Got Milk?

"Got Milk?" is one of the greatest marketing campaigns ever made.

By 1993, milk consumption in America had been declining for years. Soda was winning the fridge wars. The dairy industry had spent years telling people milk was good for them, but most consumers already agreed. They knew milk was healthy. They just didn't care.

So the California Milk Processor Board tried something different: they sold the pain of not having milk. A man gets a call from a radio station offering ten thousand dollars if he can name who shot Alexander Hamilton. He knows the answer, but his mouth is full of peanut butter, there's no milk, and the DJ can't understand a word. He loses. Two words on screen: Got Milk?

Watch the ‘Aaron Burr’ advert.

It was funny and relatable. In 1994, California milk sales rose for the first time in over a decade. The tagline hit 90% awareness and the campaign won advertising awards. Celebrities lined up for the milk moustache, and Mattel made a Got Milk? Barbie. It became one of those rare campaigns that escapes advertising and enters culture.

I love great marketing: the craft of it, the way a sharp campaign can make something ordinary feel essential. But "Got Milk?" worked, to the extent that it worked, because of something specific to its situation. Everyone already knew what milk was. They already had it in their kitchens. The campaign's job was to remind them, at the right moment, to buy more of something they already understood.

Now try that with a B2B services company.

A different game

When a consumer buys milk, they reach into a fridge. One person can make the decision in three seconds. They already know what milk tastes like and what it costs. The risk of getting it wrong is about two quid.

When a business buys a substantial piece of services work, almost nothing about that description applies.

There are usually multiple people involved, often across departments with competing priorities. The buying cycle can run for months, sometimes longer. The thing being purchased is hard to evaluate before it's delivered. The risk can be a six-figure commitment, a team's time and the buyer's professional reputation. The buyer can't taste the product first or simply return the work if it's not right. And they're often spending someone else's money, which can make them more cautious.

The distinction is between a familiar, low-risk purchase and a complex commitment. B2B services founders can find themselves borrowing a playbook written for a very different situation.

The playbook that doesn't transfer

The playbook for a familiar consumer product is to build awareness, create emotional pull, show up at the moment someone's ready to buy and make buying easy. Sensible principles when one person is making a fast decision about something they already understand.

But B2B services founders absorb this logic, often without realising it, and try to apply it to their own companies. More social posts for visibility, paid campaigns for reach, a rebrand to look more polished, a bigger presence at conferences. All of it aimed at the same basic goal: be more visible, to more people, more often.

A founder hires a marketing agency. The agency does good work: a new visual identity, a sharper website, a content calendar. But the phone doesn't ring any differently, because the agency was asked to amplify a message and nobody had figured out what the message should be. They were solving for awareness when buyers still couldn't see a reason to choose the firm.

Or a founder brings in a junior social media hire and expects them to define a strategic position or translate it into something worth saying. They post, the team reposts, and nothing changes. Social gets dismissed as a waste of time, which is unfair, because social can be powerful. It just can't do the thinking that hasn't been done yet.

Or a sales team gets hired: strong track records, proven closers. But those track records were built in companies where the market already understood the differentiated value. Drop them into a business where prospects can't tell you apart from the next firm, and they struggle. We've seen companies hire large sales teams that sold nothing after two years. Selling skills couldn't resolve the company's underlying lack of differentiation.

None of these are necessarily bad decisions. But they leave the same question unanswered: why should a buyer choose this firm?

What's the milk?

In "Got Milk?", everybody already knew what milk was. Its value was widely understood. The campaign's job was to remind people to buy more of something they never had to think twice about.

A B2B services company often has an earlier problem: buyers may know the kind of work you do without understanding why they should choose you. What's your milk? What is the thing you provide that makes a specific buyer say, without hesitation, "I need exactly that"?

Most services companies haven't figured that out yet.

They're often good at what they do and have delivered real results for real clients. But when they describe themselves to the market, something gets lost. "We build scalable software." "We drive digital transformation." "We deliver innovation." These are activities every competitor claims. Nobody owns them.

Services firms really struggle to extract their own differentiation. They don't recognise it in themselves. They've spent years actively trying to be broad, to never say no to a brief, to present as capable of anything. Which means when they finally try to explain what makes them different, they reach for capability language that sounds like everyone else.

Founders look at that gap between what they know they're good at and how it lands in the market, and they think: we need better marketing. Better copy, a sharper website, a more compelling pitch deck. It sounds like a marketing problem, so they hand it to marketing.

Marketers can help answer the underlying questions, but leadership has to commit to the choices. What, specifically, does this company do that the alternatives can't or won't? Who, specifically, does it matter to? And how can you prove it before anyone hires you?

Creative work needs answers to those questions. You can't "Got Milk?" something that nobody understands yet.

The invisible product problem

A product company can have something to show: a demo, a free trial, a physical object you can hold. When Apple launches a new iPhone, you can walk into a shop and pick it up. The marketing creates desire, but the product delivers proof.

A services company can't show the finished engagement before the sale, so buyers need other evidence to judge it. Can you articulate what you do with enough clarity and specificity that a stranger could repeat it? Can you show you've solved this exact problem before?

One of our clients gets contacted by 50 businesses every month claiming to do something similar, with the same capabilities and promises. But every so often, one of them strikes a chord because something feels specific rather than generic. Something says: these people understand my world.

That gives marketing something specific to carry and distribute. But it can't create the substance from nothing.

What this actually requires

For a B2B services company, visibility needs to help the right people understand why you matter to them. Get known by those people and make yourself impossible to ignore.

That takes depth as well as reach. It means the company's marketing, sales, delivery and culture all telling the same story, because in a buying cycle that can run for months with multiple stakeholders, gaps between what you say and what you do are harder to hide.

Thoughtworks published its thinking through the Technology Radar, open-source contributions and conference talks, with people like Martin Fowler and Jez Humble becoming recognised voices. You couldn't reproduce that simply by studying their website, because the thinking was the point. The website was just where some of it lived.

You can't reverse-engineer that with a campaign. The marketing carried the position forward, but it depended on the expertise behind it.

Give marketing something to work with

When the positioning is clear, marketing can be one of the most powerful things a services company does. It's how your thinking travels when you're not in the room. It's the reason someone contacts you and says "I saw something you wrote and it landed." It can make the difference between chasing every opportunity and having the right ones find you.

The problem is when the whole job gets relegated to marketing: positioning gets treated as a messaging exercise, a marketing team or agency gets asked to make choices that require leadership's commitment, and then takes the blame when it doesn't work.

Great marketing deserves better than that. In B2B services, it needs a specific, provable reason why a particular type of buyer should choose you over every alternative, including doing nothing.

Figure that out and the marketing, social activity and sales hires have something stronger to work with. The same tactics and people have a better chance because of what sits underneath them.

"Got Milk?" was a masterpiece, built for a product everyone already understood.

Most B2B services companies don't have that luxury. Their work starts earlier and goes deeper. It looks nothing like a campaign.