Purple Cow (16 page)
If you’re thinking about being a Purple Cow, the time to do it is when you’re not looking for a job.
In your career, even more than for a brand, being safe is risky. The path to lifetime job security is to be remarkable.
References available upon request? Nonsense. Your references are your resume. A standard resume is nothing but an opportunity for a prospective employer to turn you down. A sheaf of over-the-top references, on the other hand, begs for a meeting.
Visit
www.monster.com.
Millions of résumes, all in a pile, all waiting for someone to find them. If you’re in that pile, it’s not a good place to be. Before you start looking for a job, consider what you could do today so you never have to worry about that.
Case Study: Tracey the Publicist
So my friend Tracey quit her job at a publicity firm to set up her own shop. Following conventional wisdom, she sent out hundreds of form letters to hundreds of marketing directors all over the Northeast. This is awfully expensive advertising, and of course, it didn’t work very well.
Any marketing directors who
need
a PR firm probably already have one. If they were looking for a new one, it would take far more than an unsolicited FedEx package to get them to pick up the phone and call Tracey.
need
a PR firm probably already have one. If they were looking for a new one, it would take far more than an unsolicited FedEx package to get them to pick up the phone and call Tracey.
What to do?
After talking with Tracey, I suggested that she focus on the narrowest possible niche. Her background was in pharmaceuticals, so we picked that. In fact, we went way further—to plastic surgeons. Tracey decided to focus obsessively on being the world’s best publicist to plastic surgeons. If pharmaceutical companies need to reach this audience in the most effective way, they’ll need to call her. She knows all the journals, all the conferences, and most of the doctors. She has the lists and the contacts. She is the one and only exceptional choice. Everyone else has this audience as part of their portfolio. For Tracey, they
are
her portfolio.
are
her portfolio.
If your job depended on hiring the best person in the world to publicize your new product to plastic surgeons, who would you hire?
Case Study: Robyn Waters Gets It
How long has it been since you’ve been to Kmart? My guess, if you’re like most readers of this book, is “a long time.” The same can’t be said of Target, though. Target is the discounter of choice among professionals, design freaks, and serious shoppers (in other words, people with money to spend).
How did Target do it? It certainly wasn’t their advertising—though that’s pretty good. Nope, it’s because of people like Robyn Waters, their VP of “trend, design, and technical specifications.” (Yes, that’s her actual title.)
Robyn is the person who persuaded Michael Graves to make a teapot for Target. She’s the one who searches out amazingly cheap (but cool) flatware, and little pens with floating targets in them. Instead of spending time and money trying to buy market share with advertising, Target has realized that by offering exclusive items that would be cool at any price—but that are amazing when they’re cheap—they can win
without
a big ad budget. Cool products that appeal to people who both buy new stuff and talk about it a lot are the core of Target’s strategy.
without
a big ad budget. Cool products that appeal to people who both buy new stuff and talk about it a lot are the core of Target’s strategy.
If a big-box retailer like Target can obliterate Sears and Kmart, what’s stopping you from being many degrees cooler than your bigger competitors?
Case Study: So Popular, No One Goes There Anymore
Here’s a great case study of how the Purple Cow cycle works.
Stew Leonard started an ordinary dairy store in Connecticut. It was less than twenty thousand square feet, selling milk, cheese, and the usual dairy store essentials. Stew didn’t want to settle for a tiny store, though, so he embraced the Cow.
He put a petting zoo out front. He developed a customer service policy so simple and important he had it carved in a 6,000-pound block of granite and put in front of the store. He started featuring unique or unusual products, and he sold many items for dramatically reduced prices. The store was stuffed with robotic mooing cows, dancing milk cartons, and a violin-playing chicken.
As the suburbs near his Connecticut store grew, so did the legend of his Purple Cow. Stew expanded the store more than ten times, eventually showing up in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
He was lauded in one of Tom Peters’ major books. He was an advisor to politicians and a friend of Paul Newman. Stew also sold more Perdue chicken every day than did any other store in the world.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
He was lauded in one of Tom Peters’ major books. He was an advisor to politicians and a friend of Paul Newman. Stew also sold more Perdue chicken every day than did any other store in the world.
The store and the innovation it stood for were so spectacular that I took each and every employee I hired and drove them an hour north to Connecticut just to see how customer service and showmanship could combine to create a world-class organization.
That was ten years ago.
Today, Stew Leonard’s is run by his son, and the store has expanded to several locations. One of them is just two miles from my house. I never go there.
Why?
Because it’s too popular. And it’s boring.
The new Stew (Stew Jr.) used the Purple Cow to spread the word and to grow. And it worked. But now that he has
already
spread the word, it’s more profitable to milk the Cow. Stew exchanged me (someone with a food and service
otaku
and a big-time sneezer) for ten ordinary grocery consumers. The products at Stew’s are no longer unique. He carries nothing organic, no brands you’ve never seen before, nothing at a remarkably low price. The customer service is merely okay. Ask someone in the fish department where to find canned pumpkin, and he’ll point in a vague direction and say, “Over there.” In the old days (when Stew’s was still remarkable), someone would walk you over.
already
spread the word, it’s more profitable to milk the Cow. Stew exchanged me (someone with a food and service
otaku
and a big-time sneezer) for ten ordinary grocery consumers. The products at Stew’s are no longer unique. He carries nothing organic, no brands you’ve never seen before, nothing at a remarkably low price. The customer service is merely okay. Ask someone in the fish department where to find canned pumpkin, and he’ll point in a vague direction and say, “Over there.” In the old days (when Stew’s was still remarkable), someone would walk you over.
There used to be a suggestion box at the exit. If you submitted a suggestion, more often than not you got a letter back from Stew (Senior) himself. Today, the suggestion box is still there, but don’t count on getting a letter back. The business is too profitable to worry about that.
So ... when your parking lot is full to bursting, and you’re making far more money than you ever did before, does that mean you don’t have to worry about the Cow?
In the short run, Stew Junior’s strategy is brilliant. He’s using the brand his father built and creating significant wealth. It’s cynical but it’s true—dumbing down his store for the masses (not the sneezers) was the way to get rich in a hurry. If your business is in a similar situation, your shareholders probably want you to do precisely the same thing.
The grocery business is pretty special in that once you stake out a location, you can profit from it for a very long time. There’s also not much chance that grocery stores are going to go out of style, so your ride on top is pretty long indeed.
If, on the other hand, your goals are growth and impact and building an ever-larger and sustained business, it’s hard to imagine how this strategy scales. If Stew opens a store in Houston, Texas (an area well served by big supermarkets and where virtually no one has heard of Stew’s Purple Cow), he’s just not going to do very well. And if Stew’s business was as subject to the vagaries of fashion as yours is, he’d have more to worry about as well.
The Purple Cow is just part of the product life cycle. You can’t live it all the time (too risky, too expensive, too tiring), but when you need to grow or need to introduce something new, it’s your best shot.
Next time you go to Stew’s, say hi for me. You’ll find me and my friends at Brother’s, the fast-growing, very profitable, and quite remarkable vegetable market around the corner.
Is It About Passion?
My hero Tom Peters asks, “Does the work matter?” The idea of adding passion and Wow! and magic to what we do is compelling to many of us. All of the great ideation and risk-taking and multidisciplinary magic that Tom and those who followed him have riffed about are so important—but they don’t appeal to many of the people we work with.
The people who say, “How can we make it appeal to a broader audience?” or “Wal-Mart won’t take it,” or “We can’t afford silly meetings or product failures” aren’t being moved by the heroic tales of innovative marketers. The skeptics think the whole passion thing is sort of flaky. They’re not buying it. Nope, those people don’t care about the
why.
They just want to do what’s going to work.
why.
They just want to do what’s going to work.
And that’s the point of the Cow. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to be a
Fast Company
junkie, a new-product guru, a make-work-matter apostle. No, you just have to realize that
nothing else is working.
The proof is there. The big brands, the big successes, the profitable start-ups (big and small, worldwide and local) have all (okay mostly) been about the Cow.
Fast Company
junkie, a new-product guru, a make-work-matter apostle. No, you just have to realize that
nothing else is working.
The proof is there. The big brands, the big successes, the profitable start-ups (big and small, worldwide and local) have all (okay mostly) been about the Cow.
You don’t need passion to create a Purple Cow. Nor do you need an awful lot of creativity. What you need is the insight to realize that you have no other choice but to grow your business or launch your product with Purple Cow thinking.
Nothing else is going to work.
Nothing else is going to work.
That means that launching ten products for $10 million each is a lot smarter than investing $100 million in TV to launch just one product. It means that if all ten products fail, you’ve just learned ten ways that aren’t going to work. You’re still ahead of where you’d be if the one TV launch had failed (which is far more likely than not.)
If your boss wants focus groups to prove that a new productis guaranteed to be a success, don’t bother. If the focus group likes it, they’re probably wrong. If your company wants you to pick one and only one product to feature this Christmas, start working on your resume. You’re not going to invent a Purple Cow with those sorts of odds and that kind of pressure. Things that have to work rarely do anymore.
You don’t need a book about creativity or brainstorming or team building. You’ve already got a hundred (or a thousand) ideas your group doesn’t have the guts to launch. You don’t need more time or even more money. You just need the realization that a brand new business paradigm is now in charge, and once you accept the reality of the Cow, finding one suddenly gets much easier.
J. Peterman knew how to reach
New Yorker
readers. He knew it was too late to become Lillian Vernon, so he didn’t try. For the audience he was targeting, his catalog and his voice were magical. No big mail-order company would have invested in his vision at first. Too untested, too “unusual.” Some might even call it weird.
New Yorker
readers. He knew it was too late to become Lillian Vernon, so he didn’t try. For the audience he was targeting, his catalog and his voice were magical. No big mail-order company would have invested in his vision at first. Too untested, too “unusual.” Some might even call it weird.
When Comedy Central focus-group-tested
South Park,
it set a record, scoring just 1.5 out of 10 points with women. Three of the women in the group cried, they hated it so much. Scary? Sure. Weird? To some. But the group that mattered—adolescent boys and those who act like them—spread the word, and the show was a monster hit.
South Park,
it set a record, scoring just 1.5 out of 10 points with women. Three of the women in the group cried, they hated it so much. Scary? Sure. Weird? To some. But the group that mattered—adolescent boys and those who act like them—spread the word, and the show was a monster hit.
Remember, it’s not about being weird. It’s about being irresistible to a tiny group of easily reached sneezers with
otaku.
Irresistible isn’t the same as ridiculous. Irresistible (for the right niche) is just remarkable.
otaku.
Irresistible isn’t the same as ridiculous. Irresistible (for the right niche) is just remarkable.
True Facts
Interbrand values the top one hundred brands in the world everyyear. Interbrand combines a bunch of mysterious factors and determines which brands are worth the most. Here’s the list for 2002:
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