Syrup (2 page)

Okay. So how do I know this idea is so good?

When I was in my senior year of high school, the counselor said, “Now, Michael, about college ...”

“Yeah?” I was distracted at the time by cheerleading practice outside his window. Or maybe I was just inattentive and day-dreaming of cheerleaders. Not sure. “I’m doing pre-law.”

This was my plan. I’d had it for years, and I was pretty proud of it, too. I mean, just having a plan was a big deal. When people (like my parents) asked, “And what are you going to do after high school?” I could say, “Pre-law,” and they’d smile and raise their eyebrows and nod. It was much better than my previous answer, a shrug, which tended to attract frowns and comments about youth unemployment rates.

“Yes,” the counselor said, and cleared his throat. Outside the window, or inside my mind, cute girls twirled red-and-white pom-poms. “I think it’s time we looked at something ... more realistic.”

I blinked. “More ... ?”

“Let’s be honest, Michael,” he said gently. He didn’t have a particularly gentle face—It was kind of bitter and jaded—and the effort he made to twist it into something sympathetic was a little scary. “You don’t have the grades for it, do you?”

“Well,” I said, “maybe not, but ...” And I stopped. Because there was no
but.
I didn’t have the grades. My plan, perfect until this moment, was missing this small but crucial step: good grades. “Shit,” I said.

And weren’t the parents pissed.

If I’d been fooling myself, I’d been fooling them worse. They were already picking me out a dorm at Harvard and talking about Stanford as a “backup.” It was a little difficult for them when I broke the news that I was going to need a backup for my backup.

When the only school that would have me was Cal State, they moved to Iowa. I’m still not sure if that was coincidence.

I majored in marketing because I was late for registration.

I mean, suddenly I was in
college;
I was in a dorm and I was surrounded by college girls. There was a lot on my mind. Now, sure, there were upperclassmen and faculty advisers dedicated to making sure that freshmen like me didn’t miss registration, but it wasn’t hard to ditch them in favor of more horizon-broadening pursuits. My biggest mistake was making friends with a guy who had just transferred from Texas and was pre-enrolled: I forgot all about registration. I was scheduled between ten A.M. and eleven, and I turned up at four the following Thursday.

I was lucky anyone was still there, because by then enrollments had officially closed. When I tapped on the glass door, my choice of two first-year electives was reduced to three sad little tables: Programming in Visual Basic; Masculinity in the New Millennium; and Introductory Marketing.

Masculinity in the New Millennium was actually kind of interesting.

But Marketing was unbelievable.

Marketing (or
mktg,
which is what you write when you’re taking lecture notes at two hundred words per minute) is the biggest industry in the world, and it’s invisible. It’s the planet’s largest religion, but the billions who worship it don’t know it. It’s vast, insidious and completely corrupt.

Marketing is like LA. It’s like a gorgeous, brainless model in LA. A gorgeous, brainless model on cocaine having sex drinking Perrier in LA. That’s the best way I know how to describe it.

TRIPLE YOUR PRICE. THIS GIVES CUSTOMERS THE IMPRESSION OF GREAT QUALITY. HELPS PROFITS, TOO.

The first principle of marketing (okay, it’s not the first, but it doesn’t sound nearly as cool to say it’s the third) is this:
Perception is reality.
You see, a long time ago, some academic came up with the idea that reality doesn’t actually exist. Or at least, if it does, no one can agree what it is. Because of perception.

Perception is the filter through which we view the world, and most of the time it’s a handy thing to have: it generalizes the world so we can deduce that a man who wears an Armani suit is rich, or that a man who wears an Armani suit and keeps saying “Isn’t this some Armani suit” is a rich asshole. But perception is a faulty mechanism. Perception is unreliable and easily distracted, subject to a thousand miscues and misinformation ... like marketing. If anyone found a way to actually distinguish perception from reality, the entire marketing industry would crumble into the sea overnight.

(Incidentally, this wouldn’t be a good thing. The economy of every Western country would implode. Some of the biggest companies on the planet would never sell another product. The air would be thick with executives leaping out of windows and landing on BMWs.)

I ended up taking as many marketing classes as I could, and actually graduated from Cal State summa cum laude. If I’d just finished pre-law, I’d have settled into earnest conversation with the top law firms of the country, bandying about six-figure salaries, ninety-hour weeks and twenty-year career plans. Law seems very structured like that.

But marketing hates systems. Which is nice, in an idealistic, free-spirited sort of way, but it makes it a pain in the ass to get a job. To get a good job in marketing, you need to market yourself.

 

 

My name is Scat.

I used to be Michael George Holloway, but I had no chance of getting into marketing with a name like that. My potential employers, who had names like Fysh, Siimon and Onion, didn’t even think I was making an effort. The least I could do was echo their creative genius by choosing a wacky, zany, top-of-mind name myself.

For a while, I seriously toyed with the idea of calling myself Mr. Pretentious. But when sanity prevailed, I chose Scat. It sounded kind of fast-track.

So, armed with my new name, I was ready to hit the major corporations for a job. I was ready for the work week, tailored suits, corporate golf days, pension plans, Friday night drinks, frequent flyer programs and conservative values. I’d take it all.

But then I get my idea.

Of course, my great idea is a great
marketing
idea. And some of the best marketing ideas in the world haven’t been that exciting. Take fridge magnets. Great idea. Somebody probably made a bundle out of that one, before larger corporations with better manufacturing economies ate him up. But nobody cares.

My idea is for a new cola. This is important, because the soda market is very big. It’s so big that if a new product captures even a tiny percentage of the market, the revenues are into the millions of dollars. People tend to think of soda as little cans in fridges, without really understanding that the top two companies—Coca-Cola and PepsiCo—turn over about twenty billion dollars a year, and could, if they felt the urge, actually buy themselves a country.

So a
good
idea for a new cola is pretty exciting.

At eight A.M., I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a beer, a pen, a scribbled-on piece of paper and a whopping headache. Unfortunately, after my initial burst of genius, I’ve stalled. It turns out that although I’ve come up with good ideas for the important stuff—the name, the concept and the target market—I’m short on the rest, like how it should taste. And, more important, I’ve realized that there’s no way I can bring this product to market alone.

This is depressing.

Fortunately, Sneaky Pete arrives home.

Sneaky Pete is the coolest person I’ve ever met. This is partially due to his amazingly snappy fashion sense, but mainly because he rarely says anything, which allows him to preserve a slightly mysterious air of smooth confidence. I met Sneaky Pete at a marketing function during my last semester at Cal State and we became friends—surprisingly easily, considering his lack of conversation. So it was logical that we should pool our resources to find an LA apartment, especially since Sneaky Pete’s resources are much larger than mine.

If you happen to meet Sneaky Pete, maybe at some beach-house party, you’ll be told he’s from Tokyo, Japan. You won’t be told by Sneaky Pete, of course, because he is far too cool to hold forth about his international travels, but it’s a sure bet you’ll find out from someone. They’ll tell you in slightly awestruck tones that in Tokyo, Sneaky Pete was the wild child of marketing; that he moved from company to company and revived brand after brand; that in the end he had to come to America because the Japanese haven’t learned the same absolute respect for marketing that we have and as such find it difficult to justify marketing salaries of more than a million dollars a year.

You will raise your eyebrows and look over at Sneaky Pete, and he’ll be standing there with his deep shades and stunning cheek-bones, and you will believe. If you are brazen or addled enough to ask “Why is he called Sneaky Pete?” you will receive a short, alarmed roll of the eyes. A roll that suggests you don’t really want to know, and if you do, you should know you can’t ask in public.

I have a lot of respect for Sneaky Pete, not least because he is actually a fresh marketing graduate from Singapore who has never worked in his life. His real name is Yuong Ang (I saw it on his passport), his most valuable possession is a crumpled little book called
Through American Eyes: The Asian Stereotype,
and he attended Guandong Technical School, where he managed bare passing grades.

“Sneaky Pete!” I say, leaping up. “Man, I’m glad to see you.” He may be pleased by this, or maybe not: it’s kind of hard to tell through his shades. “I have a huge idea and I need your help.”

He cocks a chiseled eyebrow at me, then pulls up a chair at our tacky kitchen table. I tell him all about my idea and he listens solemnly, nodding. I’m pretty relieved he doesn’t shoot me down, because even though you need to back your own judgment on stuff like this, it’s good to have other people believe in you, too.

“My
problem,
though,” I say, “is that I don’t know what to do now. I mean, I can’t launch a cola product by myself. I’m stuck.”

Sneaky Pete leans back in his chair, smirking.

“What?” I say. “I’m not stuck?”

He shakes his head.

“Hmm ... hey, no! You mean I should sell this to one of the majors?”

Sneaky Pete’s lips stretch into a grin.

“Okay.” I think about this. “That would be good if I knew someone in the industry. But I don’t. If I just walked in there, they’d chew me over and take my idea. I need a contact.” I sigh. “I guess I need the name and number of the New Products Marketing Manager at Coke.”

I snigger at this little fantasy. But Sneaky Pete doesn’t share my joviality. He leans forward, and he’s not smiling anymore. Sneaky Pete looks very serious.

“No,” I say. “No way.”

Then Sneaky Pete speaks. This is always a little thrill, both because it’s so rare and because of his accent, which is strangely addictive.

“Yes way,” Sneaky Pete says.

It turns out that Sneaky Pete met this girl at a Malibu nightclub who has just been appointed New Products Marketing Manager at Coca-Cola. I am continually amazed by how many people Sneaky Pete manages to meet, given that as a general rule he doesn’t talk.

I don’t quite catch the girl’s name, but Sneaky Pete waves his hand in a way that tells me he’ll take care of everything. He pulls out his cellphone and goes into his room, and when he comes out he hands me a scrap of paper with a time—two hours from now—and an address.

“Sneaky Pete,” I say earnestly, “thank you. I’ll remember you when I’m rich and famous.”

I am the only person in Los Angeles who doesn’t own a car, so I catch the bus to Coca-Cola’s downtown tower (they’re technically based in Atlanta but have obviously realized they can’t
really
operate out of anywhere but California). It’s twenty minutes away from our East LA apartment, but the building is so mammoth that I spend another five gaping at it. It’s huge, black and so much like a big glass of Coke it had to be accidental.

I take a deep breath, then stroll into reception, pausing only to dutifully admire the smattering of ancient Coke memorabilia. I note that as in all large corporations that loudly subscribe to equal opportunity and employment based solely on skill, the receptionist is young, female and gorgeous.

“Scat,” I tell her. “To see the New Products Marketing Manager.”

The receptionist fields this without looking up. Just when I’m about to introduce myself again, only louder, she says, “She’ll be a few minutes, Mr. Scat. May I show you to a meeting room?”

“Yes you may,” I say generously. She slides a VISITOR badge across the counter and leads me to a well-lit room with a mahogany desk, big red chairs and carpet thick enough to lose small children in. I throw my briefcase on the table and sink into a chair. “Thanks.”