Purple Cow (13 page)

BOOK: Purple Cow

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Sell What People Are Buying (and Talking About!)

A few years ago, after yet another unsuccessful sales call, I realized the blindingly obvious: It’s a lot easier to sell something that people are already in the mood to buy.

As obvious as this may seem, most marketers don’t get it. For example, Butterball has invented a new use for turkey (and its brand) and has introduced fast-baking pot pies, now in your grocer’s freezer. The problem is that the audience for this very retro food isn’t necessarily in the market for a brand-new way to feed their family. What’s worse, Butterball is introducing the product with TV commercials running on the Food Channel.

I’m trying hard to imagine Butterball’s target customer. The Food Channel viewer is busy watching a cooking show, and here’s an insipid, soft-focus commercial for a glorified TV dinner. How many viewers will even watch the commercial? Of those watching, how many will respond in the way Butterball hopes? Worse, how many will tell a friend about this great new meal?

On the list of people who are baking a frozen comfort food for dinner, there are few risk-taking early adopters. And among those adopters, very few, it seems to me, are going to look to the Food Channel for the answer to their “What’s new?” problem.

Consumers with needs are the ones most likely to respond to your solutions. Whether your prospect is an industrial bearings buyer at Ford or an overworked househusband in Tucson, you need to figure out who’s buying, and then solve their problem. Butterball’s product is unremarkable. It doesn’t solve anyone’s problem except for Butterball’s. Butterball’s advertising and media choices make it worse.

The alternative is to start with a problem that you can solve for your customer (who realizes he has a problem!). Then, once you’ve come up with a solution that is so remarkable that the early adopters among this population will gleefully respond, you’ve got to promote it in a medium where those most likely to sneeze are actually paying attention. Altoids’ campaign is a great example. They realized that young adults who weren’t taking up smoking were looking for something to do with their fingers and their mouths while at work—and Hershey’s bars weren’t going to cut it.

By advertising in urban centers with cutting-edge imagery and slogans, Altoids spoke directly to this market about a need that customers didn’t even know they had. By creating a tin that just begged to be shared, Altoids made it easy for early adopters to sneeze the product to the rest of the market. The result: one of the most profitable candy introductions ever.

The Problem with Compromise

The old saying is right: “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” If the goal of marketing is to create a Purple Cow, and the nature of the Cow is to be extreme in some attribute, it’s inevitable that compromise can only diminish your chances of success.

Compromise is about sanding down the rough edges to gain buy-in from other constituencies. Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavor, while habanero pecan is not. While there may be just a few people who are unwilling to eat vanilla ice cream, there are legions of people who are allergic to nuts, sensitive to spicy food, or just plain uninterested in eating a challenging scoop of ice cream. The safe compromise choice for a kid’s birthday party is the vanilla. But vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla.

In almost every market, the boring slot is filled. The product designed to appeal to the largest possible audience already exists, and displacing it is awfully difficult. Difficult because the very innocuousness of the market-leading product is its greatest asset. How can you market yourself as “more bland than the leading brand”? The real growth comes with products that annoy, offend, don’t appeal, are too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too simple—too something. (Of course, they’re too
too
for some people, but just perfect for others.)

Bootstrapping entrepreneurs often upend existing industries because the dominant players in an industry are the last places you’ll find empowered mavericks. The market-leading companies may owe their dominance to the Purple Cow they marketed years and years ago, but today, they’re all about compromising themselves to continued profitability. The seeds of their destruction lie in their dependence on being in the middle.

If someone in your organization is charged with creating a new Purple Cow,
leave them alone!
Don’t use internal reviews and usability testing to figure out if the new product is as good as what you’ve got now. Instead, pick the right maverick and get out of the way.

Case Study: Motorola and Nokia

Guess what? Cell phones are now boring. Just about everyone who needs a phone now has one. Most people who want a phone have one, too. The companies that built this revolution now have a problem: What next?

What do they have to put into a phone to get people to notice it? Is it possible to make a remarkable phone anymore? What both companies have discovered is that smaller phones no longer create excitement, so they needed something new. Nokia just introduced a $21,000 cell phone called Vertu—designed to be not just a phone but a remarkable piece of jewelry as well. At the same time, both companies are working on disposable phones that they hope will be remarkably cheap.

In a totally different direction, both companies are scrambling to market phones that send photographs. Of course, both the sender and the recipient have to have the right kind of phone, but that might be a good thing.

The sad truth, though, is that it may be quite a while before the market generates the attention it did five years ago. The Purple Cow has left the room, and there’s not a lot the cell phone companies can do about it.

The Magic Cycle of the Cow

Does our chaotic world guarantee that your efforts to bring new ideas to the marketplace are guaranteed to be chaotic as well? Are we doomed to randomly invent stuff for an ever-changing roster of potential consumers?

I don’t think so. The reason is that many consumers don’t change their roles very often. Sneezers love to sneeze. They’re often open to hearing from marketers who are pretty reliable in their track record of creating Purple Cows. But cocooned, scared consumers (in business or at home) keep their ears closed virtually all the time. The cautious consumers are stuck in their habitual mode, just like the sneezers are.

But it’s the sneezers we care about, and we can leverage the fact that if we respect them, they’ll listen.

The four steps, then, are these:

1. Get permission from people you impressed the first time. Not permission to spam them or sell them leftovers or squeeze extra margins from them. Permission to alert them the next time you might have another Cow.

2. Work with the sneezers in that audience to make it easier for them to help your idea cross the chasm. Give them the tools (and the story) they’ll need to sell your idea to a wider audience.

3. Once you’ve crossed the line from remarkable to profitable business, let a different team milk it. Productize your services, servicize your products, let a thousand variations bloom. But don’t believe your own press releases. This is the inevitable downward slide to commodity. Milk it for all it’s worth, and fast.

4. Reinvest. Do it again. With a vengeance. Launch another Purple Cow (to the same audience). Fail and fail and fail again. Assume that what was remarkable last time won’t be remarkable this time.

This may not be nearly as predictable or as profitable as marketing Quisp or Wheaties or Wisk or Allstate or Maxwell House was thirty years ago. Sorry Not my fault. But it’s all we’ve got.

All of a sudden, it’s obvious why you need a permission asset. If your company doesn’t have one yet, you can start today, for free, by using Outlook on your PC. Give people an e-mail address to write to. Write back. You’re on your way.

What It Means to Be a Marketer Today

If Purple Cow is now one of the Ps of marketing, it has profound implications for the enterprise. It changes the definition of marketing.

It used to be that Engineering invented, Manufacturing built, Marketing marketed, and Sales sold. There was a clear division of labor, and the president managed the whole shebang. The marketer got a budget and she bought ads with it.

Marketing was really better called “advertising.” Marketing was about communicating the values of a product after it had been developed and manufactured.

That’s clearly not a valid strategy in a world where the product attributes (everything from service to design) are now at the heart of what it means to be a marketer. Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. How can a Purple Cow company
not
be run by a marketer?

Companies that create Purple Cows—companies like JetBlue, Starbucks, Hasbro, and Poland Spring—have to be run by marketers. Turns out that the CEO of JetBlue made one critical decision on day one: He got the head of Marketing involved in product design and training as well. It shows. Everything they do that adds value is marketing. Poland Spring starts with worthless water. Hasbro starts with a few cents’ worth of plastic and paper. JetBlue sells a commodity just like American Airlines does, but manages to make a profit doing it. These companies are marketers at their core.

The geniuses who invented 1-800-COLLECT are true marketers. They didn’t figure out how to market an existing service. Instead, the marketing is built into the product—from the easy-to-remember phone number, of course, to the very idea that MCI could steal the collect call business from the pay-phone operators.

But isn’t the same idea true for a local restaurant, a grinding wheel company, and Travelers Insurance? In a world where just about anything we need is good enough, and where just about all the profit comes from the Purple Cow, we’re all marketers!

If a company is failing, it is the fault of the most senior management, and the problem is probably this: They’re running a company, not marketing a product.