Purple Cow (11 page)
Seventy-two Pearl Jam Albums
The music business is all about interrupting jaundiced strangers with news about ever more similar acts, all trying to breakinto the Top 40. Ninety-seven percent of all records lose money because this model is fundamentally broken.
Of course, in 1962 this was a brilliant strategy. People were starved for great new music. Retailers wanted more titles to stock, radio stations wanted more acts, and consumers wanted bigger collections. Advertising (in the form of radio payola or retail spiffs) was quite effective. No longer.
Virtually all breakthrough acts in the music business now are the result of blind luck (and a little talent). A band (brand?) captures the interest of a small group of sneezers, who tell their friends, and suddenly they’ve got a hit. Rather than accepting this, though, the music industry tries to manufacture hits the old way.
Except for Pearl Jam. They seem to get it. They broke through. They worked hard (and got lucky), recorded some hits, and became headliners. Then, instead of insisting that they could do it again and again and again, they rallied their core audience and built a very different system.
If you’re a Pearl Jam fan, you know that from 2001 through 2002, the band released seventy-two live albums, all available on their Web site. They’re not trying to interrupt strangers; they’re selling to the converted. Pearl Jam knows that once they have permission to talk to someone, it’s much easier to make a sale. They know that the cost of selling an album to this audience is relatively minuscule, and they’ve turned a profit on all seventy-two albums. The big win on top of this income stream occurs when some of this core audience is so delighted by this bounty of great products that they take the time to indoctrinate their friends. Thus, the Pearl Jam universe grows. Big fans bring in new fans, and old fans stick around because they’re catered to. There’s very little leakage because the band keeps the existing customer base satisfied with remarkable products.
Do you have the e-mail 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? Visit sethgodin.type
pad.com
and you can sign up for my blog and get daily updates.
Case Study: Curad
When Curad wanted to challenge the Band-Aid brand for the market for adhesive bandages, most people thought Curad was crazy. Band-Aid was a household institution, a name so well known it was practically generic. And the product was terrific. What could Curad hope to accomplish?
Curad developed a Purple Cow—bandages with characters printed on them.
Kids, the prime consumers of small bandages, loved them. So did parents who wanted to make the boo-boos get better even faster! And of course, when the first kid with Curads wore them to school, every other kid wanted them, too.
It didn’t take very long at all for Curad to grab a chunk of market share away from the market leader.
Could you make a collectible version of your product?
Sit There, Don’t Just Do Something
Marketing departments often feel a need to justify their existence. If last year’s slogan feels old, they’ll spend a million dollars to invent and propagate a new one. If retail sales are down, marketers will hire a consultant to freshen up their store look.
All too often, these marketing efforts are the result of a compromise. Either a budget compromise (“We don’t have enough money to launch a new product; let’s launch a new slogan”) or a product compromise (“That will offend our existing customer base; let’s do something less radical”). Almost without exception, these compromises are worse than doing nothing.
If you do nothing, at least you’re not going to short-circuit your existing consumer networks by loading them up with a lot of indefensible junk. When you do nothing, your sneezers can still trumpet the original cool stuff that made you popular in the first place. The constant “refreshing” of your line with ever more mediocre messaging and products just makes it harder for your few remaining fans to spread the word.
Ben & Jerry’s avoided temptation for years. If they didn’t have a super-cool flavor or a great promotional idea, they did nothing. Yes to free ice cream once a year at every scoop shop, but no to 5 percent off any pint this week at your local store. McIntosh, a leading manufacturer of high-end stereo equipment, has done the same thing. Instead of launching a few amplifiers a year, McIntosh launches a few a decade. This tactic may not satisfy the junior people in the Engineering department (fewer cool projects), but it helps build the legend and work the products through the adoption curve.
Doing nothing is not as good as doing something (great). But marketing just to keep busy is worse than nothing at all.
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)?
Case Study: United States Postal Service
Very few organizations have as timid an audience as the United States Postal Service. Dominated by conservative big customers, the Postal Service has a very hard time innovating. The big direct marketers are successful because they’ve figured out how to thrive under the current system, and they’re in no mood to see that system change. Most individuals are in no hurry to change their mailing habits, either.
The majority of new policy initiatives at the Postal Service are either ignored or met with nothing but disdain. But ZIP+4 was a huge success. Within a few years, the Postal Service diffused a new idea, causing a change in billions of address records in thousands of databases. How?
First, it was a game-changing innovation. ZIP+4 makes it far easier for marketers to target neighborhoods, and much faster and easier to deliver the mail. The product was a Purple Cow, completely changing the way customers and the Postal Service deal with bulk mail. ZIP+4 offered both dramatically increased speed in delivery and a significantly lower cost for bulk mailers. These benefits made it worth the time it took mailers to pay attention. The cost of ignoring the innovation would be felt immediately on the bottom line.
Second, the Postal Service wisely singled out a few early adopters. These were individuals in organizations that were technically savvy and were extremely sensitive to both pricing and speed issues. These early adopters were also in a position to sneeze the benefits to other, less astute, mailers.
The lesson here is simple: The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need the Purple Cow. Half-measures will fail. Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things the right customers care about, on the other hand, can have a huge payoff.
In Search of
Otaku
Otaku
The Japanese have invented some truly useful words. One of them is
otaku. Otaku
describes something that’s more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession.
Otaku
is the overwhelming desire that gets someone to drive across town to try a new ramen-noodle shop that got a great review.
Otaku
is the desire to find out everything about Lionel’s new digital locomotive—and to tell your fellow hobbyists about it.
otaku. Otaku
describes something that’s more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession.
Otaku
is the overwhelming desire that gets someone to drive across town to try a new ramen-noodle shop that got a great review.
Otaku
is the desire to find out everything about Lionel’s new digital locomotive—and to tell your fellow hobbyists about it.
People read
Fast Company
because they have an
otaku
about business. They visit trade shows to stay on the cutting edge—not just to help their company survive, but because they like that edge.
Otaku,
it turns out, is at the heart of the Purple Cow phenomenon.
Fast Company
because they have an
otaku
about business. They visit trade shows to stay on the cutting edge—not just to help their company survive, but because they like that edge.
Otaku,
it turns out, is at the heart of the Purple Cow phenomenon.
As we saw earlier, your company can’t thrive just by fulfilling basic needs. 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.
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. The flash of insight is that some markets have more
otaku
-stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets—regardless of relative size.
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. The flash of insight is that some markets have more
otaku
-stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets—regardless of relative size.
There’s a healthy vein of hot-sauce
otaku
in the United States, for example. Chili-heads in search of ever hotter elixirs, the biggest possible burn, have made the production of these insane sauces into a real business. Examples? Dave’s Insanity, Blair’s After Death Hot Sauce, Mad Dog 357, Pain 100%, Mad Dog Inferno, Boar’s Breath, Sweet Mama Jamma’s Mojo Juice, Melinda’s XXXX, Mad Cat, Lostin Boiling Lake, Satan’s Revenge, and the always popular Trailer Trash. At the same time that dozens of entrepreneurs have created successful hot-sauce businesses with no advertising, no one has made any impact selling mustard.
otaku
in the United States, for example. Chili-heads in search of ever hotter elixirs, the biggest possible burn, have made the production of these insane sauces into a real business. Examples? Dave’s Insanity, Blair’s After Death Hot Sauce, Mad Dog 357, Pain 100%, Mad Dog Inferno, Boar’s Breath, Sweet Mama Jamma’s Mojo Juice, Melinda’s XXXX, Mad Cat, Lostin Boiling Lake, Satan’s Revenge, and the always popular Trailer Trash. At the same time that dozens of entrepreneurs have created successful hot-sauce businesses with no advertising, no one has made any impact selling mustard.
Arguably, there are more people who enjoy mustard than people who enjoy brain-scorching 25,000-Scoville-unit hot sauce. Yet hot sauce is a business and mustard isn’t. Why? Because very few people will order mustard by mail or request a different brand at a restaurant. They don’t have the
otaku.
otaku.
Smart businesses target markets where there’s already
otaku.
otaku.
Go to a science fiction convention. These are pretty odd folks. Do you appeal to an audience as wacky and wonderful as this one? How could you create one? (Jeep did. So did
Fast Company
and the Longaberger basket company. There are similar groups in the investing community, the market for operating systems, and the market for million-dollar stereo systems. Products differ, but sneezers and early adopters stay the same.)
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