this is the story of how oreo used a clever combination of marketing and branding and cutthroat business practices to dethrone hydrox as the nation's leading biscuit in order to become milk's favorite cookie and more importantly the business and marketing lessons that you can learn from this and apply directly to your own business or idea or message and on a lighter note i'll even show you a secret website that i just happen to stumble across while doing research for this case study where you can order a number of different kinds of exotic oreos from all over
the world flavors just like this one which we'll talk about later but before we get to that to figure out how we got here we first need to take a real quick look at how this all began so buckle up because things are about to get crunchy i'm uh i'm not even sure what that means so let's go our story begins in 1882 with an entrepreneur by the name of jacob loose who buys the coral cracker and candy company in kansas city missouri three years later in 1885 he renames it to loose brothers manufacturing and
then changes the name again in 1895 to the american biscuit company then let's fast forward through a series of name changes and mergers and liquidations and all kinds of non-cookie related business stuff where we end up in 1908 with the release of the hydrox cookie the first ever sandwich cookie and with that said let me turn it over to morgan freeman to explain what a sandwich cookie is a sandwich cookie also known as a sandwich biscuit is a type of cookie made from two thin cookies or medium cookies with the filling between them so hydrox
became the world's first sandwich cookie and despite having what is possibly the world's worst name for a cookie which we'll talk about later and for the first four years hydrox had a monopoly on the market and they were loved for their taste and their exotic design packaged and sold as an english biscuit with a twist a unique point of differentiation for the time using an industrial press to create a stamped cookie that kinda looked like a flower but here's where things get interesting in 1912 four years after the release of the hydrox cookie nabisco invents
the oreo a cookie that the company described as two beautifully embossed chocolate flavored wafers with a rich cream filling sounds familiar doesn't it but as long as something isn't trademarked or legally protected there are no laws against coming out with a competing product but even the name oreo whose origins has been speculated about for decades appears to even be a direct rip-off of the mountain laurel that's printed on every hydrox cookie a mountain laurel also known as an oreo daphne i mean come on oreo daphne it's like you're not even trying to hide it but
despite following a relatively proven recipe for success it wasn't smooth sailing right out of the gate for oreo in fact it would take decades for oreo to finally defeat hydrox as the world's favorite cookie and it's from this decades-long rivalry and epic cookie battle that a number of very important and valuable business and marketing lessons can be learned the first of which is the true power of a name like i said before the name hydrox is possibly the world's worst name for a cookie ever second only maybe to roadkill biscuits or poop cookies or any
cookie that has dried fruit in it i mean come on it's not a cookie long story short naming your cookie the hydrox cookie is bad like terribly awful so why'd they choose that name well the name hydrox was chosen originally to suggest purity of product was created by mashing together hydrogen and oxygen the two chemicals that make up water unfortunately words have meaning and associations and hydrox a name made by combining two chemicals sounds medicinal rather than delicious there's another strike against this name too though which is that there was already an existing hydrox chemical
company that sold hydrogen peroxide again another bad association to have with your brand when you make cookies but it gets worse when hydrox cookies were first launched in 1908 the pseudo-scientific term hydrox was being used everywhere from hydrox aerated table water to hydrox ice cream and hydrox ginger ale and soon the number of hydrox related brands out there meant the company couldn't defend their name in court all that said the bigger issue was still by far the chemical associations with the name but hydrox weren't the only ones to mess up they had a strong following
people liked the taste and they weren't about to go down without a fight as oreo would soon discover despite oreos popularity today they're about the furthest thing possible from an overnight success for years after their release grocery stores struggled to entice customers away from hydrox and towards oreo cookies and they were often left struggling to unload these cookies by any means necessary in 1914 one store found itself with a 710 surplus of oreo cookies that they just couldn't sell so they made the mistake that most people do in these kind of situations and they simply
slashed prices but then they took it a step further by berating customers claiming that they didn't know what a truly fine biscuit really was and this struggle would go on for almost 40 more years for real oreo just could not get their stuff together pardon the pun fortunately for oreo the company that made them nabisco had pretty deep pockets and so they could afford to take an l on oreos and sell them at a loss but then in the mid 1950s everything changed and oreo discovered an important marketing lesson i don't know about you but
when i think of cookies i think of fun and happiness and a tasty treat that i know isn't good for me but i like to enjoy once in a while anyway i may even feel a little bit nostalgic and bring back memories of my childhood and growing up well apparently this is what oreo thought too and they completely revamped and updated their entire marketing and messaging strategy their focus was on fun and bright colors and a tasty chocolaty treat that was crammed with more filling than any other brand hydrox on the other hand took the
complete opposite approach and went with the grumpy old man angle no not in a cute funny way in the awful way that you imagine you know the stereotypical old man in a rocking chair on his front porch yelling at people to get off his lawn thinking about the glory days and how much better things used to be well if that sounds like a terrible marketing strategy it's because it is and so from 1915 to 1965 hydrox took this approach and labeled oreo as an imposter and as a knockoff and as a wannabe even going so
far as to warning people to not be fooled by lookalikes yikes unsurprisingly when people reach for a cookie the last thing they're looking for is a glass of judgment to wash it all down oh yeah that's uh that's not nice but the final nail in the coffin for hydrox and where oreo really took the lead as the world's favorite cookie was with a clever if not genius marketing play a play that used a healthy dose of pricing psychology to reposition oreo as the premium cookie in the mid-1950s oreo finally figured things out and launched a
brand new marketing and advertising campaign for oreos complete with a fancy new slogan oreo but the real stroke of genius was the price increase that went along with it you see pricing and price psychology is powerful and higher price is almost always equated with being higher quality for example not knowing anything else if i asked you what the better quality cookie was a cookie that cost one dollar or a cookie that cost five dollars pretty much everybody is going to say the 5 cookie is better they've done studies to prove this not with cookies but
with wine where the higher price of the wine the better people thought it tasted even when they were tasting the exact same wine oreo apparently knew about this psychological principle and with the stroke of a pen they raised the price and became the premium cookie making hydrox the cheaper low budget and less desirable cookie and whether by accident or engineering oreo managed to replace itself in the mind of consumers as the original making hydrox appear like the knockoff imposter and the domination just kept going from there once on top oreo wasn't about to ever lose
their position as the world's favorite cookie again constantly trying to reinvent themselves they changed their slogan five times over 10 years from for the kid in all of us to america's best loved cookie to the one and only to who's the kid with the oreo cookie and oreo the original twister and more recently coming out with more relevant and trending topics that take advantage of pop culture as well as current events basically showing that they're plugged into the current economy as well as its current customers the most famous being the super bowl power outage of
2013 when oreo tweeted their famous dunk in the dark tweet but they've also come out with others including the tour de france shinshin the mars rover and even elvis week hydrox on the other hand was bought and sold by keebler and then kellogg's and then discontinued in 1999 before being re-released in 2014 by leaf brands and even though hydrox cookies are still available it took a lot of work to get my hands on a couple boxes and even then getting my hands on these cookies was no easy task i got two for um research fortunately
i came across a website during my research called underground snacks where i was able to order these hydrox cookies as well as a few different flavors of oreos from all over the world flavors just like these red velvet ones they smell kind of funny kind of scared i don't think i want to take a bite good though and these peach oolong tea ones taste like peach and tea and these yellow ones which i can only imagine are lemon but i have no idea lemon so clearly oreo's done a good job but for even more examples
of what great marketing looks like the next thing you're going to want to do is check out the video i've got linked up right here on tesla's marketing strategy so make sure to check it out now and i'll see in the next video tesla has recently topped instagram as the fastest growing brand in the world according to london-based company brand finance this shouldn't be too surprising though after all they've positioned themselves well in some of the fastest growing and most popular in
