Marketing Quiz: Learn & Play

The most respected restaurant guide in the world was created to sell something else entirely.

It was created to sell tires.
In 1900, two brothers who ran a tire company gave away the first edition for free. The more reasons people had to drive somewhere far away, the faster tires wore out, and the sooner they were replaced.
At the time, there were fewer than 3,000 cars in the entire country.
The star ratings came much, much later.

We choose between products all day long, yet we rarely know why we picked the one we did.

Marketing Trivia Quiz is a three-choice quiz app about the hidden machinery behind how things get sold.


[1] Pick an answer, walk away with a story worth retelling

Every question comes with an explanation. You do not just find out whether you were right, you find out why it works that way, so what stays with you afterward is something you can actually tell someone.

- A company once ran ads asking people to please stop using its name as a verb
- The number two rental car company put "We're only No. 2" in its own headline
- Those three sizes at the movie theater or the coffee shop: the middle price is doing a job
- The produce section sits right inside the supermarket entrance for a reason
- One company decided it would make its money on membership fees, not on the products it sells


[2] Start anywhere, whether it's all new or all familiar

There are three difficulty levels, sorted by how deep into the trivia they go.

- Junior: everyday shopping, solvable even if you've never heard the story
- Planner: famous campaigns and the mechanics of pricing
- Director: advertising history, and what later became of the famous "laws"


[3] Five questions per round, sized for a spare moment

Each round is one campaign, and one campaign is five questions, running through five steps: brief, insight, idea, production, launch.
It fits in the few minutes you spend waiting for a train, or for your coffee.

Your score is kept for each campaign, so you can pick up where you left off and keep going for a perfect run.


[4] Play without worrying about a signal

All the questions live inside the app. Airplane mode, the subway, another country: no connection needed.


[5] Available in several languages

The app supports English, Japanese, German, Spanish, and Korean, among others. You can switch at any time from the in-app settings.


[Who this is for]

- Anyone curious about what stores and ads are really doing
- Anyone who catches themselves studying the price tag
- Anyone interested in how the world's brands came to be
- Trivia lovers who like collecting things worth repeating
- Anyone who wants something to think about in a spare five minutes


[About the content]

Questions are checked against primary sources wherever possible: company records, academic papers, contemporary news coverage, and reports from public institutions.

This field is full of stories that are widely believed but were later overturned by further research. Rather than state those as settled fact, the explanations tell you what happened next.


Take a look at the first question.