I’d like to tell you a story about a branding “experiment” I conducted in 2011. One of my coworkers, let’s call him Rob, liked to tell the same jokes over and over and over. One had been in rotation for over 20 years, and was retold whenever the topic of cheese came up (which is pretty often.) “Someday, I’m going to melt down some Edam cheese and some Gouda cheese and blend them together. Then I’ll sell the product as Edam-Gouda Cheese! Get it? A-DAMN-GOODA-CHEESE! I’ll be rich!”
20 years. He had to be stopped. Secretly, Russell Wilkins and I purchased edamgoudacheese.com and began building a sham website: one of Rob’s old classmates had “stolen” his idea, marketed it, and was now making millions. We designed a logo, wrote a backstory, designed and published a website, and actually made some Edam-Gouda cheese (it was terrible) with a custom label. We took the cheese down to Rob’s favorite sandwich shop, asking them to offer it to him as a “promotional guest cheese.”
After lunch, Rob stormed in, visibly agitated. He spent an hour researching the company and calling old college friends. Eventually we revealed the scam: look on his face was priceless. From then on, he didn’t tell his cheese joke anymore. Instead, he wanted to actually start Edam Gouda Cheese Co. because it suddenly seemed like a viable option.
