How My Five-Year-Old Taught Me a $10 Billion Dollar Lesson About Entrepreneurship

I sat down at the breakfast table between my five-year-old and two-year-old daughters and was about to eat my usual bowl of granola and almond milk when my two-year-old began whining: “Meek! Meek! Meek!”

My five-year-old, who seems to understand my two-year-old better than I do, translated for me: “I think she wants some of your milk, Daddy.”

“Well, she can’t have this milk,” I explained. “It’s not her milk. It’s almond milk.” Within seconds, my wife — as the always-prepared parent — appeared from seemingly nowhere to hand our youngest daughter a freshly filled cup of whole milk, and that appeared to be the end of the conversation. I ate my granola. My two-year-old happily gulped down her newly supplied milk. And my oldest daughter quietly chewed on her waffle.

Later that same morning, as I drove my girls to daycare, my oldest daughter was unusually quiet. Aside from selfishly enjoying the rare moment of calm, I didn’t think too much about her silence. However, as we pulled into the daycare’s parking lot, she finally spoke. “Daddy,” she said, “what kind cow does almond milk come from?”

I laughed. The question was one of those beautiful questions only children can ask because adults are too cynical and jaded about the world to notice all of society’s inconsistencies. In other words, it was simultaneously unexpected, naive, innocent, and secretly brilliant.

Unfortunately, at that particular moment, I didn’t realize how clever my daughter’s question was. I could tell the almond milk question had been bothering her since breakfast, which explained her uncharacteristic silence. She’d been carefully trying to unravel a mystery that, in my mind, didn’t seem worth the brainpower, anxiety, and frustration she’d devoted to it. Instead, I dismissed it as the silly question of a child who just doesn’t know better.

Once I’d finished my laugh, I gave her a perfunctory answer. “Almond milk doesn’t come from cows,” I explained. “That’s just what it’s called. It comes from almonds, which is a type of nut.”

“Then why is it called milk?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I never really thought about it,” I responded. “I guess because it’s white and kind of tastes like milk.”

She seemed to accept my careless answer as correct. I helped her out of the car, she happily skipped off to be with her friends, and that was the end of our conversation about the origins of almond milk. Or so I thought.

The unexpected return of the almond milk question

After dropping off my daughters, I went to a meeting with one of my entrepreneurship students. His startup was developing a type of hybrid note taking and word processing app to compete with Microsoft Word and Google Docs as well as companies like Evernote. But he was struggling to get users.

“I feel like we’ve tested Facebook ad campaigns using every marketing message possible,” he said with frustrated exaggeration. “I just don’t know how else to convince people to try it.”

Not knowing what advice to give, I figured the most useful thing I could do was review his ads. “Can I take a look at some of the messaging you’ve experimented with?” I asked.

“Sure,” he shrugged. He opened his Facebook Ads account and passed me his laptop. He clearly didn’t expect me to find anything useful, and, honestly, neither did I. But I skimmed through the campaigns and read his messaging. They were filled with generic statements about how his software was “all new,” “revolutionary,” and “game changing.” Nothing seemed overly compelling, but nothing seemed terrible either.

While I looked through his campaigns, he took out a bottle of almond milk from his backpack and began drinking. In that moment, like a thunderbolt, the solution to his problem hit me. I knew why his campaigns weren’t working.

“Almond milk!” I exclaimed, surely sounding crazy.

“Huh?” my student asked with understandable confusion. “Do you want some?”

“No, not that,” I assured him. “It’s something my daughter asked me this morning. She asked why almond milk is called milk, and I think I know the answer.”

“How is that supposed to help me?” he asked.

“Oh, it will,” I promised. “It’s going to explain everything you need to know.”

Almond milk’s brilliant marketing strategy

Technically, almond milk isn’t really a type of milk. Milk is a nutrient-rich, biologically produced substance exclusively created by lactating female mammals in order to nourish their children. In fact, if I remember my 7th grade science class correctly, being able to produce milk — along with having hair — is one of the key characteristics that makes an animal a mammal.

Instead of being a type of milk, almond milk is water that’s been filtered through crushed almonds. Although the beverage has existed since the 13th century, the medieval type of almond milk isn’t very similar to what we now call almond milk. The almond milk we drink today didn’t become widely popular until the early 2000s. Around that time, manufacturers began adding other things to create a pleasing look, feel, taste, and texture that made it more closely resemble cow’s milk. This was more than just a way of improving the product. It was also a brilliant marketing strategy.

To understand just how brilliant the strategy was, think about what would have happened if almond milk manufacturers had used the same marketing strategy as the entrepreneur sitting in my office. In other words, what if, instead of calling their beverage “milk,” the manufacturers had decided to frame it as its own unique type of plant-based drink that was “all new,” “revolutionary,” and “game changing”? Maybe they would have made it blue. Maybe they would have made it less sweet. Maybe they would have allowed small bits of crushed almond to remain in the drink to give it a grainy texture.

If you found yourself gagging over the thought of pouring a blue, bitter, grainy almond beverage into your morning cereal, then you’re ready to appreciate the true value of the marketing strategy deployed by almond milk manufacturers. Specifically, think about all the clearly defined roles milk plays in our lives: we drink it for breakfast; we use it in our cereal; we pour it into our coffees; Starbucks uses it to make Frappuccinos; and so on. In addition, we already have infrastructure for delivering milk to consumers. There are milk aisles in grocery stores, standard types of milk containers, and even common milk purchasing quantities (e.g. gallons and half-gallons).

Almond milk manufacturers recognized the existing expectations and infrastructure around cow’s milk, and, instead of competing with it, they decided to embrace it. Rather than presenting their almond beverage as revolutionary and forcing consumers (and the stores selling it) to figure out what to do with it on their own, almond milk manufacturers decided to present their drink as a familiar product. They created a direct milk substitute. By doing this, consumers immediately knew exactly what to do with it, which helped smooth the adoption curve of almond milk.

For evidence of the strategy’s success, just look how much almond milk has grown in popularity. Over the past 20 years, almond milk has replaced soy milk as the most popular non-dairy milk alternative while growing into a $10 billion dollar industry. Clearly, making almond milk more milk-like has been a valuable marketing strategy.

How to leverage almond milk’s marketing strategy

When I finished explaining the almond milk marketing strategy to the entrepreneur asking for my advice about his own marketing strategy, he no longer looked at me like I was completely crazy for talking about almond milk, but he was still a little confused. “So, I’m supposed to make my product more familiar?” he asked.

“Yes!” I urged. “You’ve been trying to convince people your product is revolutionary. What if your messaging is pushing away potential users because it makes them feel like they don’t understand what you’ve built? Rather than trying to convince them to use something revolutionary, how can you frame what you’ve built so it feels like a familiar yet better way of doing something they’re already comfortable with?”

“I guess I could try that,” he said. He wasn’t as excited about my almond milk epiphany as I was, but at least he seemed willing to test an alternate strategy. We spent the rest of our meeting tinkering with new Facebook ads that presented his product as something comfortable and familiar.

It didn’t take long for the value of the new strategy to become obvious. Later that same afternoon, I received the following email:

“Dr. Dinin — It worked! These new ads are getting us the best click-through and conversion rates we’ve ever had by a ton. Thanks for your help!”

I wish I could take credit, but the real innovator was my daughter. She’s the person who asked the important question I’d completely overlooked.

When I picked her up from daycare at the end of the day, I told her about my meeting and how much she’d helped. Unfortunately, her response wasn’t as enthusiastic as I’d hoped. “That’s boring, Daddy,” she said. “Will you turn on the radio, please?”

Oh well. She’s only five and has a few more years before she’ll be building startups of her own. In the meantime, hopefully her thoughtful question can help one of you.

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to Web Masters, his podcast exploring digital entrepreneurship.