Purple Cow (6 page)

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Authors: Seth Godin

Tags: #Business & Economics, #Marketing, #General

BOOK: Purple Cow
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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. And second, it makes it easier for these early adopters to persuasively sell their peers on the rest of the curve.
Ideas That Spread, Win
 
Abrand (or a new product offering) is nothing more than an idea.
Ideas that spread are more likely to succeed than those that don’t.
I call ideas that spread,
ideaviruses.
Sneezers are the key spreading agents of an ideavirus. These are the experts who tell all their colleagues or friends or admirers about a new product or service on which they are a perceived authority. Sneezers are the ones who launch and maintain ideaviruses. Innovators or early adopters may be the first to buy your product, but if they’re not sneezers as well, they won’t spread your idea. They’re selfish in their use of a new idea, or they don’t have the credibility to spread it to others. Either way, they’re a dead end when it comes to spreading an idea.
Every market has a few sneezers. They’re often the early adopters, but not always. Finding and seducing these sneezers is the essential step in creating an ideavirus.
So how do you create an idea that spreads? Don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody. The everybody products are all taken. The sneezers in these huge markets have too many choices and are too satisfied for it to be likely that you will capture their interest.
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. The early adopters in this market niche are more eager to hear what you have to say. The sneezers in this market niche are more likely to talk about your product. And best of all, the market is small enough that a few sneezers can get you to the critical mass you need to create an ideavirus.
Then, if you’re good and you’re lucky, that innovation will diffuse. After it dominates the original niche, it will migrate to the masses.
It’s not an accident that some products catch on and some don’t. When an ideavirus occurs, it’s often because all the viral pieces work together. How smooth and easy is it to spread your idea? How often will people sneeze it to their friends? How tightly knit is the group you’re targeting—do they talk much? Do they believe each other? How reputable are the people most likely to promote your idea? How persistent is it—is it a fad that has to spread fast before it dies, or will the idea have legs (and thus you can invest in spreading it over time)?
Put all of your new product developments through this analysis, and you’ll discover which ones are most likely to catch on. Those are the products and ideas worth launching.
 
The Big Misunderstanding
 
The problem with the books I mentioned earlier—
Crossing the Chasm
and
The Tipping Point
and
Unleashing the Ideavirus
—is that many marketers got exactly the wrong idea.
Marketers who read these books often conclude that these ideas are gimmicks that work every once in a while, or that the ideas sound organic and automatic and natural. An idea
becomes
an ideavirus. It crosses the chasm. It tips. All these consumers seem to be busy doing your job, spreading your idea from one person to another, so you can sit back and wait for success to happen.
At the same time, the poor schnooks at Procter & Gamble and Nike and Colgate-Palmolive are spending $4 billion a year on advertising.
Guess what? Both groups are wrong. While ideaviruses are occasionally the result of luck (consider the Macarena, say, or the Pet Rock), the vast majority of product success stories are engineered from the first day to be successful.
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.
The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You’re just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often). This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best (perhaps
only)
strategy for growth.
The Purple Cow isn’t cheap, but it works. We need to understand that investing in the Cow is even smarter than buying a Super Bowl ad.
Who’s Listening?
 
I’m guilty of a little hyperbole. With all the hand wringing over the death of the TV-industrial complex and the predictions of the demise of all mass media, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that ads don’t work at all—that every consumer avoids and ignores all of them.
Of course, this isn’t true. Ads do work—not as well as they used to, and perhaps not cost effectively, but they do attract attention and generate sales. Targeted ads are far more cost effective, yet most advertising and marketing efforts are completely untargeted. They are hurricanes, whipping through a marketplace horizontally, touching everyone in the same way, regardless of who they are and what they want. There’s a huge amount of waste here, so much that it’s easy to assert that advertising isn’t working. Yes, sometimes this hurricane allows you to skip the painstaking work of moving from the left to the right. Sometimes the entire market needs something, knows they need it, and are willing to listen. The key word here, though, is
sometimes.
Sometimes is pretty rare—so rare that it’s wasteful. It’s wasteful because the vast majority of ads reach people who are not in the market for what’s being sold, or who aren’t likely to tell their friends and peers about what they’ve learned.
But a very different kind of ad does work. Why? What is it about some ads and some products that makes them successful, while others fail? Why, for example, do the little text-only ads on Google perform so well while the flashy, full-page, annoying banners on Yahoo! do so poorly?
We have to start with another look at the power in the marketing equation. In the old days, marketers
targeted
consumers. Smart ad folks worked hard to make sure their ad was appropriate for the target market and that the ad ran in media that would reach that market. Implicit in the idea of targeting, though, is the conceit that it was up to the marketers to decide who would pay attention and when.
Today, of course, the opposite is true. It’s the consumers who choose. They choose whether you are listened to or ignored. How do they decide? Are some consumers more likely than others to listen? What separates the listeners from the others?
The big secret of Google ads is that they are both contextually relevant and presented to the type of person who’s likely to act on them. You see a Google “ad” just moments after you’ve typed in a search term for that very item! Compare this to a loud, unwelcome interruption of a less-focused consumer, and the difference is clear.
At any given moment, in any given market, some people are all ears. They want to hear from you. They look through the Yellow Pages, subscribe to trade magazines, and visit Web sites looking for more information. Some of these people will eventually buy; some are just looking.
So here comes the big idea:
IT IS USELESS TO ADVERTISE TO ANYONE
(EXCEPT INTERESTED SNEEZERS WITH INFLUENCE).
 
You need to do this advertising when these consumers are actually looking for help, and in a place where they’ll find you. Of course, advertising to one interested person is a good idea, but the real win occurs when the person who’s listening is a sneezer likely to tell her friends and colleagues.
Obviously, the chances you have to advertise to this select audience are rare. The rest of the time, you need to be investing in the Purple Cow. Products, services and techniques so useful, interesting, outrageous, and noteworthy that the market will want to listen to what you have to say. No, in fact, you must develop products, services, and techniques that the market will actually
seek out.
Cheating
 
•
JetBlue Airways is cheating.
Their low-cost structure, underused airports, and young, nonunion staff give them an unfair advantage.
•
Starbucksis cheating.
The coffee bar phenomenon was invented by them, and now whenever we think coffee, we think Starbucks.
•
Vanguard is cheating.
Their low-cost index funds make it impossible for a full-service broker to compete.
•
Amazon.com
is cheating.
Their free shipping and huge selection give them an unfair advantage over the neighborhood store.
•
Google is cheating.
They learned from the mistakes of the first-generation portals and they don’t carry the baggage of their peers.
•
Wendy’s is cheating.
Their flexibility allows them to introduce half a dozen salad-based entrées, capturing a big chunk of the adult market.
•
Ducati is cheating.
Because they don’t have to make motorcycles for the entire market, they can specialize in high-profit, amazing bikes, which sell out every year.
•
HBO is cheating.
Because they have to program original shows only one night a week, HBO can focus and invest and cream the networks.
 
None of these companies are using the old-fashioned advertising-based techniques to win. To their entrenched (but nervous) competitors, these companies appear to be cheating because they’re not playing by the rules.
Why aren’t you cheating?
Who Cares?
 
You can’t make people listen. But you can figure out who’s likely to be listening when you talk, and then invent the right combination of
Ps
to overwhelm them with the rightness of your offer.
Even if someone is listening, your offering of “a little bit cheaper,” “a little bit better,” or “a little bit easier” is just a waste of time. The influential sneezers, the people with a problem to solve—they’re open to hearing your story only if it’s truly remarkable; otherwise, you’re invisible.
The “Who’s listening?” question drives not just the success of individual products, but also the status of entire markets. Consider classical music for a second.
The classical music industry is now officially moribund. The big labels are hurting. Orchestras are seeing recording money dry up. There are virtually no commercially important new works being written or recorded.
Why?
Because no one is listening.
The influential sneezers already have all the music they’re ever going to buy. Everything old that was worth recording
has
been recorded—and quite well, thank you. So the sneezers have stopped looking.
Because the sneezers have stopped looking, all of those folks farther down the curve, who seek their advice or listen to the radio stations, are busy buying cut-rate $8 versions of the classics. There’s no money there for the record companies and the orchestras. Because listeners have stopped looking, composers are turning to film scores or lawn care as a way to make a living. There’s an attention blockade, and no player in the music business has enough money to change the dynamic. Music marketers can’t buy enough ads or reach enough sneezers to spread the word about interesting new music. So the entire market stops.

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