Purple Cow (14 page)

BOOK: Purple Cow

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Marketers No Longer: Now We’re Designers

Fifteen years ago, when Jerry Hirschberg was starting up the U.S. design studio for Nissan, he was invited to the long-range product planning meetings as an observer—a courtesy extended to him by the marketing people.

The meetings were all about vague pronouncements about future cars (“all entry-level cars should be as generic as possible”) and plenty of spreadsheets about advertising spending and projected income. They were also the most important meetings the company held to plan its long-term future. The designers were mere tacticians.

Jerry proved, in short order, that he was much more than an observer. He demonstrated that designers not only had an important role in this process but should in fact dominate it.

If post-design, post-manufacture marketing is dead, what replaces it? Design. Not the pure design that they teach at Parsons, but a market-centric design that builds the very success of the product’s marketing into the product itself.

The semantics get funky, but the facts are clear. The person with real influence on the success of a product today gets to sit at the table when the original seeds for a project are being sown.

If you are a marketer who doesn’t know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you’re no longer a marketer. You’re deadwood.

Make a list of all the remarkable products in your industry. Who made them? How did they happen? Model the behavior (not mimic the product) and you’re more than halfway to making your own.

What Does Howard Know?

One thing about Starbucks is obvious—the coffee is really and truly delicious. The reason is simple. Howard Schultz (the company’s CEO) loves coffee. He refers to everyone who hasn’t had their first cup of the day as “precaffeinated.” He spent months in Italy, drinking and learning. He has a coffee
otaku.

Where does remarkable come from? Often, it comes from passionate people who are making something for themselves. The Burton snowboard, the Vanguard mutual fund, the Apple iPod, and the Learjet all came from people with an
otaku.
It’s interesting to note that the chocolate at Starbucks isn’t as great as the coffee. Obviously, Howard doesn’t know chocolate the way he knows coffee. Starbucks isn’t obsessed with chocolate; they just serve it. Are you obsessed or just making a living?

The number-one question about the Purple Cow is, “How do I know it’s remarkable?” This question almost always comes from the people who don’t have the
otaku.
John Scharffenberger, founder of Scharffen Berger Chocolate, has no trouble telling great chocolate from ordinary chocolate. He gets it.

When I was building my first company (we created books), I always asked potential employees how often they went to the bookstore. People who don’t love shopping for books obviously don’t have the book
otaku,
and they’re going to have a harder time inventing books for people who do.

Everyone who works at Patagonia is an outdoor nut. When the surf is up, the offices empty out as people rush to hit the waves. While this makes for a chaotic work environment, it also makes it more likely that Patagonia staff will know a remarkable outdoor product when they see one.

Compare this to the people who work at General Foods or General Mills or Kellogg’s. A few of them might be obsessed with their products, but most of them just churn the stuff out. Imagine how cool Pop Tarts would be if the brand manager was the sort of person who ate them for dinner.

This is Dineh Mohajer, founder of Hard Candy, a cosmetics company with more than $10 million a year in sales. She knows what young women who love nail polish want because she is a young woman who loves nail polish.

A doctor I know makes a point of calling patients even if it’s not bad news. If your routine tests come back with nothing to worry about, he calls and tells you. This is a monumentally simple task, but it’s remarkable nonetheless. “It’s simple,” he told me; “that’s what I want my doctor to do for me.” Sometimes, in the middle of all the tumult of work, it’s easy to forget that we’re making something for people who care.

The challenge is in projecting. It’s easier if you care deeply. But what if
you
don’t care? What if you’re busy making and marketing something you’re not passionate about using? After all, someone needs to make disposable diapers or dialysis machines or grinding wheels.

You can choose from two techniques. The first is to learn the
art
of projecting. Of getting inside the heads of the people who
do
care deeply about this product and making them something they’ll love and want to share. Marketers and designers who do it can put themselves into other people’s shoes and imagine what
they’d
want. In the long run, learning this knack is actually much more profitable than being able to make stuff for only yourself. Learning this knack gives you more flexibility. There are marketers who can create Purple Cows for only a tiny audience—an audience just like the marketers themselves. They make decisions based on gut instinct, and (for a while) this works. If you follow this path, though, sooner or later your gut will let you down. If you haven’t developed the humility that comes from being able to project to multiple audiences, you’re likely to panic when you can’t connect to your chosen group any longer.

The second technique is to learn the
science
of projecting—to build a discipline of launching products, watching, measuring, learning, and doing it again. Obviously, this technique doesn’t work for complicated, long-sales-cycle products like jet airliners, but it does work for cars, toys, and most everything in between. Every February, the toy industry launches hundreds of toys at the annual Toy Fair. Only a fraction ever get produced, though. The nonremarkable ones disappear some time between their introduction and their ship date.

The marketers who are practicing the science of projecting what people want don’t have a particular bias or point of view. Instead, they understand the process and will take it wherever it goes.

Is there someone (a person, an agency?) in your industry who has a track record of successfully launching remarkable products? Can you hire them away, or at least learn from their behavior? Immerse yourself in fan magazines, trade shows, design reviews—whatever it takes to feel what your fans feel.

Can you create a culture of aggressively prototyping new products and policies? When GM shows a concept car at the New York Auto Show, there’s more than ego involved. They’re trying to figure out what car nuts think is remarkable. I’m not pitching focus groups here (they’re a waste). I’m talking about very public releases of cheap prototypes.

Do You Have to Be Outrageous to Be Remarkable?

Outrageous is not always remarkable. It’s certainly not required. Sometimes outrageous is just annoying. Ozzy Osbourne is lucky to be both outrageous and remarkable. But a performance artist smearing himself with lard and wrapping himself in felt is just plain weird.

It’s easy to fall into a trap of running upside-down ads, wearing green bow ties, and filling your ads with scatological references. Being scandalous might work on occasion, but it’s not a strategy; it’s desperation. The outrageousness needs to have a purpose, and it needs to be built into the product.

Walking onto a cross-country flight, I noticed that the 60-year-old woman in front of me was wearing a Hooters T-shirt. Their slogan? “Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.” The fascinating thing about Hooters’ outrageousness is that it’s just outrageous enough to be remarkable to this audience... without offending. Does everyone like Hooters? No way. That’s part of what makes it remarkable. If everyone liked it, it would be boring.

The reminder: It’s not about the way you say it, it’s what you say. And while you can momentarily use offensive behavior to capture the attention of people who might not want to pay attention, it’s not a long-run strategy. Outrageousness by itself won’t work because the conversations sneezers have about you aren’t positive.

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.