Those of us who enjoy clever, well-written commercial spots owe it all to Joe Sedelmaier. He's the director/producer who changed the face of television advertising with quirky characters like the laconic Clara Peller and the fast talking Federal Express guy. Peller's simple question, "Where's the beef?" turned the fast-food industry on its head.

My all-time favorite takes place at the counter of a burger restaurant, where an affable server waits on a puzzled customer, who's just watched a guy walk by with a chicken sandwich. I hope Mr. Sedelmaier doesn't mind my recreating it for you here.

CUSTOMER: Excuse me, but what was that in there?

SERVER: It's chicken!

CUSTOMER (suspiciously): Chicken…?

GUY IN LINE: Processed.

CUSTOMER: P-processed?

SERVER: That's like when they take a lot of chickens and assemble the respective parts.

CUSTOMER: What parts?

SERVER (to co-workers): What parts?

REGISTER GIRL: Different parts!

SERVER (earnestly): Parts is parts.

SERVER: As I hear tell, all the parts are crammed into one big part.

CO-WORKER (dramatically): Fused…

SERVER: Yeah, then the one big part is cut up into little pieces parts. And parts is parts.

In the midst of this exchange, the narrator lets us know that Wendy's serves a pure, non-processed, boneless breast of chicken and ends the commercial saying, "You'll want something better; you're Wendy's kind of people."

If you've never seen the spot, take a look at it on YouTube. It's the Adam to Clara Peller's Eve. It's the great sire of all the funny commercials birthed on Super Bowl Sundays, and it's the reason you're so disappointed when one doesn't hit the mark. Joe Sedelmaier set the bar awfully high. When it's perfect, absurdity is genius. Anything short of that is just plain stupid.

So what's the perfect absurdity in this spot? Parts is parts, of course. When you're eating them, parts most definitely is not parts! And to suggest that a customer should feel good about eating parts mysterious and unknowable is, well, perfectly absurd.

That's what makes it absurd, and it's what reminds us that we don't want to consume just any old parts.

Guess what? Same goes for marketing communications. Parts is not parts when it comes to delivering a relevant and precise message to a well-defined and targeted audience.

Just because it came from a chicken doesn't make it "chicken."
We'll start with the obvious. Generally speaking, the average consumer's definition of chicken includes leg, thigh, wing and breast. A smaller segment of the population will add liver to the list, and at least one person (my wife) insists that a chicken gizzard is a legitimate "eating part". Beyond this list, with rare exceptions, it ain't chicken.¹

More importantly, it's not even chicken if you say it is. And if you think the consumer of your message or product is interested in your definition of anything, you're probably wrong. What you do isn't "innovative" because you say it is. What you sell isn't "the very definition of luxury" just because you've defined luxury that way.

Paurav Shukla, senior lecturer at the Brighton Business School at the University of Brighton (UK), writes in the e-magazine Luxury Society that "while the word ‘luxury' is used in daily lives to refer to certain lifestyle, the underlying construct's definition is consumer and situation specific."² In other words, the consumer of the message or product gets to decide whether your message is relevant or even true.

The consumer (and you'll forgive me for this) is a pretty smart bird. He or she has—through education and experience—developed his or her standards, definitions and expectations. The relevance of your message, therefore, will depend upon your ability to understand how your audience defines the quality and applicability of your claim. If it's not chicken to them, it's not chicken. Understanding what your audience members think and how they apply their own personal desires to decision-making will help you deliver your message with relevance.

Just because it "tastes like chicken" doesn't make it good.
In high school I had a job as a night janitor, and one of my co-workers would come to work at least once a week with a dinner of fried rattlesnake biscuits in a brown paper sack. For the uninitiated, a rattlesnake biscuit is not some clever name for a culinary technique like, say, "chicken-fried" steak or "ho" cake. It is, in fact, a biscuit with a chunk of snake in it.

Offering me a bite, my friend promised "it tastes just like chicken."

Now, you know and I know, from time immemorial—or at least in the 150 years since the Donner Party set out for California—some pretty nasty things have been described as tasting "just like chicken." And I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that, compared to my fried rattlesnake biscuit experience, the Donners got off pretty easy. At least the ones who weren't eaten did.³

Precision plays a pivotal role in successful communication, because trying to mold your message to a broad, common perception often fails to deliver the needed punch to change the minds and drive the behavior of the individuals who actually mean something to you, your qualified buyers.

Sharpening your message, rather than broadening it, is the best way to make a claim for uniqueness which, by its very definition, requires specificity, not generality. Your message should reflect the uniqueness of your target audience, not just any old listener.

Show some pluck; be authentic.
What this thing really boils down to is rejecting the notion that we're in the business of mass-producing messages to manipulate large segments of our audience. The world doesn't work that way anymore, and nobody wants processed chicken or processed anything-else for that matter, especially processed communication.

The good news is that we now have ways, creatively and technologically, to begin to drive more precise and specialized communication that meets the needs of unique targets and creates value for them at the beginning of our relationship with them. That means using the right communication "parts" in the right combination to meet the expressed needs of our target audience every minute of every day. Every target is different, which means every channel-combination is different.

We can combine traditional media with social channels to create a legitimate two-way conversation from which we can better understand what it means to create value for that specific customer. We can subject ourselves to the consistent scrutiny these channels offer. And we can adjust not only our messaging, but the very products and services that we're marketing to create and improve our value to our customer every single day.

The only way to do this is to provide a pure, non-processed kind of marketing. Because, if they're our kind of people, they'll always want something better.

¹ While it is true that the chicken foot is commonly eaten in places like China, Trinidad, Jamaica, South Africa, and Peru, I wouldn’t eat one. Have you seen what chickens walk around in?

² ©2011 Luxury Society.

³ Historians continue to shed additional light on the Donner Party incident, suggesting that the claims of cannibalism, while true, were greatly exaggerated. This finding is irrelevant to those who were, in fact, consumed.

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