The Super Mario Problem

It was a cold winter. And besides walking across the river to get pho in the basement of the Leo Burnett building, most of my time at the agency was spent concepting ads for Pizza Hut. We had won the AOR business the prior fall, and with hundreds of millions of dollars of ad-spend flying around, leadership was throwing everything they could at getting the best, or at least the most, ideas possible.

“Pizza is about bringing people together.”

That was the brief. How do we show people coming together over a steaming hot slice of Pizza Hut. Or more realistically a luke-warm, left out for a while but still good enough slice. As the lowest on the totem pole and theoretically the most likely to actually eat the stuff, the job of my copy partner and I was simple: find every scenario we could where we could show that wonderful, ad-worthy come-togetherness.

“How about we show Brad fans and Jen fans sitting together watching a movie even though they must hate each other.”

“Who?”

As is typical, we start with what we know. Her with whatever is going on in pop culture, and me with whatever I’ve been into. With C2E2 coming up, my mental season had swung to nerd, and so did my point of view.

“Pitt. Aniston.”

“I like the structure. How do we show they are fans without using their likeness tho? I don’t think Mr. Hut wants a lawsuit from Mrs. Aniston. What if we do something that we can nod to that’s instantly recognizable? Who are the most iconic hero and villain pairs of all time? How about Mario and Bowser?”

“Who?”

“Mario. Like… Mario. And Bowser. Like… the big turtle guy.”

“I don’t think anyone knows who that is.”

“Sure they do. Imagine a tv spot opens on a table at a comic con. No dialogue. Just 15 seconds of a dude dressed up as Mario sitting at a table sharing a pizza in silence with a guy dressed as Bowser.”

“That kind of funny but what if we did Star Trek or whatever. People know that.”

“Great. Let’s set that one aside and move on.”

She went on to write that script. Where a stormtrooper and Darth Vader got into a lifesaver (this is absolutely not an exaggeration) battle over pizza.

We did not produce that spot. And maybe it would have been terrible. Any maybe I should have realized that everyone on this planet doesn’t share the same fandoms. But I’ll be damned if I don’t believe everyone knows who Mario is. Bowser? Who knows. But everyone knows that little plumber.

Recently I’ve seen “The Mario Problem” floating around online. A framework to emphasize the benefit of a product instead of the product itself. I love this analogy, and I consistently use it in coaching and facilitation, but most importantly, I take it as proof that people absolutely know who Mario is.

So, The Mario Problem. Simply put, no one playing Mario picks up a mushroom because they want a mushroom. Or a fire flower because it’s pretty. They pick them up for the benefit. To grow. To be powerful. To live longer. To shoot fire out of your face at the goombas. In other words, Mario wants the mushrooms and fire flowers to survive and thrive.

At any given time, the human brain is filtering for these two things. Survive. Thrive. Survive. Thrive. As we are being bombarded by thousands of marketing messages daily, we have to filter out the noise to focus on what matters. In StoryBrand, we teach businesses to market around this exact principle to cut through that noise and sell better.

For a business to have a clear message that actually works, they must first understand how their product helps the hero in the story to survive and thrive, then focus on what success will look like when they use the product.

“Sick of starting over? With this little flower you’ll not only live, you’ll leave a trail of dead goombas in your wake.”

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