Test Kitchens are the New Marketing

“There are two major camps of cooking theory. To some, cooking is an art form, dependent upon intuition and sensation. To others it’s an equation — just as magical, but also methodical. So what happens when you combine the two?” Jaya Saxena “The Life of a Cook’s Illustrated Test Cook” Photo credit: Karen Ulrich.

Note: My colleague Tim Murray (@FromMars) and I developed this story together, and all ideas here have been simmered, pan-seared and slow roasted by the fearless marketing team led by jascha kaykas-wolff at Mozilla. I’d happily spend all day in the kitchen with any of them.

We marketers love metaphors. Here’s one for how high functioning marketing organizations operate today.

The best marketing departments operate like test kitchens. If, like most of us, you haven’t witnessed a real test kitchen in action, or caught a glimpse of its televised version, here’s a refresher.

Test kitchens combine a handful of chefs sprinting together to a goal, failing often, learning as they go, converging on a shared outcome.

The chefs are cross-trained. No one is hired just to chop the leeks — that guy has to be able to prepare a sauce, fry a crispy pork belly, and then clean up the mess when he’s done. A happy side effect — because they don’t get pigeonholed, test kitchen chefs have more fun.

Test kitchens are not free form: process is key. If you could cut the roof off a working test kitchen and take a bird’s-eye view, you’d see agile work teams in action. It is the seamless handoffs, exquisite timing, and working in parallel that makes effective test kitchens tick.

Test kitchens taste test. That’s what they do, all day long. They work from hypotheses, conduct experiments, and problem solve creatively when things don’t go as planned. Most importantly, test kitchens are designed for risk taking.

Chefs compensate for an overload of variables by using their instinct, informed by experience with prior tastes, touches, sights, smells and sounds. And art plays a critical role. Measurement and new data inform each subsequent test, but so does intuition and creative expression. The magic happens when a chef folds together experience and instinct, art and science.

Do you work in a test kitchen or a campaign factory?

Ultimately, test kitchens have one goal — create beautiful new recipes. Recipes are documented learnings based on repeated failures. They can be replicated and scaled. They are not bibles. Great recipes bend but don’t break, and are designed to be tweaked and modified.

At Mozilla, our marketing test kitchen is just beginning to find its stride as a growth team built on agile methodology. We serve up recipes to over 50 million people in over 100 countries every day. We’ve begun to focus on 5 rules to help us get to great recipes.

1. Know your diners. Easy to say but hardest to do. Understand who you are cooking for. Don’t cook for yourself. Whether the recipe suits your personal taste is not important. You are not the audience you’re serving. (By the way, we fail at this constantly).
2. Start with fresh ingredients. Match your knowledge of your audience with the product ingredients that matter to them. Some of this may be out of your control because you don’t get to build the product. But the best test kitchens have special relationships with the farms, ranches and stores that supply them. The best marketing test kitchens don’t stop in the marketing department either— their influence (and some of their best tactical ideas) extends well in to product.
3. Mise en place. Before you begin, make sure everything is in place. That’s code for “it starts with a marketing brief.” Set the table with clear hypotheses, prioritized user stories, and an initial canvas of ingredients and resources you will apply to reach your desired outcome.
4. Cook something different. If you are grilling the same hamburger as the joint next door, you’ll never gain market share. Don’t just add bacon either. The most innovative test kitchens look out for the inevitable, and then go the other way.
5. Taste test (fail) constantly. A test kitchen would never put out a recipe without testing and refining it many times over. Marketing test kitchens don’t run campaigns, they run experiments. They start small and then build. And they constantly optimize. Great chefs take risks and embrace failure.

Jaya Saxena sums it up well for me in her wonderful article on the Life of a Cook’s Illustrated Test Cook. Replace the word cooking with marketing and you get the idea.

“There are two major camps of cooking theory. To some, cooking is an art form, dependent upon intuition and sensation. To others it’s an equation — just as magical, but also methodical. So what happens when you combine the two?”

You get a test kitchen.