Nantzee Springs Water Bottle

For years people have thought that good marketing meant the best creative, absolute artistic masterpiece, the most absolutely over-the-top commercial, AI super duper crazy stuff — but that's not what it's about. I think that sometimes the best marketing can be bad marketing. It doesn't always have to be great. Sometimes good marketing is generic.

I think what's most important about marketing is being memorable. For example, the reason that I'm writing this blog post:

This weekend while at the farmers market, I was getting myself an iced mocha from Homewood Gourmet when I noticed that they had bottled water. Of course it was like 90° so I was gonna get my three-year-old son a bottle of water. I noticed that they had the brand Nantzee Springs and that brings me back. Nobody else, I don't think, would really see that and it would jump out to them unless you were from Dothan, Alabama and you were approximately 38 to 49 years old right now. A tune played in your head and here is that tune.

This indisputably plays in the head of an entire generation of people from a region in the country because of a commercial. Not because of some billion-dollar marketing campaign. Not because the owner wrote a book. Not because they had some badass CEO that started a podcast. It's because some local cable company created this silly, silly, silly dancing water bottle commercial. For that we are forever grateful yet also forever haunted by this song.

But okay, here's the pitch and how it relates to marketing today:

Because sometimes the $10,000+ piece of art or the super duper cool stylized AI video or the $10,000 story framework workshopped commercial that you've created — sometimes it's not really about that.

Sometimes, even if it's an accident, it's about being memorable.

So definitely, with a little bit of local pride and their marketing campaign from 30 years ago, I saw the bottle and I purchased it. I sang the song to my son, made an Instagram post about it, told the story to a couple of people. My sister agreed with me and said that it is constantly playing in her head on a loop as well.