One of my marketing heroes didn’t work in marketing at all, in fact he lived over 100 years before marketing existed.
His name was James Watt, and he marketed the Industrial Revolution.
How could one man market an idea that would change the world?
It all began around 1712 when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam-driven beam engine.
Mines would be drenched with water which had to be pumped out.
Newcomen’s pump-engine had a piston which would fill with steam pushing one end of the beam up.
To lower the beam, the piston had to be sprayed with water to cool it and disperse the steam.
The piston then had to be reheated at every stroke, it was a long inefficient process.
In 1764, Watt invented the condensing cylinder, whereby the steam would be fed to a second cylinder for cooling, leaving the primary cylinder hot, so the process was much faster.
Watt’s engines were much more efficient but that left him with a problem: how to sell his revolutionary machines to an agricultural society.
This is where Watt marketed what became known as the Industrial Revolution.
England had always run on horse power, everything was driven by horses, how could Watt explain something so revolutionary as his steam engines to people who had no knowledge of anything but horses?
Watt’s marketing brilliance was talking to people in their own language.
All everyone knew was horses, so Watt didn’t talk about his machines in terms of engineering brilliance, he talked about them in terms of horses.
Watt invented the unit of horsepower.
He started with the generally accepted amount of work a horse could do in a day: raising 33,000 lbs of water from the bottom of a well 1,000 feet deep.
He converted that into a usable unit: one horsepower = 550lbs raised 1 foot in 1 second.
By converting a horse’s usable energy into a number, he could compare it against his steam engines and he had something any farmer or pit-owner could understand.
Now, instead of some new-fangled steam-gimmick his engines could be compared directly against horses in work-units.
Watt could explain to people who had never known a machine, how many horses his engine could replace.
A 6 horsepower engine could do the work of six horses, a 12 horsepower engine could do the work of 12 horses, and so on.
He could explain that his machine never needed a rest like a horse, so where horses would work 8 hours shifts, his machine could work 24 hours non-stop, replacing three horses.
Before Watt, all England knew was the muscle-power of horses, Watt’s equation took the fear and mystery out converting from horses to new-fangled machinery.
The brilliance of Watt was not being thrilled with his own cleverness, but speaking the language of the people he wanted to convince.
To get out of his own head and into the consumer’s head.
That was how James Watt marketed the Industrial Revolution.,
So powerful was his unit of horsepower as a concept that it’s still used as a measurement of power today, all over the world.
Formula One racing cars, travelling at 200 mph, are rated at 1,000 horsepower.
The Apollo 11 rocket, which took man to the moon, is rated at 32 million horsepower.
When Watt translated his technology into something anyone could understand he made it a language the entire world, present and future, could own.
That’s the power of great marketing and advertising thinking.
My favourite line from Blackadder, when he was the regency butler reading out the jobs ads in a newspaper:
“Man called Stephenson has invented a giant kettle on wheels. Needs someone to help with the marketing.”