Purple Cow (18 page)
WHY DOES TED LEONSIS, billionaire owner of the Washington Wizards, stay at the Four Seasons in Manhattan? I mean, he could stay anywhere he wants to. As best as I can tell, he stays there because the entire staff at the café knows how to bring him his iced tea. In a tall thin glass, with ice, with a little carafe of hyper-sweet sugar water on the side. He doesn’t ask for it; they just bring it. Every person who meets with Ted at the hotel notices it. I think it makes Ted happy that his friends notice it. Having something personalized can make one feel special.
L. L. BEAN CAN SELL mail-order clothes to people who don’t trust mail order. It’s the guarantee that makes it work. Take a pair of pants, light them on fire, send in the ashes, and L. L. Bean will refund your money. Stories like that make it easy for a sneezer to spread the word.
WHAT KIND OF MOTORCYCLE does Shaquille O’Neal own? Jesse Gregory James is a maker of custom motorcycles—giant, $100,000 bikes. Each motorcycle is handmade, months in the making, and very, very profitable. And there’s a multi-year waiting list. Someone who can afford a motorcycle that costs this much wants (and probably deserves) to have it made just for him. The act of making something very expensive and very custom is in itself remarkable.
THE HUMMER IS TOO BIG, too wide, too ugly, and too inefficient to be a car. It doesn’t belong on public roads. It annoys most of the people who come in contact with it. Except, of course, for the people who buy it. Most of them don’t need to suddenly go off-road and climb steep, sandy hills. Hummer drivers just like annoying the rest of us. They enjoy driving a truly remarkable vehicle.
WHY DO MOVIE EXECUTIVES fly halfway across the world to the Cannes Film Festival? While the parties are fun, they can’t possibly make up for the inconvenience and investment of time and money. The reason is simple—the executives know that something remarkable will happen there. Some movie, some director, some star will make news. The movie executives will discover something new, and that’s why they go. How can your product make news? (Note that there’s a big difference between making the news and making news. Forcing your way onto TV with publicity hype is not much of a long-term strategy. It works a lot better when you’ve actually got something to say.)
WHERE DID MY SON GO to get his new pet? Well, type in “frog pet” on Google and you’ll find
growafrog.com
, the Web site for a twenty-year-old company that does just one thing: it sells pet tadpoles (soon to be frogs) in little plastic aquariums. My son has already told twenty other friends about these guys, and the little booklet of frog lore they include makes it even easier to share. (Did you know that some of the frogs they sell live to be seventeen years old?) This company’s obsessive focus on this niche made them the obvious choice.
growafrog.com
, the Web site for a twenty-year-old company that does just one thing: it sells pet tadpoles (soon to be frogs) in little plastic aquariums. My son has already told twenty other friends about these guys, and the little booklet of frog lore they include makes it even easier to share. (Did you know that some of the frogs they sell live to be seventeen years old?) This company’s obsessive focus on this niche made them the obvious choice.
Just like the two stores in New York: one is called Just Bulbs; the other is called Just Shades. No, they’re not related. No, they’re not near each other. But yes, they’re pretty remarkable.
YES, YOU’VE HEARD IT ABOUT VOLVO BEFORE, but the fact remains that a tiny country created a car with a profitable niche because the country made it so easy for sneezers to sell to those who didn’t realize what they were missing. The fact that the Volvo was widely considered to be ugly was the perfect conversation starter. The fact that you’ve heard this story a hundred times before proves that it works.
Do YOU REMEMBER THE LONG BOX? A ten-inch-long sleeve of cardboard, it encased CDs for years. Record companies thought the extra cardboard would give them more marketing space, while retailers figured they would cut down on theft. Some artists, though, complained. In addition to consumers’ hating the packaging, the artists pointed out that millions of trees were being needlessly killed to print this disposable packaging, and landfills were filling up with the debris. One of the reasons this campaign succeeded was that it wasn’t a very big concession for anyone along the way. It was easy news to spread, and easier still for big companies to appear to be environmentally sensitive by giving in to the threats of boycott and ceasing production of the long box.
WHILE COMPUTERS ARE the obvious example of how technology can make a product remarkable, how about handmade watches? Some watch manufacturers charge upwards of $50,000 for devices that can be wound just once a week, track the phases of the moon, and automatically remember leap year fifty years in the future. Amaz-ingly, the more complex the watch, the longer the waiting list. The most complicated watch built today has a waiting list of more than two years. No, it’s not a mass-market item, but it sells because it’s complicated (if the buyer wanted accuracy and features, he’d buy a $50 Casio).
COMEDIAN BUDDY HACKETT learned a long time ago that when he didn’t have anything funny to say, he should just swear. People liked that. Today, we see movies and records and books and bars that succeed just because they intentionally cross the boundaries of good taste. The best example is John Waters. His first movies were so gross, most people consider them unwatchable. Not the early adopters with a taste for the bizarre. They rushed to tell their friends, and Waters’s reputation was made. Today,
Hairspray,
based on his movie of the same name, is the hottest play on Broad-way. Many of those who tread a more culturally acceptable path to get to the same end have not succeeded nearly as well.
Hairspray,
based on his movie of the same name, is the hottest play on Broad-way. Many of those who tread a more culturally acceptable path to get to the same end have not succeeded nearly as well.
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