A 30-year-old mapping brand made one choice at exactly the right moment, and suddenly it’s the #1 downloaded app.

Remember MapQuest?

I used it constantly in the strange little window of time between paper road maps and having GPS in everyone’s phone and car.

You’d type your destination in a desktop computer, print pages of turn-by-turn directions, then drive around flipping loose sheets of paper. And every so often, MapQuest would confidently send you the wrong way down a one-way street.

Good times.

MapQuest launched on the web in 1996 and became gi-normous.

AOL acquired it for about $1.1 billion back in 2000.

And then Google Maps, smartphones and GPS navigation turned the whole print-your-own-directions ritual into a funny memory. 

Surprisingly, MapQuest never quite disappeared.

Most of the world just completely stopped thinking about it.

Until Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 27 directing the U.S. government to rename Lake Ontario Lake America.

Google subsequently changed the name for U.S. Maps users.

Apple followed a couple days ago, after Trump personally contacted the company about the change, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

MapQuest had a different response:

“We’re not changing it.”

In fact, when Google made the switch, MapQuest posted:

“We are aware that Lake Ontario is being correctly labeled on our map.”

That apparently struck a nerve.

As I write this, MapQuest has rocketed to #1 among all free apps in Apple’s U.S. App Store, ahead of ChatGPT.

On Android, it has climbed to #5 among free apps in the U.S. 

The numbers behind that rise are even more nuts.

MapQuest was averaging roughly 500 U.S. iOS downloads a day in early August.

On Sunday, it reportedly had about 80,000. Android downloads jumped from around 1,000 a day to 20,000 on Saturday, and MapQuest says actual usage has increased about 50-fold. 

Thirty years after folks my age were printing out its directions, millions of people are suddenly talking about (and using) MapQuest again.

There’s a product marketing lesson in that.

MapQuest couldn’t have planned the circumstances that created this moment.

It could choose what to do when the moment arrived.

And this wasn’t entirely new. When the Gulf of Mexico was renamed Gulf of America in U.S. federal usage last year, MapQuest ALSO kept the familiar name.

The company originally joked that it was so old it didn’t know how to update its maps. That became a position: MapQuest uses geographic names its customers already know and want to use. 

Then circumstances made that choice suddenly consequential.

I write in I Need That about how much meaning buyers attach to products beyond their functional utility. MapQuest didn’t suddenly become 160 times better at navigation on Sunday.

Its meaning changed.

Downloading it became a way for people to express a preference, make a point, or reward a company for a decision they approved of.

That propelled a largely forgotten brand past companies with infinitely larger marketing budgets.

There’s no playbook for engineering something like that.

But there is a lesson in being distinctive enough to capitalize when the unexpected opportunity appears.

Because opportunity rarely sends a calendar invitation.

Your choices create what you’re able to do with it when it arrives.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.