How to Lose a Brand and Win the Market: The Mantel Elephant

Every now and then, marketing gives you an opportunity that's either brilliant or completely implausible. Or maybe it's both.

This was one of those times.

Consider: One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a brand is also one of the most flattering. It becomes the category.

Kleenex becomes tissues. Xerox becomes copying. And in South Africa, for many years, HIAB became the generic name for a truck-loader crane from Sweden.

That's wonderful, if you own the brand and dominate the trade. Less wonderful if you unexpectedly lose the franchise.

Yet that's exactly what happened. Mantel Brothers lost their HIAB franchise. And with it, effectively, their entire market.

Sensing blood in the water, six major competitors immediately moved in. Two were international giants. All six started eating Mantel's lunch.

So Mantel Brothers spent several anxious months looking for a replacement franchise. Eventually they acquired the South African franchise for Weyhauser ATLAS cranes, manufactured in Germany.

The immediate challenge was obvious: How do you persuade an entire market to forget the name it has been using for a truck crane for years?

The less obvious challenge was more interesting: How do you make the replacement memorable enough to become the new generic name ... the name on everyone's lips?

So they called on us. The answer, we decided, was an elephant.

Enter the Mantel Elephant

This is where things get slightly less ordinary. But there's always method in our madness. You'll see.

The last thing we needed was another yellow crane called something foreign. We wanted a thing that people would remember. So we named it the MANTEL ELEPHANT.

And we painted it orange, making the machine visibly different from its yellow predecessor.

"Elephant" replaced the Swedish connection with a strong African one; something solid, durable, distinctive, and ownable. More importantly, it gave us a chance to build a completely new mental association.

Now all we had to do was get people to cement that association: Truck crane = MANTEL ELEPHANT.

Except you can't exactly walk into someone's office and say, "Good morning. Please forget the brand you've been using for years and remember ours."

We had to get people wondering and anticipating, before the crane actually arrived. That was the marketing objective.

So our campaign took a deliberately eccentric route.

We imagined a fictitious company (supposedly out of India) and mailed letters to a carefully selected database of fleet managers in the construction industry, nationwide.

The letter advised each recipient that the pack elephant they had ordered was on its way.

There was no mention of Mantel Brothers. No explanation. No clue as to what on earth was going on.

Two days later, another letter arrived from the same fictitious company: a shipping advice and pro forma invoice.

Then, two days after that, came a pamphlet entitled: The Care and Feeding of Elephants. The copy here was deliberately ambiguous. It could just as easily have been talking about a real animal as a piece of machinery.

And because we were committed to taking this all the way, we dropped a peanut into each envelope.

Then we crushed it, so a small oily stain bled visibly through the paper. (Maybe an elephant stepped on it?) It was, by any standard, a remarkably low-tech piece of marketing.

Subtle? No.

Memorable? Extremely.

The Elephant gets attention

The response was spectacular. We'd expected attention ... and we got a lot of it.

Hundreds of letters (some puzzled, some entertained, some impressed) came pouring into the return address, which itself was disguised because we wanted the mystery to have a life of its own, before anyone connected it with Mantel Brothers.

Then the national press picked it up.

Newspapers began asking the same question as the fleet managers: What is this? And, more importantly: Who is behind it?

Most people understood that there was a joke somewhere in the machinery. They simply didn't know when or where the other shoe would drop.

It dropped on the following Monday.

That's when the fleet managers received an outsize envelope, clearly labeled from Mantel Brothers. It announced that "Your Orange Elephant is inside."

In fact, there were three things inside.

First, a straightforward cover letter that explained the campaign and the reason for the light-hearted deception.

Second, a lavishly illustrated technical sales booklet that introduced the MANTEL ELEPHANT and demonstrated its superiority in the field.

And third, something rather different: a children's storybook, titled The Orange Elephant.

Once upon an Elephant

The book told a beautifully illustrated story about a village of magic lumberjacks whose beloved little elephant had been overwhelmed by the increasingly heavy tasks it was being asked to handle.

The villagers are in despair. Without their elephant, they can no longer load enough lumber onto their trucks, to take to market. Their livelihood is at stake.

Now the village magician comes to the rescue. He drapes his Magic Mantle (see what we did there?) over the elephant's shoulders, and the elephant's color changes to orange.

Magically, the little elephant now becomes more powerful than ever. Able to load not just lumber onto their trucks with ease, but almost anything else that's needed.

The villagers rejoice. And of course, live prosperously ever after.

Behind all this whimsy was a serious marketing idea. We were not just trying to reach the purchasing department.

We had developed a way to get the Mantel name and story into the actual homes of decision-makers, where they might be seen during leisure hours: by spouses, children, visitors and, most importantly, by the decision-maker himself when he wasn't wearing his business face.

A technical brochure has a specific job to do.

The children's storybook had an entirely different sort of staying power: it was a Trojan horse for a brand.

We wanted the Mantel name sitting in the homes of fleet managers rather than trapped inside a sales department.

A brochure says, "Here are our specifications." A children's book says, "Read me."

That difference matters. It gets read. It gets handled. It gets talked about.

It gets remembered.

The reveal

The press, delighted that the mystery had finally been solved, went to town.

The Mantel name, the elephant and the story appeared across business pages around the country. This was organic (we had no PR agent) but not unexpected.

We predicted that Mantel would regain much of its lost market position. We were only surprised at the pace. Within just four months, its nationwide service network was once again up and running, and Mantel had knocked five of its six new competitors completely out of the marketplace.

Four months after that, Mantel's market share had climbed to almost 85 percent, higher than anything the company had achieved with HIAB.

The elephant had not merely replaced the old brand association. It had beaten it.

Lessons learned

The obvious lesson is that good marketing doesn't always look like marketing.

Sometimes it looks like a mystery. Sometimes it looks like a children's book. Sometimes, it can look like a crushed peanut in an envelope.

But underneath the fun was a serious lesson: the campaign worked because it solved a very specific strategic problem.

When Mantel lost the brand that had defined its category, it didn't try to argue with the market. It gave the market something new to remember.

That's often the real job of marketing. Not to explain what you sell. Not even to make people like you.

It is to give them a memory that belongs exclusively to you.

In this case, it was orange, four-legged and capable of lifting a rather impressive amount of building material.

And, as we'd expected, it was quite the salesman.

I've always thought there was something particularly South African about the whole episode: a German machine, an African elephant, an "Indian" postmark, a British-influenced sense of the absurd, and an experienced marketer's instinctive conviction that the right person will buy the right thing.

You might be surprised at how well this kind of offbeat thinking works here, too.

Two extraneous takeaways

There are two details from the campaign that I still treasure, neither of which appears in any conventional marketing textbook.

One is this: during the early stages, the flood of mail produced a letter from the fleet manager of a large international manufacturing company.

It said, simply:

"Dear Sirs; what the hell are you talking about??"

On that Monday, he had his answer. (I still have that letter, and about 50 more that I kept from that campaign. All of them in the high-energy spirit of the campaign.)

The second, my favorite episode, happened on the Monday afternoon of the reveal.

A furious gentleman stormed into the Mantel Brothers offices (no appointment) and demanded to see the CEO, John Mantel.

He announced: "You have landed me in a heap of trouble."

The reason? Mantel had sent him one storybook. He had two children. Tongue firmly in cheek, he explained that intense family strife would ensue unless each of his sons had their own copy.

So he had driven to Mantel's office to demand another book.

Then he made an offer: "Give me another book, and I'll order two of your cranes right now."

They did. He did. And the sale of those two cranes paid for the entire campaign.