Purple Cow (10 page)
In just about every industry and just about every career, the creator of the Purple Cow receives huge benefits. Star football players get long-term contracts. The authors of a fluke bestseller like
The Nanny Diaries
managed to sign a million-dollar deal for a sequel, even though the new book can’t possibly be as successful. A hot agency easily signs up new clients on the basis of their success with their old clients. Same reason.
The Nanny Diaries
managed to sign a million-dollar deal for a sequel, even though the new book can’t possibly be as successful. A hot agency easily signs up new clients on the basis of their success with their old clients. Same reason.
Once you’ve managed to create something truly remarkable, the challenge is to do two things simultaneously:
• Milk the Cow for everything it’s worth. Figure out how to extend it and profit from it for as long as possible.
• Create an environment where you are likely to invent a new Purple Cow in time to replace the first one when its benefits inevitably trail off.
Of course, these are contradictory goals. The creator of a Purple Cow enjoys the profits, the accolades, and the feeling of omniscience that comes with a success. None of those outcomes accompany a failed attempt at a new Cow. Thus, the tempting thing to do is to coast. Take profits. Fail to reinvest. Take no chances because those “chances” seem to be opportunities to blow the very benefits you worked so hard to earn.
Palm, Yahoo!, AOL, Marriott, Marvel Comics ... the list goes on and on. Each company had a breakthrough, built an empire around it, and then failed to take another risk.
It used to be easy to coast for a long time after a few remarkable successes. Disney coasted for decades. Milton Berle did, too. It’s too easy to decide to sit out the next round, rationalizing that you’re spending the time and energy to build on what you’ve got instead of investing in the future.
Case Study: The Italian Butcher
There are literally thousands of butchers in Italy, but only one of them is famous (and only one of them is rich). Dario Cecchini has been profiled in magazine articles and guidebooks. His 250-year-old butcher shop in Panzano almost always has a crowd. People come from all over the world to visit his shop—to hear him quote Dante and rhapsodize about the Fiorentina beefsteak. When the European Economic Union banned the sale of steak with the bones left in (because of the fear of mad cow disease
2
), Dario Cecchini held a mock funeral and buried a steak in front of his store—complete with casket.
2
), Dario Cecchini held a mock funeral and buried a steak in front of his store—complete with casket.
Is his meat that much better? Probably not. But by turning the process of buying meat into an intellectual and political exercise, Dario has figured out more than one way to make money from a cow—this time, a purple one.
Wall Street and the Cow
Current market conditions notwithstanding, what’s the secret to every entrepreneur’s dream, the successful IPO? The companies that successfully went public during the Net boom (and those that will follow when the market comes back) had one thing in common—they’d created a Purple Cow and proved it.
Whether it was insanely popular chat sites or beta versions of database software that key early adopters raved about, each company had a story to tell the Street. So investors bought in.
Then just about every company forgot the lesson of the Cow. Instead of taking the money and using it to create a series of innovations that could lead to the next Cow (at a higher, bigger level), these companies took profits. The companies streamlined and mechanized and milked their Cow. Alas, very few markets are stable enough and fast—or long growing enough to allow a public company to thrive for very long. Their days of 20 percent annual growth are probably gone forever.
The Opposite of “Remarkable”
is “very good.”
Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren’t. Yet so few brave people make remarkable stuff. Why? I think it’s because they think that the opposite of “remarkable” is “bad” or “mediocre” or “poorly done.” Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus-worthy. Yet this is not a discussion about quality at all.
If you travel on an airline and they get you there safely, you don’t tell anyone. That’s what’s supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if it’s horrible beyond belief or if the service is so unexpected (they were an hour early! they comped my ticket because I was cute! they served flaming crêpes suzette in first class!) that you need to share it.
Factories set quality requirements and try to meet them. That’s boring. Very good is an everyday occurrence and hardly worth mentioning.
Are you making very good stuff? How fast can you stop?
The Pearl in the Bottle
Remember Prell? All of us boomers certainly can envision the clear bottle of shampoo filled with green liquid ... and the pearl slowly drifting downward. This image was omnipresent in the advertising for Prell.
The commercial never made it clear precisely what a pearl had to do with shampoo or why we wanted the pearl to move slowly. What is beyond dispute is that TV commercials made this rather ordinary shampoo a significant success.
Where do you find a Purple Cow in the cosmetics business? After all, almost all shampoos are the same. More often than not, it’s an extraneous exotic ingredient or fancy packaging that people notice, not the effectiveness of the potion.
Compare the inexorable decline of Prell (the TV commercials stopped working) with the gradual ascent of Dr. Bronner’s.
Dr. Bronner’s does no advertising at all, yet their product continues to grow in sales and market share. If it’s not because of a better product, then why? Because of the incredible packaging. The packaging is very much part of the experience of using the product.
Most people discover this extraordinary product at a friend’s house. Brushing your teeth in the guest bathroom, with nothing much better to do than snoop, you inevitably start reading the thousands of words inscribed all around the bottle. “Balanced food for mind-body-spirit is our medicine.”
Not only is it unique, but the uniqueness is aimed at a specific audience, one in which the early adopters are more than happy to proselytize to their friends.
Dr. Bronner’s is a truly remarkable shampoo as shampoos go. It’s worth noticing, worth talking about, and for many people, worth buying. In a world without (effective) ads, it has an unfair advantage against anything the big guys can develop.
Buy a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s. Now, working with your factory and your designers, Bronnify a variation of one of your products.
The Parody Paradox
J. Peterman is back. His oblong white catalog—filled with lengthy descriptions of Mata Hari, duster coats from cowboys on the prairie, and irreplaceable white silk scarves—was solidly entrenched in the zeitgeist a decade ago. The writing was so over the top that a fictional J. Peterman even became a character on
Seinfeld.
Seinfeld.
A tiny ad in
The New Yorker
launched this duster coat and the idiosyncratic voice behind the J. Peterman catalog. It was so remarkablethat it spread, and as it spread, it became ripe forparody.
The New Yorker
launched this duster coat and the idiosyncratic voice behind the J. Peterman catalog. It was so remarkablethat it spread, and as it spread, it became ripe forparody.
Imagine for a second the same thing happening to L. L. Bean or Lands’ End. Inconceivable. Those catalogs are safe and steady and boring. The original J. Peterman catalog, on the other hand, was so ridiculous that it was delightful to parody. We feel the same way about Martha Stewart’s obsessive calendar in the front of her magazine or the two “cheeseburgah” guys at that diner in Chicago, as parodied by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.
In each of these cases, the very uniqueness that led to a parody results in a huge increase in attention, in sales, and in profits. If you can show up in a parody, it means you’ve got something unique, something worth poking fun at. It means there’s a Purple Cow at work. The paradox is this: The same word of mouth that can make your product a huge hit can also lead to someone’s snickering at you.
Most companies are so afraid of offending or appearing ridiculous that they steer far away from any path that might lead them to this result. They make boring products because they don’t want to be interesting. When a committee gets involved, each well-meaning participant sands off the rough edges, speaking up for how their constituency might not like the product. The result is something boring and safe.
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?
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