Purple Cow (9 page)
The front-loading of the budget does two things to your product:
• It means you get very few chances to launch new products because each one is so expensive. Thus, you won’t make risky bets, and you’ll be even more likely to introduce boring, me-too products.
• It doesn’t give you a chance to ride through the idea diffusion curve. It takes a while to reach the sneezers, who take a while to reach the rest of the population. But your front-loaded budget means that by the time the bulk of the population hears about what you’ve done, you’ve burned out the retailers, destroyed your inventory, or, worst of all, driven your start-up company into bankruptcy.
Dozens of astonishingly great products were introduced during the dot-com boom. Alas, most of them never had a chance to diffuse. For example, a weatherproof package receptacle that only you and the UPS man knew the combination for. Or a tiny electronic gizmo that told you which bars, clubs, and restaurants in your town were hot and what was playing. Or a Web site where you could easily give feedback to big companies—and get your problems fixed.
In each case, a fledgling company spent most of its capital on mass marketing. Marketing that came too soon and disappeared before the idea could spread.
Compare this to the success of just about every movie that has surprised Hollywood over the past decade. When a
Blair Witch
or a
Greek Wedding
comes along, it doesn’t get launched with a huge marketing budget. The film-makers wisely focus on making a remarkable movie instead. So a few innovators (the folks who go to see every movie, just about) stumble onto the film, and the word starts to spread.
Blair Witch
or a
Greek Wedding
comes along, it doesn’t get launched with a huge marketing budget. The film-makers wisely focus on making a remarkable movie instead. So a few innovators (the folks who go to see every movie, just about) stumble onto the film, and the word starts to spread.
It seems obvious, yet just about every product aimed at a large audience (consumer and industrial) falls into this trap.
What would happen if you gave the marketing budget for your next three products to the designers? Could you afford a world-class architect/designer/sculptor/director/author?
Case Study: The Best Baker in the World
Lionel Poilane’s dad was a French baker, and he inherited the family bakery when he was a young man. Rather than sitting still and tending to the fires, though, Lionel became obsessed with remarkable.
He did extensive research, interviewing more than eight thousand French bakers about their techniques. He pioneered the use of organic flour in France. He refused to bake baguettes, pointing out that they were fairly tasteless and very un-French (they’re a fairly recent import from Vienna). He acquired the largest collection of bread cookbooks in the world—and studied them.
His sourdough bread is made with just flour, water, starter, and sea salt, and it’s baked in a wood-fired oven. Poilane refused to hire bakers—he told me they had too many bad habits to unlearn—and instead hired young men who were willing to apprentice with him for years.
At first, the French establishment rejected his products, considering them too daring and different. But the overwhelming quality of the loaves and Poilane’s desire to do it right finally won them over.
Virtually every fancy restaurant in Paris now serves Poilane bread. People come from all over the world to wait in line in front of his tiny shop on Rue de Cherche Midi to buy a huge loaf of sourdough bread—or more likely, several loaves. The company he founded now ships loaves all over the world, turning handmade bread into a global product, one worth talking about.
Last year, Lionel sold more than $10 million worth of bread.
Mass Marketers Hate to Measure
Direct marketers, of course, realize that measurement is the key to success. Figure out what works, and do it more!
Mass marketers have always resisted this temptation. When my old company approached the head of one of the largest magazine publishers in the world and pitched a technology that would allow advertisers to track who saw their ads and responded to them, he was aghast. He realized that this sort of data could kill his business. He knew that his clients didn’t want the data because then their jobs would get a lot more complex.
Measurement means admitting what’s broken so you can fix it. Mass-media advertising, whether it’s on TV or in print, is all about emotion and craft, not about fixing mistakes. One reason the Internet ad boomlet faded so fast is that it forced advertisers to measure—and to admit what was going wrong.
Well, creators of the Purple Cow must measure as well. Every product, every interaction, every policy is either working (persuading sneezers and spreading the word) or not. Companies that measure will quickly optimize their offerings and make them more virus-worthy
As it becomes easier to monitor informal consumer networks, the winners will be companies that figure out what’s working fastest—and do it more (and figure out what’s not working—and kill it).
Zara, a fast-growing retailer in Europe, changes its clothing line every three or four weeks. By carefully watching what’s working and what’s not, they can evolve their lineup far faster than the competition can ever hope to.
What could you measure? What would that cost? How fast could you get the results? If you can afford it, try it. “If you measure it, it will improve.”
Case Study: Logitech
How did Logitech become the fastest-growing technology company in America? Their mouses (mice?), track-balls, and input devices aren’t the best examples of cutting-edge technology coming out of Silicon Valley, certainly. And the lack of cutting-edge technology is a key part of their success.
Logitech succeeds because management understands that they are in the fashion business. The guts of their devices don’t change often—but the functionality and style change constantly. Management isn’t busy trying to figure out how to innovate a better chip. They are, on the other hand, working frantically to create a better user experience.
For the frequent user, the impact of a cooler, better, easier-to-use input device is profound—so profound that many users are happy to proselytize to their peers. More sneezing of a Purple Cow. Logitech doesn’t crave more advertising. They crave more remarkable products. That’s what their customers want to buy.
Who Wins in the World of the Cow
It’s fairly obvious who the big losers are—giant brands with big factories and quarterly targets, organizations with significant corporate inertia and low thresholds for perceived risks. Once addicted to the cycle of the TV-INDUSTRIAL complex, these companies have built hierarchies and systems that make it awfully difficult to be remarkable.
The obvious winners are the mid-sized and smaller companies looking to increase market share. These are the companies that have nothing to lose, but more important, they realize that they have a lot to gain by changing the rules of the game. Of course, there are big companies that get it and have the guts to take the less risky path, just as there are small companies that are stuck with their current products and strategies.
As I write this, the number-one song in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and a dozen other countries in Europe is about ketchup. The song is called “Aserejé” (also known as “The Ketchup Song”), and it is by three sisters you never heard of. The number-two movie in America is a low-budget animated movie in which talking vegetables act out Bible stories. Neither thing is the sort of product you’d expect from a lumbering media behemoth.
Sam Adams beer was remarkable, and it captured a huge slice of business from Budweiser. Hard Manufacturing’s $3,000 Doernbecher crib opened up an entire segment of the hospital crib market. The electric piano let Yamaha steal an increasingly larger share of the traditional-piano segment away from the entrenched market leaders. Vanguard’s remarkably low-cost mutual funds continue to whale away at Fidelity’s market dominance. BIC lost tons of market share to Japanese competitors when they developed pens that were remarkably fun to write with, just as BIC stole the market away from fountain pens a generation or two earlier.
Case Study: A New Kind of Kiwi
The last time New Zealand successfully introduced a fruit to North America (which in itself is a cool post-modern idea), it was the gooseberry. They renamed it the “kiwi,” introduced it to yuppies, foodies, and upscale supermarkets, and watched it take off.
Today, diffusing an idea about a new fruit is much more difficult. How then to launch a new kiwi, one that’s golden with an edible peel?
Zespri, the only company that knows how to grow the new kiwi, aimed at a niche—Latino foodies. The new kiwi has a lot in common with mangoes and papayas but is different enough to be remarkable. By targeting upscale Latino groceries, Zespri found underserved produce buyers who had both the time and the inclination to try something that was new and exclusive.
So, without advertising at all, Zespri gets the fruit in front of an audience of risk-taking sneezers. If Zespri is aggressive in doing in-store tasting, they’ve got an excellent chance of working their way through the Latino community and then eventually crossing over to the rest of the mass market. Last year, Zespri managed to sell more than $100 million worth of golden kiwi fruit, but unless you’re Latino, you’ve probably never even seen it.
The Benefits of Being the Cow
So it’s an interesting paradox. As the world gets more turbulent, more and more people seek safety. They want to eliminate as much risk as they can from their businesses and their careers.
And most of the people mistakenly believe that the way to do that is to play it safe. To hide. So fewer and fewer people work to create a new Purple Cow.
At the same time, the marketplace is getting faster and more fluid. Yes, we’re too busy to pay attention, but a portion of the population is more restless than ever. Some people are happy to switch their long distance service, their airline, their accounting firm—whatever it takes to get an edge. If the bank teller annoys you, well, there’s another bank right down the street. So while fewer people attempt to become the Cow, the rewards for being remarkable continue to
increase
! At work is the ability of a small portion of eager experimenters to influence the rest of us.
increase
! At work is the ability of a small portion of eager experimenters to influence the rest of us.
As the ability to be remarkable continues to demonstrate its awesome value in the marketplace, the rewards that follow the Purple Cow increase.
Whether you develop a new insurance policy, record a hit record, or write a best-selling, groundbreaking book, the money, prestige, power, and satisfaction that follow are extraordinary. In exchange for taking the risk—the risk of failure or ridicule or unfulfilled dreams—the creator of the Purple Cow gets a huge upside when she gets it right.
Even better, these benefits have a half-life. You don’t have to be remarkable all the time to enjoy the upside. Starbucks was remarkable a few years ago. Now they’re boring. But that first burst of innovation and insight has allowed them to grow to thousands of stores around the world. Starbucks is unlikely to keep up their blistering growth rate unless they find another Cow, but the benefits that came to them were huge. Compare this growth in assets to Maxwell House. Ten years ago, all the brand value in coffee resided with them, not with Starbucks. But Maxwell House played it safe (they thought), and now they remain stuck with not much more than they had a decade ago.
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