Cheeto, "The Other Hand" and Celebrating Your Audience

The line between B2B and B2C has blurred. We aren't marketing to “accounts” or “titles;” we’re marketing to people who happen to be at work. To reach them, we have to look past their LinkedIn profile and into their psychographics: the underlying motivations and daily frictions that drive their behavior.

Psychographics—a market research method that tracks psychological traits from lifestyles and interests to personality traits—can take your campaigns to the next level. When you start asking the right questions, such as what "friction points" your targets face outside of work, what music they listen to, and what shows they keep up with, you unlock a new realm of creativity for marketing campaigns.

Case in point? The Cheetos “other hand” campaign. It’s a true masterclass in leveraging shared friction to resonate with your audience in an unforgettable way.

Turning a product drawback into a badge of honor

Cheetos are known for their signature orange color, which almost always finds its way onto hands, couches, and clothes. Instead of focusing on the negative associated with this “Cheetle,” Cheetos took control of the narrative.  After running a study that revealed 99% of people eat Cheetos with their dominant hand, the brand creatively reimagined how the average Cheetos lover goes through their day using “the other hand.” (Their dominant one is likely covered in orange dust, of course.)

Integrated campaign creative

Campaign video 

The brand shot a commercial that uses comedic sketches to explore the day-to-day lives of Cheetos customers who use their non-orange (and non-dominant) hand to execute critical tasks. The vignettes range from a botched plastic surgery to a kid's cake that looks like it was made by kids themselves. The result is a sticky commercial that reclaims that signature Cheeto dust as a comedic, universal badge of honor for its loyal snackers. (It was also recreated in numerous OOH billboards to great comedic effect.)

“The Other Hand” font 

One element that set apart the campaign was the way it built out a world centered on “The Other Hand” story. Rather than calling it a day after a few catchy commercials, the brand created an “Other Hand” font that allowed users to continue interacting with the concept online.

Accessible through a Google browser extension, “The Other Hand” font allows customers to swap out the font of all the text on their screens; in doing so, it effectively doubled as a content generation tool as well. This creative element brought customers further into the fold with a single click and produced highly shareable content. 

Product launch 

The font was so popular that the brand decided to take it a step further and launch a new packaging design: a bag with all the text printed in “The Other Hand” font. The press for the new design involved real customers, continued to build out the world of the campaign, and delivered a strong visual presence for consumers who interact more with the shelf than the web. 

What your firm can learn from Cheetos 

What made this campaign successful wasn’t just the fun campaign slogan, the product rollout, or the endlessly memorable billboards of “The Other Hand” gone wrong. It was the desire to reflect Cheetos' orange-stained experience to a tee, warts and all. Because in the world where “The Other Hand” is dominant, orange fingers aren’t a drawback; they’re a fact of life that leads to sheer ingenuity. 

What does this mean for energy and industrial marketers? No, you don’t have to develop a signature font that reflects your offering. But you do need to identify your customers’ "orange dust." Maybe it’s the reality of working in sub-zero temperatures with heavy gloves or the frustration of trying to access data from the field and the workarounds that ensue. Whatever the case, this kind of thinking allows you to stop targeting a persona and start targeting a moment of need. 

By getting to the heart of your customer’s experience as people—their specific stresses, their specialized language, their daily work-arounds and more—you can develop creative that celebrates them. Because at the end of the day, business people are people, too.

> Let us uncover your customer's "Other Hand" moment