its features and benefits that there was no sense in them pretending like they were ever going to top it.
Most companies would kill to hit this kind of messaging pay dirt, and Little Caesers did it with two adjectives and a conjunction.
I’m sure there was brainstorm in 1996 where the CMO said, “We need to sell more pepperoni pizzas, we’re going to have them ready for people to pick up and they’ll be hot, I need a name by Friday.” So someone in marketing named Brian was like, “What if we called it the Peppe-Rome-i Pizza! Get it? Because Caeser, and Rome?” and someone else was like, “We should call it Sizzleroni so they know how hot and blazing fast it. You can literally hear it sizzle!”
It’s a silly hypothetical, but it’s basically what happens at a grander scale in so many other industries, especially tech. We get in our heads that we must reinvent and iterate on the language an average person would use to describe our product, because our product is so special and unique, it can’t possibly be bound by normal, plain words. Little Caesers could have made a similar argument; regardless your opinion on the taste, the idea of a cooked carryout pizza that’s ready to be picked up without a call-ahead was kind of revolutionary, at least enough that no one else has tried to compete with it in 24 years. They could have called it the Sizzleroni, and maybe it still would have taken off.
They didn’t, though. They knew what they had, and called it like it is: Hot-N-Ready.
The Wendy’s “4 for $4” is another example of brilliant, minimal utilitarian naming. It’s two numbers and a preposition, but tells you exactly what you’re getting and nothing more. It communicates value without needing to say much of anything except the price.
It’s become so iconic that every one of Wendy’s’ competitors has since copied it with their own $3, $4 or $5 value combo—and a college basketball player even chose his jersey number in honor of it.
That’s the power of simplicity.
”But they’re just selling pizza and burgers! We have a multi-product, multi-buyer-persona company! It’s not that simple.”
You might be right, and restaurants just have it easier. A pepperoni pizza isn’t a piece of business intelligence software, after all.
But I’m here to propose that it is that simple. You have something that’s hot and ready, too. You’re just using too many words to tell people about it.