Purple Cow (19 page)
A RESTAURANT NEAR MY HOUSE hired a teenager to wear a clown suit and do magic tricks and create balloon animals all weekend, every weekend. The result is pretty predictable. Kids told kids, parents told parents, and the restaurant was packed with families every weekend. It wasn’t hard, but it was remarkable.
WHEN BEST BUY CHANGED their product (the store!) and got rid of the commissions, that set the stage for a growth spurt that took them from $250 million in annual revenue to more than $23 billion. A retailer does more than just move boxes. A retailer sells, with the environment and the people who work there. Best Buy made their sales technique so different it was noteworthy.
OTHER THAN ITS MUCH FABLED open-source origins, why does Linux have such a following? One reason is that becoming a Linux user requires a real commitment. Linux is hard to install, hard to use without a lot of practice, and not easy to integrate into a traditional corporate environment. All of these hurdles, though, created a devoted and loyal core. This group realized that as they got more and more people to invest their time in using and supporting the product, the operating system would get better, investments would be made in software and user interfaces, and internal issues would disappear. The flaws in the product itself created an asset.
MOST TOWNS HAVE ONE: a steakhouse that serves a three-pound steak for $50—and then refunds your money if you can finish it. Word gets out. People come. Not to eat the steak (that would be stupid) but because the message behind it is fairly remarkable. The same thing happens with ski resorts with very difficult slopes and with video services that let you rent as many DVDs as you want.
THERE’S MORE RISK than ever in our lives. That’s one reason so many businesses ship Federal Express. When L. L. Bean switched, it wasn’t so much because people wanted their orders delivered faster. It was because the certainty of the delivery date and the ability to track the package in real time gave people needed assurance.
Do YOU REALLY THINK that any one of the ten people who will buy out the entire production run of the world’s fastest motorcycle (0 to 250 miles an hour in 14 seconds) will ever take it to top speed? Of course not. But for $250,000, they sure could. Is your product the best at anything worth measuring?
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN part of your product or service breaks? How soon before someone shows up to fix it? When my PowerBook broke, I called Apple. Two hours later, an Airborne Express truck pulled up with a cardboard shipping box and took my Mac away—and they brought it back 48 hours later! Wow.
This isn’t a stunt, nor is it foolish altruism. Apple profits by selling AppleCare (insurance that they’ll be there if your machine breaks) and they enjoy the word of mouth that a story like this generates.
THERE IS ACTUALLY A CONTEST for the loudest car stereo. These stereos are so loud that you can’t get into the car—you’d go deaf. The current champ is eight times louder than a 747 jet. Yet people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in their quest for the loudest stereo. And thousands of other people buy the winning brands—not to play them quite that loud, but just to know they could.
AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM, people pay extraordinary premiums for the last decibel of noise reduction if they believe it matters to them. Quiet windows, buildings, neighborhoods, laptops, cars—in each case, the amount spent for each incremental decibel of noise reduction is often double what the previous one cost. Watch one traveler busy selling a seatmate on the Bose noise-limiting headphones, and you can see the ideavirus at work.
IKEA IS NOT JUST ANOTHER cheap furniture store. There are plenty of places to buy stuff that’s cheap. But most of them can’t offer the brilliant combination of form and function you get for the same price at IKEA. Last year, the chain sold more than 25 percent of all the furniture sold in its price range in Europe and the United States. That stunning figure isn’t the result of advertising. It’s clearly a response to IKEA’s market-beating combination of quality and price.
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