Cheetos just went and launched a marketing campaign that 99% of its customers won’t fully understand.

And THAT’S pretty much the point.

They challenged professional font designers to create a typeface using only their non-dominant hands — simulating how you’d write if your snack hand was covered in orange Cheeto dust, but you weren’t done snacking.

The results are gloriously messy, with wobbly letters and chaotic spacing, mocked-up in crazy new applications like stop signs and tattoos.

Most Cheetos eaters don’t know (or give any f***s) about font design.

But designers and marketers?

We gobble this stuff up (cheesy + corny pun intended). And we’re exactly the audience that makes campaigns go viral on LinkedIn and creative platforms.

This follows a smart tradition of brands turning “flaws” into features:

• Pringles celebrating how your hand gets stuck in the can
• Domino’s “Oh Yes We Did” campaign that acknowledged their pizza wasn’t great (and showed how they fixed it)
• Doritos hilarious (if very weird) “finger cleaner” ad
• And the legendary Volkswagen “Think Small” campaign

But Cheetos takes a novel direction by targeting a slim but influential slice of their audience. The design community gets an inside joke about their craft, while casual viewers just see fun, messy branding.

Action for today: What subset of your audience has outsized influence on a platform that matters? Could a campaign that speaks their specific language help spread your message more broadly?

Need help finding your product’s most influential advocates? Let’s talk about precision targeting … just tap reply.

Laurier

Product Payoff: Here’s a classic for ya: Moleskine notebooks built their entire brand by targeting creative professionals. Regular notebook users didn’t care about the (convoluted) Hemingway and Van Gogh connections, but designers and writers spread the gospel. Today they’re the default “serious notebook” across all professions.