💊 $4 Antacid vs. $40 Pain: How TUMS Sells You on Avoiding Regret

You ever seen a marketing deck where the team spent like, three weeks mapping all their “customer personas”…only for it to sound like they were pulled off the back of a cereal box? 😅

THEM: “We’ve done the research, and our customers are most definitely…

• Millennials

• Working moms

• “Anyone who likes saving money”

ME: 😅

Everyone always nods politely, as if these revelations are somehow groundbreaking, when really they’re about as useful as saying “humans breathe oxygen” or “people generally dislike pain.”

This is the trap marketers love to fall in… selling to a who.

It’s neat. It’s tidy. It looks good on a slide. But it doesn’t actually move customers to action, because people don’t make decisions based on whether they fit a persona. They make decisions in very specific moments, usually when they’re trying to avoid pain, embarrassment, frustration, or regret.

👉 Which is why the sharper question (and the one we should be asking) is this:
“When would someone regret not having our product?”

That’s the pivot point most marketers miss, and it’s where the money lives.

🌮 Meet TUMS (and the Third Taco Problem)

Nobody, in their whole life, has ever woken up, stretched, looked in the mirror, and thought:

But almost everyone (and I mean everyone) has had that moment of staring down at the last taco, feeling smug about finishing it, only to realize 20 minutes later that you regret every decision you ever made…

(ME: “OMG tacoooooos….😋”

ALSO ME: “…why the hell did I eat that third taco?” 😖)

That moment is the exact moment TUMS owns.

And that’s the brilliance of their marketing. They don’t try to win the “who” game because that’s broad, bland, and forgettable (it’s also where a lot of their competitors played for a long time)

Instead, they dominate the “when” game, zeroing in on one of the most universal regret moments of modern eating culture.

It’s not about “digestive health solutions.” It’s about regret management. And TUMS has become shorthand for it.

🧠 The Psychology: Why Regret Is Rocket Fuel

There’s a principle in behavioral science called Regret Aversion.

In simple terms, researchers Kahneman & Tversky showed that people are about twice as motivated to avoid losses (or regret) as they are to pursue gains. Which means the pain of heartburn after those tacos feels disproportionately larger than the joy of eating them in the first place.

And here’s where it gets wild: once someone has experienced that pain even once, the memory becomes sticky. It’s vivid. It’s available on demand. Psychologists call this the Availability Heuristic — the tendency to overweight negative memories that are easiest to recall.

Add one more layer — Identity Buffering — and the genius of TUMS becomes obvious. They don’t shame you for overindulging. They don’t wag a finger and say “don’t eat tacos.” Their ads basically say: “Hey, everyone eats the third taco. Because tacos are delicious, let’s be real here. You’re not broken, you’re just human. That’s why we exist.”

This is subtle but powerful. It means customers can maintain their identity as a fun, social, adventurous eater while also protecting themselves from the downside. TUMS lets you have your tacos and eat them too.

And speaking of something subtle but powerful, did you know that less than 1% of eCom brands ever hit 9 figures? 🤯 

I didn’t. But I know where to learn the tactical steps that got them there...

No Best Practices is where you’ll learn the direct response tactics and brand positioning frameworks those rare brands use to scale. It’s written by my good friend Alex G., and I highly recommend you check it out!

If you want your ads to scale, your emails to convert, and your brand to actually beat the competition → this is where you start.

👉 Subscribe to: No Best Practices = performance marketing from first principles.

🚨 Why Most Ads Miss the Mark

Most brands never even attempt this kind of marketing because it feels safer to stick with the “who.”

You get to look smart in the boardroom, put logos on a slide, and check the box on “customer segmentation.” But then you launch your ad campaign and wonder why no one clicks, no one buys, and the creative that looked beautiful in the pitch meeting falls flat in the wild.

It’s because demographics don’t drive behavior. Moments do.

You can target “busy professionals ages 25–45” all you want, but that doesn’t mean anything when the real driver of purchase is the moment their laptop dies and they realize they haven’t backed up a single file since 2019.

That’s why so many volume-based ad spends flop. They’re speaking to a “who” that looks good on paper but has nothing to do with the real “when” the purchase actually happens.

💥 Why This Works (and How to Do It Yourself)

I truly believe most marketers miss the mark because they start with “personas,” not moments. They obsess over the “who” — the demographic, the job title, the abstract identity… but real customers don’t buy in an abstract, perfect world. They buy in a messy, complicated, specifics-driven environment.

Lucky for them, there’s a method for turning those messy moments into marketing fuel. A way to capture the regret points your customer already feels (or will feel soon) and translate them into ads so vivid they’re impossible to ignore.

And once you know the steps, you can build regret-driven creative on repeat. Here’s how:

Step 1: Hunt for Regret Moments

Ask yourself (or better yet, ask your customers):
👉 “When have you kicked yourself for not having this solution sooner?”

These are usually small, embarrassing, or frustrating details that never make it into a persona deck. Moments like:

• “When I had to tie my shoes and threw my back out.”

• “When the baby photos disappeared because my phone crashed.”

• “When I ate the third taco and swore I wouldn’t do it again.”

Write these down in plain language — no jargon, no “brand-safe” polish just yet.

Step 2: Make It Vivid

Next draft your messaging, and be very careful to go after when…not who.

❌ Don’t say “we’re the heartburn sufferer’s #1 choice.” Nobody has ever typed that into Google at 1AM after a bad food decision.

✅ Do say: “That third taco was a mistake. Get the comfort you need STAT.”

See the difference? One sounds like it came from a medical brochure. The other sounds like something your best friend would text you after a night out.

The more sensory, funny, or painfully specific you can make the regret moment, the faster your customer recognizes themselves in it…and the faster they feel like, “Oh, that’s me.”

That flash of recognition is the emotional hook. It’s the bridge between your product and their very human, very real Tuesday-night regret. 😖

Step 3: Normalize It

Here’s the part most brands screw up…

If you frame the regret as a personal failure — “You should’ve known better, you messed up” — people are going to shut down. Turn off. Scroll away.

But if you frame it as universal: “We’ve all been there, everyone eats that third taco, bro. We got you.” — you preserve their dignity while still making the pain real.

This is identity buffering in action: your product becomes a way to protect their identity, not attack it.

Step 4: Offer the Out

Finally, position your product as the easy, low-friction “never again” button.
No lecture required. No lifestyle overhaul needed. Just a simple way to erase regret before it even starts.

That’s why TUMS doesn’t sell “digestive health management.”
They sell “the solution for taco number three.”

Step 5: Build Ads Around the Sequence

When you’ve got the regret mapped, your ads practically write themselves.

Example:

• Regret Moment: “Why did I eat the third taco?”

• Vivid Hook: “That taco was worth it. We can deal with the aftermath together.”

• Normalization: “Everyone overdoes it sometimes.”

• Out: “TUMS supports third tacos. Kills the regret.”

That’s a complete ad framework in four lines — no personas required.

This works because it aligns perfectly with how humans process decisions: we remember regret more vividly than reward, we want to avoid future embarrassment more than we want future gains, and we’ll happily pay $4 today to avoid a $40 mistake tomorrow.

When you start building your ads around regret-driven “when” moments instead of vague “who” personas, your creative gets sharper, your message gets stickier, and your customer feels like you actually see them in the messy, human moments that shape their choices.

Figuring out the “who” is easy.

If you’ve made it this far (still nodding, still thinking about tacos) you probably don’t need me to tell you how regret works. We’re all living it. 😅

We’ve all had own “third taco” moments in marketing:

• That time when you poured $5K into ads that looked gorgeous…only to realize you didn’t actually know why they flopped.

• That other time a competitor launched a campaign using messaging you could have found first, if only you’d had a better system for tracking customer insights.

• That time you stared at a Notion board full of “ideas” and thought: Dang it, I should have something smarter than sticky notes and guesswork.

Those moments sting, and they’re expensive, and they stack up…

Which is why I invite you to join me inside the Tether Lab.

Inside this community, we map regret like it’s a blueprint. We show you how to spot the exact “when” moments that actually move your customer, and we give you the systems to turn those insights into creative that scales…before your competitors do.

When you’re ready to stop piling up third tacos in your own business…this is where you start. 🌮

👉 Join the community 115+ ecom operators trust today.

Until next week,
🦕 Sarah

P.S. Most marketers intend to figure this out “later.” After the next launch. After the next quarter. After things calm down.

But regret doesn’t wait, and neither do your customers. If your brand is ready to find its “third taco moment,” this is where to do that!

🚨 Dex’s Trend Alert: 4,000% Spike…The Monkey Meme Has a Philosophy Degree Now

This week’s runaway trend isn’t skincare, sneakers, or Stanley Cups…
It’s “thinking monkey” memes.

↑ 800% in the past month
↑ 4,500% year-over-year

Yep, the internet’s favorite animal just got senior status in the group chat.

📈 The Signal:
The rise of “thinking monkey” isn’t about apes. It’s an identity shorthand.

• 18–34s are defaulting to visual reaction tokens instead of words.

• It’s the new shrug emoji, but with more existential weight.

• “Monkey thinking” is now a cultural Swiss Army knife: you can use it for “lol,” “deep thoughts,” or “I have no clue what’s happening.”

Memes are doing what words can’t: collapsing complexity into one image.

🧠 The Diagnosis:
This is more than a “funny monkey” trend. It’s collective self-mockery at scale.

• Irony as identity armor. The meme says: “I’m in on the joke, don’t take me too seriously.”

• Low-cost relatability. Anyone can use it—no perfect caption, no clever take required.

• Philosopher’s stone for Gen Z humor. Everything becomes pseudo-profound when paired with a furrowed-brow primate.

In other words: this is emotional outsourcing. The monkey is doing the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.

📌 How to capitalize on this trend:

🐒 For DTC Brands
Meme it, don’t theme it.
→ “Thinking monkey when you realize your moisturizer is older than your ex.”
→ Product ads that hijack the meme instead of recreating it.

🎥 For Creators & Media Buyers
The meme is a tempo setter.
→ TikTok POV: “Me pretending to budget” → cut to monkey thinking.
→ Test ads with humor-first hooks before dropping the sales pitch.

🧠 For Strategists
This is attention arbitrage. Memes like this spike hard, but the underlying psychology is stable: people want to signal relatability while hiding vulnerability. Design campaigns that let them do both at once.

💡 Pro Move:
Build a “Which Meme Brain Are You?” quiz (thinking monkey, distracted boyfriend, Wojak, etc.) → funnel answers into product bundles. It’s personality testing disguised as scroll-bait.

Until next time—
Stay curious.

– Dex 🐒🕵️‍♂️