Stuff your face

How many hot dogs can you eat in 12 minutes?

Believe it or not the World Record is 62.

Every year there is a contest to determine the fastest speed eater of hot dogs. The challenge is to see who can eat the most hot dogs in 12 minutes.

For years and years the record had steadily crept up, one hot dog at a time.

By 2000 the record stood at 25 hot dogs. Still impressive.

The technique adopted by most competitors had stayed the same year after year.

It was simple.

To stuff as many hot dogs as greedily and as quickly into the mouth as possible.

Presumably he or she with the biggest mouth won.

In the early years of the new Millennium a new face had come onto the scene. He adopted a new approach.

For Takeru Kobayashi it was not just about speed. It was about breaking down the approach and seeking improvements across the technique.

Instead of eating the hot dog whole, he tried breaking it in half. He found that it gave him more options for chewing, and freed his hands to improve loading.

Then he experimented with eating the dog and bread separately.

Next he tested dipping the rolls in water, then water sprinkled with vegetable oil, then he videotaped his training sessions. All designed to help find new ways to eat a hot dog as quickly as possible.

Finally he looked to find different ways of chewing and swallowing to create space in his stomach in order to avoid vomiting.

In 2000 when he first turned up to compete he didn’t look the part. He was slight and short, unlike his supersized competitors who had been gorging on hot dogs for years.

He wasn't taken seriously at first.

But he smashed the competition and the world record out of sight, eating an incredible 50 hot dogs.

In one year he had doubled the world record.

This thinking, this approach is called Marginal Gains Theory.

Where the little things matter.

Where by looking for continuous improvement across all the small things we do, we can create a cumulative effect that can be significant and substantive.

And by breaking down the process and the thinking into its constituent parts we can find new ways of thinking, new approaches, to the challenge. Finding marginal gains as we go.

Each gain might be small but the cumulative effective can be revolutionary. Transformative.

All it requires is a creative and marginal gain mindset and the will to challenge established ways of doing things.

And if it can work in improving hot dog performance, it can work in improving marketing performance.

Where are your marginal gains?