Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

In 1991, someone at Mazda looked at a Samsonite suitcase and thought: “What if this could do 30 km/h?”
It sounds like the setup to a particularly unhinged Top Gear segment, but no, this really happened. In the golden age of fax machines and grunge, a team of Mazda engineers decided to build a fully functional petrol-powered car that folded into a suitcase.
They called it the Mazda Suitcase Car, and no, it wasn’t a metaphor or some weird art installation. This was an actual, three-wheeled, go-kart-sized vehicle with working headlights, a horn, foot pegs, and a handlebar throttle ripped straight out of a motorcycle’s playbook. It even had a disc brake and a differential, which basically means (in case you aren't a mechanical engineer) that it could turn corners without flipping like a pancake.
The whole thing started with a suitcase, a pocket bike engine, and what we assume was a dare. The final creation weighed 32 kg and unfolded like a really lame Transformer. When zipped up, it looked like standard airport luggage. When opened, it became a tiny road warrior capable of reaching 30 km/h. You could assemble it with no tools, just pure willpower and some upper body strength.
Fortunately, Mazda didn’t actually plan to sell the thing. It was built for auto shows in the US and Europe, rolling proof that their engineers had both talent and time on their hands. The Suitcase Car made its most iconic appearance when a Mazda executive zipped through Times Square in it before the 1992 New York International Auto Show. Because nothing says “cutting-edge automotive tech” like a grown man riding a suitcase down Broadway.
Unfortunately for anyone hoping to commute via briefcase, the Suitcase Car never made it past prototype. This is probably because stuffing a combustion engine inside your carry-on bag is frowned upon by airport security.
Mazda's efforts sound like the kind of thing that could become a Red Bull competition, although they would probably be looking for a top speed with another zero on the end. Red Bull is an extraordinary story of experiential marketing. It's also proof that you should travel and see the world, as the company's existence owes itself to an Austrian businessman who once tried an obscure energy drink in Thailand. In Dominique Olivier's piece this week, she digs into the Red Bull story and how they've built the world's leading energy drink using advertising methods that have very little to do with the drinks themselves. Enjoy it here>>>
Speaking of marketing, Heineken is trying to overcome Gen Z's decision to drink less. To do it, they are running a campaign that takes the jol back to the early 2000s. Read on for that story, along with Dominique's Fast Facts based around the oddest ideas in marketing.
And since it's the weekend and we seem to be so focused on experiences in this edition of Weekender, it seems appropriate to include the first episode of Investec's Wine in Focus podcast. If you're interested in learning more about wine and perhaps even investing in it, this is a fun listen that includes the most important reminder of all: the best bottle is the one you open with your besties.
Have a great day!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

Red Bull: The Thing With Wings

Heineken wants you to party like it's 2003

TL;DR: Ever gone to a live event and wished the people around you would just put their phones down and live in the moment? Heineken’s latest marketing gamble says “same”.
Back in the early 2000s, phones were gloriously dumb. They flipped, they slid, they played Snake, and if you were really lucky, they had a tiny antenna you could pull out just for the drama. Fast forward two decades and your phone now knows your heartbeat, your sleep schedule, the contents of your inbox and the embarrassing number of hours you’ve spent doomscrolling. Heineken thinks maybe it’s time to press pause on all that.
Enter the Boring Phone, Heineken’s gloriously lo-fi gadget that made its debut at Milan Design Week in April 2024. Made in collaboration with streetwear brand Bodega and designed to look like a Heineken bottle had a baby with a Nokia 3310, this phone connects to exactly nothing. No internet, no apps, just good old-fashioned SMS and calls (the kind that require actual voice vibrations). Only 5,000 were released, but over 70,000 people tried to get their hands on one. Apparently, boring is the new limited edition.
But what if you weren’t one of the chosen 5,000? Assessing that they may have underestimated the demand for the Boring Phone, Heineken went back to the drawing board and returned with Boring Mode - an app version of digital detox that lets you turn your very smart, extremely capable phone into a Boring Phone. With the tap of a button, you can silence the siren song of social media and relive the glory days of texting without autocorrect and finding your way to the afterparty location without GPS. The app will even block access to your camera for a limited time.
The idea is simple: when you're out at a music festival or a party, maybe don’t experience it through 47 Instagram stories and a livestream your future self won’t watch.
Live. In. The. Moment.
It’s all part of a larger societal shift that the clever marketers at Heineken have picked up on. After years of Zoom fatigue and algorithmic burnout, people are craving real-life, unfiltered connection. Marketers call it “experiential engagement.” Normal people call it “touching grass.” Either way, Heineken has planted its flag squarely in the dirt of post-pandemic human interaction, and they’ve got the bottle openers to prove it. (Literally: in 2022 they made one that shut down your work apps.)
With beer sales under pressure due to Gen Z's determination to drink less (see the full breakdown of why that’s happening here), this back-to-basics approach could be the marketing trick that lands Heineken some much-needed front-of-mind real estate. After all, if you can’t scroll, you might as well sip something cold and talk to the humans around you. Preferably with both thumbs off the screen and one hand holding a beer.
And of course, these days, that could easily mean an alcohol-free beer. That's the only product category where these beer companies are currently enjoying any growth!

Dominique's Fast Facts: Oddest Ideas in Marketing

An assortment of facts that will only take you five minutes to read.

In 2016, Nivea debuted their “Care From the Air” marketing campaign at Cannes. The campaign involved a seagull-shaped drone that would “poop” sunscreen on unsuspecting children at the beach. The idea was to get sunscreen on children who would otherwise refuse to have it applied by their parents. As it turns out, not even desperate parents could get behind this idea.

In 2019, Skittles went to Broadway with a one-night-only performance of Skittles: The Musical. The musical was written by an award-winning playwright and formatted as one large and obvious ad that told the story of how manipulative the marketing industry was. Throughout the musical, all of the characters regularly spoke and sang about how advertisements ruined their lives and how they were living in one giant Skittles commercial. Even though Skittles charged $200 for each ticket, the musical sold out and went viral within days of its premiere.

To promote their new stock photo service Adobe Stock in 2016, Adobe partnered with Swedish agency Abby Priest to develop a tongue-in-cheek fashion line that featured outdated, overused stock photos. For a limited time only, you could buy a t-shirt with your favourite cliche stock image printed on it for the world to see. You can see the catalogue here (trust us, it's worth the click).

Back in 2009, Burger King kicked off their Whopper Sacrifice campaign. The campaign involved an app that prompted Facebook users to delete 10 of their Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free Whopper. The app would then alert each of those 10 friends that they’d been sacrificed for a bite of fast food. Over 200,000 people sacrificed their friends in the name of a burger before the app itself was sacrificed on the altar of Facebook. The company protested that the app violated the site’s privacy clauses by informing users of the friend removals, a function that overrode Facebook’s existing mechanic of simply removing a friend without that person being informed.