Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
- create remarkable products that people seek out.
- no one is going to eagerly adapt to your product.
- ideas that spread are more likely to succeed than those that don't.
- services that are worth talking about get talked about.
- it is useless to advertise to anyone (except interested sneezers with influence).
- is not marketing done to a product. The marketing is the product, and vice versa.
- invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products.
- Be exceptional.
- Nothing else is going to work.
- Almost everything you don't do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack.
The ads-industrial complex
The system was simple. Find a large market niche that's growing and not yet dominated. Build a factory. Buy a lot of ads. The ads will lead to retail distribution and to sales. The sales will keep the factory busy and create profits.
The "before" rules:
- average products
- advertise to everyone
- fear of failure
- long cycles
- small changes
The "after" rules:
- remarkable products
- advertise to innovators or early adopters
- fear of fear
- short cycles
- big changes
Being remarkable in the right way helps you in two ways. First, it makes it far easier to attract the left side of the curve (innovators and early adopters). And second, it makes it easier for these early adopters to persuasively sell their peers on the rest of the curve.
Don't try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody. The everybody products are all taken. [...] The way you break through to the mainstream is to target a niche instead of a huge market. With a niche, you can segment off a chunk of the mainstream, and create an ideavirus so focused that it overwhelms that small slice of the market that really and truly will respond to what you sell.
Marketing in a post-TV world is no longer about making a product attractive or interesting or pretty or funny after it’s designed and built - it's about designing the thing to be virus-worthy in the first place. Products that are engineered to cross the chasm - with built-in safety nets for wary consumers – are way more likely to succeed than are products not engineered that way. Services that are worth talking about get talked about.
In almost every market measured, the "leading brand" has a huge advantage over the others.
The lesson is simple - boring always leads to failure. Boring is always the most risky strategy. Smart business people realize this, and they work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it's not going to work, but they accept the fact that that's okay.
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
You must somehow connect with passionate early adopters and get those adopters to spread the word through the curve. And that’s where otaku comes in. Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They're the ones who will take the time to learn about your product, take the risk to try your product, and take their friends' time to tell them about it.
It's a lot easier to sell something that people are already in the mood to buy. [...] Consumers with needs are the ones most likely to respond to your solutions. [...] Once you've come up with a solution that is so remarkable that the early adopters among this population will gleefully respond, you've got to promote it in a medium where those most likely to sneeze are actually paying attention.
If the goal of marketing is to create a Purple Cow, and the nature of the Cow is to be extreme in some attribute, it's inevitable that compromise can only diminish your chances of success.
The real growth comes with products that annoy, offend, don't appeal, are too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too simple - too something. (Of course, they're too too for some people, but just perfect for others.)
If a company is failing, it is the fault of the most senior management, and the problem is probably this: They're running a company, not marketing a product.
Where does remarkable come from? Often, it comes from passionate people who are making something for themselves.
If you're thinking about being a Purple Cow, the time to do it is when you're not looking for a job.
Is It About Passion? 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.
If your boss wants focus groups to prove that a new product is 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 résumé. 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.
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.
Instead of trying to use your technology and expertise to make a better product for your users' standard behavior, experiment with inviting the users to change their behavior to make the product work dramatically better.
If a product's future is unlikely to be remarkable – if you can't imagine a future in which people are once again fascinated by your product – it's time to realize that the game has changed. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new.
Differentiate your customers. Find the group that's most profitable. Find the group that's most likely to sneeze. Figure out how to develop/advertise/reward either group. Ignore the rest. Your ads (and your products!) shouldn't cater to the masses. Your ads (and products) should cater to the customers you'd choose if you could choose your customers.
Make a list of competitors who are not trying to be everything to everyone. Are they outperforming you? If you could pick one underserved niche to target (and to dominate), what would it be? Why not launch a product to compete with your own - a product that does nothing but appeal to this market?
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?
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."
How could you modify your product or service so that you’d show up on the next episode of Saturday Night Live or in a spoof of your industry's trade journal?
Do you have the email addresses of the 20 percent of your customer base that loves what you do? If not, start getting them. If you do, what could you make for these customers that would be super-special?
Could you make a collectible version of your product?
What would happen if you took one or two seasons off from the new-product grind and reintroduced wonderful classics instead? What sort of amazing thing could you offer in the first season you came back (with rested designers)?
Where does your product end and marketing hype begin? The Dutch Boy can is clearly product, not hype. Can you redefine what you sell in a similar way?
Do you have a slogan or positioning statement or remarkable boast that's actually true? Is it consistent? Is it worth passing on?
If you're in an intangibles business, your business card is a big part of what you sell. What if everyone in your company had to carry a second business card? Something that actually sold them (and you). Something remarkable. Imagine if Milton Glaser or Chip Kidd designed something worth passing on. So go do it!
If someone in your organization is charged with creating a new Purple Cow, leave them alone! Don't use internal reviews and usability testing to figure out if the new product is as good as what you've got now. Instead, pick the right maverick and get out of the way.
Go take a design course. Send your designers to a marketing course. And both of you should spend a week in the factory.
You're probably guilty of being too shy, not too outrageous. Try being outrageous, just for the sake of being annoying. It's good practice. Don't do it too much because it doesn't usually work. But it's a good way to learn what it feels like to be at the edge.
What would happen if you told the truth?
Remarkable isn't always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software. Getting in the habit of doing the "unsafe" thing every time you have the opportunity is the best way to learn to project - you get practice at seeing what's working and what's not.
If you could build a competitor that had costs that were 30 percent lower than yours, could you do it? If you could, why don't you?
The big question is this: Do you want to grow? If you do, you need to embrace the Cow. You can maintain your brand the old way, but the only route to healthy growth is a remarkable product.
Ask, "Why not?" Almost everything you don't do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don't do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, "Why not?"