Take the Weird and Make It Wonderful
Don't explain away the strangeness of a new category — brand it into delight.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 80%
Early genetic testing was, in Wojcicki's telling, an esoteric gift that people didn't know what to do with. 23andMe's head of marketing reframed the challenge in one line: 'we're going to take the weird and we're going to make it wonderful.' Rather than explaining why consumers should care about genetics, the brand made the strangeness itself the appeal — ancestry surprises, Neanderthal percentages, lactose intolerance, unexpected relatives. The delightful surface built brand recognition and mainstream comfort, which in turn carried the serious health products into homes. The framework treats a new category's weirdness as its most valuable marketing asset rather than the thing to apologize for.
Origin
In 23andMe's early days genetic testing was an unfamiliar, slightly uncomfortable purchase — people literally asked why they would want it. The company's head of marketing, whom Wojcicki describes as a brilliant brand marketer, articulated the vision of converting that weirdness into wonder rather than fighting it.
Core principles
- 01A genuinely new product is weird before it is wanted; weirdness is the raw material, not the obstacle.
- 02Delight converts curiosity into purchase faster than education converts skepticism into purchase.
- 03The fun surface of a product can carry the serious one into the mainstream.
- 04Brand recognition is what makes a strange category feel safe to enter.
How to run it
- 1
Locate the weirdness precisely
Identify what specifically makes people recoil or shrug. For 23andMe it was spitting into a tube and receiving information about your own DNA — esoteric and slightly unsettling.
Watch out Don't sand the weirdness off. It's the only thing about you that isn't commoditized.
- 2
Find the delight inside it
Ask what is genuinely fun, surprising, or human about the strange thing. Ancestry surprises, Neanderthal percentages, and discovering unknown relatives were all fun before they were useful.
Pro tip Look for what customers tell their friends about unprompted — that is the wonderful part.
- 3
Lead the brand with the delight
Make the delightful angle the front door of consumer marketing. Ancestry got the most publicity and became the accessible entry point to the whole product.
- 4
Let the serious product ride in behind
Once the brand is familiar and beloved, the harder, more consequential use case — breast cancer risk, Alzheimer's risk, carrier status — becomes something people are willing to face.
Pro tip The fun product and the serious product must be genuinely the same product, or this reads as bait-and-switch.
Watch out Do not use the playful brand to obscure serious consequences — pair it with a real consent process.
In the wild
Ancestry composition — discovering you're half Italian rather than fully Irish, or that you carry African or Jewish descent — became the feature that got the most publicity and the most delight, alongside playful traits like Neanderthal percentage and lactose intolerance.
→ 23andMe built extraordinary brand recognition and grew past 14 million customers, with the health and research products travelling in on the back of the fun ones.
Common mistakes
Explaining instead of enchanting
Founders of new categories default to education, arguing people into interest. Wojcicki's marketer skipped the argument entirely and made the product something people wanted to talk about.
Treating the fun feature as a distraction from the real product
Ancestry looked frivolous next to disease risk, but it was the mechanism that made disease risk mainstream. Killing the fun layer would have killed the funnel.
Is it for you?
Best for
Consumer companies creating a category from scratch where the product's value is real but unfamiliar and hard to explain cold.
Not ideal for
Products in established categories competing on price or performance, or serious-use-case products where a playful brand would undermine trust.
From the transcript
“My head of marketing who was really a brilliant brand marketer had the vision she's like look we're going to take the weird and we're…”
“She took genetic testing from these early days where it was like why would I want this it was like kind of an esoteric interesting…”
“The brand recognition is extraordinary and we made it something that is truly wonderful.”
From the episode
Anne Wojcicki: How 23andMe is Disrupting the Healthcare Industry
Anne Wojcicki