The why, what and the how of being remarkable
Marketers have talked about the five Ps of marketing. Some of them include: Product, Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Publicity, Packaging, Pass-along, Permission... This book is about a new P that is suddenly exceptionally important..."Purple Cow"
Here are some of our favorite quotes:
Cows after you've seen them for a while are boring. They may be perfect, attractive, have great personalities...but they're still boring. A purple cow, though. Now that would be interesting (for a while)
Over the past 2 decades, smart business writers have pointed out that the dynamic of marketing is changing. Marketers have read and talked about those ideas, even used some of them, but have maintained the essence of their old marketing strategies.
The traditional approaches are now obsolete. Alternative approaches aren't a novelty - they are all we've got left.
As marketers, we know the old stuff isn't working and we know why: because as consumers we're too busy to pay attention to advertising but we're desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
Peppers & Rogers in "The One to One Future" showed that there are only 4 kinds of people (prospects, customers, loyal customers, and former customers) and that loyal customers are often happy to spend more money with you.
In "Permission Marketing" I outlined the ever-growing attention deficit that marketers face. I also discussed how companies win when they treat the attention of their prospects as an asset, not as a resource to be strip-mined and then abandoned.
The world has changed. There are far more choices but less and less time to sort them out
Busy consumers ignore unwanted messages, while your competition which already has market share to defend is willing to overspend to maintain that market share.
People are getting harder to reach. Just because you have someone's email address or phone number doesn't mean they want to hear from you. Even when people do want to hear from you by phone, mail or email, they are less and less likely to take action.
People who buy for businesses just aren't as needy as they used to be. The folks who got there before you have a huge inertia advantage
Bottom line? All the obvious targets are gone, so people aren't likely to have easily solved problems. Consumers are hard to reach because they ignore you. Satisfied customers are less likely to tell their friends. The old rules don't work so well anymore.
The old rule was this: Create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing. The new rule is: Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.
It's safer to be risky - to fortify your desire to do truly amazing things. Once you see that the old ways have nowhere to go but down, it becomes even more imperative to create things worth talking about.
You must design a product that is remarkable enough to attract early adopters but flexible enough to be attractive enough that those adopters will have an easy time spreading the idea to the rest of the curve.
Ideas that spread win: A brand or new product offering is nothing more than an idea.
You need to be investing in the Purple Cow: Products, services and techniques so 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.
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.
Differentiate your customers. Find the group that's most profitable. Your ads and products should cater to the customers you'd choose if you could choose your customers.
As consumers get better and better at ignoring mass media, mass media stops working.
Why is it so hard to be Purple? If you're remarkable it's likely that some people won't like you. Criticism comes to those who stand out.
Nobody says "Yeah, I'd like to set myself up for some serious criticism!" and yet the only way to be remarkable is to do just that.
Boring is the most risky strategy.
Mass marketers hate to measure. Measurement means admitting what's broken so you can fix it. Companies that measure will quickly optimize their offering.
As it becomes easier to monitor informal consumer networks, the winners will be companies that figure out what's working fastest and do it more. and figure out what's not working and kill it.
It's an interesting paradox, as the world gets more turbulent, more and more people seek safety. They want to eliminate as much risk as they can from their businesses. At the same time, the marketplace is getting faster and more fluid. Yes we're too busy to pay attention but a proportion of the population is more restless than ever. Fewer people attempt to become the Cow, so the rewards for being remarkable continue to increase.
Once you've managed to create something truly remarkable the challenge is to do two things simultaneously:
milk the cow for everything its 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.
Marketing departments often feel the need to justify their existence. If last year's slogans feel old they'll spend a million dollars to invent and propagate a new one. All too often these marketing efforts are the result of compromise: a budget compromise or a product compromise. Almost without exception these compromises are worse than doing nothing.
Doing nothing is not as good as doing something great but marketing just to keep busy is worse than nothing at all.
Otaku describes something that's more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession. People read Fast Company because they have an otaku about business. It's at the heart of the Purple Cow phenomenon
The marketing-leading companies are all about compromising themselves to continued profitability. The seeds of their destruction lie in their dependence on being in the middle.
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.
What if you don't care? What if you're busy making and marketing something you're not passionate about? After all someone needs to make disposable diapers or dialysis machines. You can choose from 2 techniques
Learn the art of projecting - getting inside the heads of people who do care deeply about this product and making them something they'll love and want to share
Learn the science of projecting - to build a discipline of launching products, watching, measuring, learning and doing it again.
Outrageous is not always remarkable. It's certainly not required. Sometimes it's just annoying. Being scandalous might work on occasion but it's not a strategy it's desperation. The outrageousness needs to have a purpose and be built into the product.
Whilst 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.
Brad Anderson is a brilliant strategist. he said "Instead of selling people what we wanted to sell, we sold what people wanted us to sell and then figured out how to make money doing it. Every time we talked to our customers they wanted us to follow the path that turned out to be the hardest possible path we could follow and every time that path was the right path."