Black Swans & Cranberry Sauce: A Thanksgiving Tale

As we gather for Thanksgiving, I wanted to share a story about how an agricultural crisis led to one of marketing's greatest pivots — and what it tells us about the changing rules of success.

In November 1959, America stopped eating cranberries. The government alerted the public to avoid the fruit after traces of a cancerous herbicide were found in a small batch. At the presidential Thanksgiving dinner at the White House, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower broke tradition by using apple rather than cranberry sauce. Soon enough, the government realized it had overreacted and consumption could resume. But it was too late. Cranberries were a seasonal commodity, with almost all produce sold around Thanksgiving and Christmas. A few weeks of panic destroyed a whole year of business. 

The “Cranberry Scare” of 1959 was a classic “Black Swan:” A highly improbable event that nearly decimated a whole industry. To survive the next crisis, farmers realized they had to find a way to get consumers to buy cranberries all year round. To achieve this goal, they appointed one of the nation’s foremost marketing wizards as CEO of Ocean Spray, the largest cranberry cooperative. Described as “Don Draper without the drama,” Gelsthorpe was famous for convincing Americans to use roll-on deodorants on a daily basis. Now, he had to convince them to consume cranberries every week. 

Without a Thanksgiving turkey, there was no discernible reason for most Americans to eat cranberries. So Gelsthorpe made them drink it. Gelsthorpe and his team started tinkering with one of Ocean Spray’s niche products, the Cranberry Juice Cocktail. At the time, the sour drink was only consumed by farmers and their neighbors. But mixed with water, other fruit juices, and plenty of sugar, Cranberry juice could be made palatable to a broader audience.

The company relaunched the juice with a “Drink Different” campaign, encouraging people to drink it every day and emphasizing it had higher levels of  “food energy” compared to the more popular orange juice. “Food energy” actually meant calories. A few years later, the Federal Trade Commission forced Ocean Spray to stop using the phrase. But by then, drinking the juice had already become a habit for millions of Americans, and the Cranberry industry never looked back.

Gelsthorpe has done it again. As he told The New York Times, marketers “don’t wait for the groundswell; they build a consumer desire.” Gelsthorpe’s ingenuity laid the groundwork for a brand that would endure for decades.

But the world has changed dramatically since then. In the 1960s, creating consumer desire was a deliberate, top-down process reliant on carefully crafted campaigns and controlled messaging. Fast forward half a century, and we see a starkly different landscape.

In September 2020, Ocean Spray bottles started flying off the shelves across America. At the same time, millions of people started listening to Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, catapulting the song back to the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time since 1977. Demand for two very old products was breaking records, and no one understood why. 

No one outside TikTok, that is. 

Earlier that morning, Nathan Apodaca was on his way to work at a potato warehouse in Idaho. His truck, with 320,000 miles under its belt, finally gave up. Apodaca was stuck, but he wasn’t fussed. "I'm like, 'OK, I'm not gonna sit here and wait for nobody to pull some jumper cables," he told NPR. “So I grab my juice, grab my longboard, started heading to work."

Apodaca was back en route to the warehouse, rolling on his skateboard, phone in one hand and a bottle of Ocean Spray “Cran-Raspberry” in the other. The sky was blue, and the autumn breeze was pleasant. Apodaca decided to share the moment with the world. He uploaded a video of himself cruising downhill, lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams while occasionally gulping red juice.   

The video went viral, drawing 100,000 views in the first hour and ultimately racking up hundreds of millions of views as it “jumped” from TikTok to other social networks. Seeing Apodaca’s momentum, thousands of people started uploading tribute videos of themselves drinking Ocean Spray and singing Dreams. Within days, Fleetwood Mac veterans Nick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks — both in their 70s — joined TikTok and uploaded their own tribute videos. 

In total, more than 800,000 Apodaca tribute videos were uploaded in the weeks following his initial upload.  Something in Apodaca’s demeanor hit a nerve. No one understood why, but everyone did. As TikTok’s team recounted in a blog post, “A vibe might be hard to define, but the TikTok community knows one when they see one.” On social media, nobody knows what works until it takes off. And whatever works on social media drives sales for physical and digital products everywhere. 

A week after Apodaca’s fateful skateboard ride, Ocean Spray gifted him a new truck, which led to yet another viral video. The event drove the company to embrace a whole new approach to marketing and launch a set of new products that appeal to younger consumers. The results, as of 2023, are impressive. This incident exemplifies nonlinearity in the digital age, where a single, spontaneous event can rapidly transform a brand's fortune.

Gone are the days when wizards like Edward Gelsthorpe could “build consumer desire” through meticulous planning. Nathan Apodaca’s 2020 video was as much of a Black Swan as the Cranberry scare of 1959. In the past, unpredictable events interrupted the “normal” flow of business; today, these events are the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy. Companies have to constantly keep an eye out for early viral waves and respond quickly in order to make the most of them. Rather than focus on a handful of TV channels and newspapers, advertisers also incentivize and collaborate with hundreds of individual people to try to trigger such viral waves.

Today's viral moments can't be engineered like Gelsthorpe's campaigns, but they show how brands still need to reinvent themselves - sometimes with help from an Idaho potato worker with a skateboard and good vibes. Now pass the cranberry sauce!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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