Purple Cow (15 page)
The French subsidiary of McDonald’s recently subsidized and publicized a report that urged the French not to visit fast-food outlets like McDonald’s more than once a week. The report created a worldwide uproar, and the U.S. parent company professed to be “shocked!”
Is this a bad strategy? Perhaps by being honest (and very different) when talking to their customers, the French subsidiary is building the foundation of a long-term growth strategy. The American factory/advertising model demands more, more, more, which ultimately leads to a flameout when the pace of growth can’t be maintained. By acknowledging the downsides of the fast-food experience, perhaps McDonald’s France is reaching a far larger audience than they could ever hope to reach the old way.
What would happen if you told the truth?
But What About the Factory?
This is certainly the biggest objection to Purple Cow thinking. Your company has been successful. You grew (probably on the strength of the TV-industrial complex). You invested in people, policies, distribution, a product line, and a factory. A system that every employee has bought into—it’s who you are.
And now, apparently overnight, nothing is working the way it should. If you’re Burger King, you switch ad agencies (again). If you’re Motorola, you lay off ten thousand people. Small companies suffer, too, but more quietly.
Most big companies think that marketing is in crisis. They see that what they used to do doesn’t work the way it used to. They want to protect their huge investment in infrastructure, and they believe that fixing their marketing is the answer.
Your boss and your coworkers are likely to resist when you share the thoughts in this book. They’ll point out that it’s marketing’s job to market—that good marketing could fix the products you’ve got now. You don’t have
time
for remarkable products anyway, they say. You need success right now.
time
for remarkable products anyway, they say. You need success right now.
Well, if you don’t have time to do it right, what makes you think you’ll have time to do it over?
I wrote this book to give you ammunition to make your case. Give everyone a copy. Not just the Marketing department. Everybody. Let them see that every single industry is feeling the same pain you are. Perhaps they’ll realize that the problem isn’t in your advertising—it’s much bigger than that.
Before you spend another dollar on another brain-dead ad campaign, trade show, or sales conference, spend some time with your engineers and your customers. Challenge your people to start with a blank sheet of paper and figure out what they’d do if they could do just about anything. If they weren’t afraid of failing, what’s the most audacious thing they’d try?
The new CEO of Best Buy, Brad Anderson, is a brilliant strategist. He’s got a sharp eye for the key moments in the evolution of his company. He said, “Instead of selling what we wanted to sell, we sold what people wanted us to sell, and then figured out how to make money doing it. Every time we talked to our customers, they wanted us to follow the path that turned out to be the hardest possible path we could follow. And every time, that path was the right path.”
Best Buy could have done what just about every other regional electronics retailer facing a slowdown does: Buy some more newspaper ads. Play with the pricing. Lay some people off. Whine a bit and buckle down. Instead, Best Buy opted to follow a harder path, one that led to a remarkable experience for the consumer. At first, this looked like a longer, slower way to make their business grow, but in retrospect, it was a lot faster (and a lot cheaper) than running a bunch of boring ads and staying just where they were.
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.
The Problem with Cheap
Cheap is one of the only remarkable items that never seems to run out of appeal. For just about any repeatedly purchased item, all other things being equal, the cheap one will gain market share.
The problem with cheap is that once you start, your competitor will likely play the same game. In an incremental price war, how will one player beat the other and still win economically? IKEA can do it. Wal-Mart can do it. Can you?
Cheap is a lazy way out of the battle for the Purple Cow. Cheap is the last refuge of a product developer or marketer who is out of great ideas.
The exception to this rule is the quantum leap in pricing. When a marketer can radically redefine the way a product is produced or delivered, and leapfrog the pricing of others, that can create a remarkable game-changing event.
The Purple Cow is not the exclusive domain of high-priced products and wealthy consumers. Motel 6 is remarkable for being simultaneously clean and cheap. Same with Wal-Mart.
JetBlue and Southwest have completely changed the pricing equation in air travel. Traditional carriers, with expensive hubs and awkward union relationships, cannot sustain long-term price competition. In the long run, the 50-percent cost advantage enjoyed by these new competitors is certain to defeat the old guard. American and United know this, yet there’s absolutely nothing that they can do about it. Southwest changed the rules of the game, and the big airlines don’t even have a pair of dice.
IKEA has done it in furniture. They so dominate their segment with cheap (but not cheapo) furnishings that they are able to drive their costs lower and lower. Their volume advantage changes the game for their competition, guaranteeing IKEA leadership in this segment (until some competitor figures out a remarkable way to change the game again).
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?
Case Study: What Should
Hallmark.com
Do?
Hallmark.com
Do?
Hallmark runs one of the three biggest online greeting card services. The site grew when an ideavirus started—people would send an e-card to a friend, who would find out about the service by reading the card and would respond by sending a few more cards. Within a year, billions of cards were flying around online.
The challenge, of course, is turning this free activity into something that can actually make money. One thing that’s working for Hallmark is selling gift certificates. Hallmark owns a gift certificate company, and they make a profit every time you spend $20 on a $20 gift certificate (complicated, but true).
Anyway, Hallmark lies at the nexus of three powerful forces at work in this book, so I was happy to help my friend at Hallmark brainstorm some ways to put them to work.
To start, Hallmark has permission to talk to the audience. These are consumers who voluntarily come to the site to send a card. No interruption media necessary. Alas, even though they are here on their own, many of them aren’t looking for Hallmark to have a voice in the conversation, so they’re not listening to any news Hallmark might want to share.
Fortunately, many of the visitors are members of Hallmark’s Gold Crown Club. These consumers are busy collecting points (à la frequent flyer miles) to trade in for prizes. These self-selected consumers have a problem (how do I get more points?) that they’re willing to look to the market to solve.
And best of all, these Gold Crown Club members are assiduous sneezers. They send a ton of cards (electronic and paper) every year, and the people they send them to enjoy receiving them—the recipients know the sender doesn’t have anything to gain. They just care enough to send the very best.
The win, it seems to me, is for Hallmark to discover whether people getting a gift certificate are likely to turn around and send one. If the idea of an electronic gift certificate is remarkable enough to spread, then their challenge is to get the core group of sneezers to spread the word.
So here are my ideas for my friend at Hallmark:
When a Gold Crown Club member is about to send an e-card, ask him if he wants to find out how many points he’ll get if he also sends a gift certificate. This will be a randomly chosen number between 100 points (a little) and 1 million points (a ton!). Obviously, most people will win a small number, but every once in a while someone will be eligible to win a large number.
Most members of this concentrated, focused, listening group will be happy to risk a click to get to the next page just to see how much they stand to earn. Now that Hallmark has shifted the conversation from “send an e-card” to “talk to Hallmark about gift certificates,” Hallmark has a chance to sell these consumers on why a gift certificate might be a remarkable gift. And many of these sneezers—suitably motivated, rewarded, and educated—will go ahead and send one.
Of course, this promotion doesn’t hit a home run unless recipients of the gift certificates start sending gift certificates as well.
Isn’t a million points a lot to give away? Exactly. It’s Purple.
When the Cow Looks for a Job
So far, we’ve talked about what companies should do. But what about you? Can you apply this thinking to your job search?
Odds are that the last time you switched jobs, you used a resume. Following conventional wisdom, you may have sent it to hundreds or thousands of employers. You may have posted it online or e-mailed it in an effort to “network” your way to a new job.
All of this effort is really nothing but advertising. Advertising in a way that’s very different from buying TV ads, but also very similar. After all, your resume is likely to land on the desk of someone with no interest whatsoever in you or what you’re up to. Worse, it’s unlikely that this strategy will lead to much word of mouth.
There’s another way. You’ve probably guessed it: Be exceptional. Remarkable people with remarkable careers seem to switch jobs with far less effort. Remarkable people often don’t even have a resume. Instead, they rely on sneezers who are quick to recommend them when openings come up. Remarkable people are often recruited from jobs they love to jobs they love even more.
The secret doesn’t lie in the job-seeking technique. It has to do with what these people do when they’re not looking for a job. These Purple Cows do an outrageous job. They work on high-profile projects. These people take risks, often resulting in big failures. These failures rarely lead to a dead end, though. They’re not really risks, after all. Instead, they just increase the chances that these people will get an even better project next time.
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