Purple Cow (3 page)
Obviously, it was a big hit.
Today, a quick visit to the drugstore turns up: Advil, Aleve, Alka-Seltzer Morning Relief, Anacin, Ascriptin, Aspergum, Bayer, Bayer Children’s, Bayer Regimen, Bayer Women’s, BC, Bufferin, Cope, Ecotrin, Excedrin Extra Strength, Goody’s, Motrin, Nuprin, St. Joseph, Tylenol, and of course, Vanquish. Within each of these brands, there are variations, sizes, and generics, adding up to more than a hundred products to choose from.
Think it’s still easy to be an aspirin marketer?
If you developed a new kind of pain reliever, even one that was a bit better than all of those I just listed, what would you do?
The obvious answer, if you’ve got money and you believe in your product, is to spend all you’ve got to buy tons of national TV and print advertising.
You’ll face a few problems, though. First you need people who want to buy a pain reliever. While it’s a huge market, it’s not everyone.
Once you find people who buy pain relievers, then you need people who want to buy a new kind. After all, plenty of people want the “original” kind, the kind they grew up with. If someone has found a convenient, trusted, effective pain reliever, he’s probably not out there wasting time looking for a replacement.
Finally, you need to find the people willing to listen to you talk about your new pain reliever. The vast majority of folks are just too busy and will ignore you, regardless of how many ads you buy.
So ... you just went from an audience of everyone to an audience of a fraction the size. Not only are these folks hard to find, but they’re picky as well.
Being first in the frozen pizza category was a good idea. Being first in pain relievers was an even better idea. Alas, they’re both taken.
Let’s consider yoga books for a second. The problem with books about how to do yoga is that there are too many of them.
A few years ago, when yoga books were scarce, all a publisher needed to be successful was a good yoga book. If people had a yoga problem, they’d visit the local bookstore, take a quick look at the three or four books available, and buy one.
Today, though, there are more than five hundred books on yoga. Nobody, no matter how motivated, takes the time to review all five hundred before buying a book on yoga. So if you’ve just written one, you’ve got a challenge ahead of you. Not only is there a huge amount of competition, but new books on yoga are useless to people who have already solved their yoga problem. All those folks who visited the store a few years ago and made yoga books so popular
are no longer shopping for yoga books!
are no longer shopping for yoga books!
Here’s the sad truth about marketing just about anything, whether it’s a product or a service, whether it’s marketed to consumers or to corporations:
Most people can’t buy your product. Either they don’t have the money, they don’t have the time, or they don’t want it.If an audience doesn’t have the money to buy what you’re selling at the price you need to sell it for, you don’t have a market.If an audience doesn’t have the time to listen to and understand your pitch, you’ll be treated as if you were invisible.And if an audience takes the time to hear your pitch but decides they don’t want it ... well, you’re not going to get very far.The world has changed. There arefarmore choices, but there is less and less time to sort them out.
This wasn’t true just twenty years ago. Way back then, consumers had a lot more time and far fewer choices. Our disposable income had fewer ways to get squandered, so if a company came up with a really neat innovation (the cell phone, for example), we’d find a way to pay for it.
Years ago, our highly productive economy figured out how to satisfy almost everyone’s needs. Then the game changed—it was all about satisfying our
wants.
The marketing community taught us (with plenty of TV advertising) to want more and more, and consumers did their best to keep up.
wants.
The marketing community taught us (with plenty of TV advertising) to want more and more, and consumers did their best to keep up.
Among the people who
might
buy your product, most will never hear about it. There are so many alternatives now that people can no longer be easily reached by mass media. Busy consumers ignore unwanted messages, while your competition (which already has market share to defend) is willing to overspend to maintain that market share.
might
buy your product, most will never hear about it. There are so many alternatives now that people can no longer be easily reached by mass media. Busy consumers ignore unwanted messages, while your competition (which already has market share to defend) is willing to overspend to maintain that market share.
Worse still, people are getting harder to reach by permission media. Just because you have someone’s e-mail address or phone number doesn’t mean they want to hear from you! And setting aside the spam issues, even when people
do
want to hear from you by phone or mail or e-mail, they are less and less likely to take action. Your satisfied consumers value these messages less because those messages no longer solve their current problems. Companies have gotten better at understanding what satisfies their consumers (and presumably have gotten better at delivering it), so the bar keeps getting raised as to what product news you can possibly deliver that will add to that satisfaction. I wasn’t being totally facetious when I quoted the former head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Almost everything we can realistically imagine that we need
has
been invented.
do
want to hear from you by phone or mail or e-mail, they are less and less likely to take action. Your satisfied consumers value these messages less because those messages no longer solve their current problems. Companies have gotten better at understanding what satisfies their consumers (and presumably have gotten better at delivering it), so the bar keeps getting raised as to what product news you can possibly deliver that will add to that satisfaction. I wasn’t being totally facetious when I quoted the former head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Almost everything we can realistically imagine that we need
has
been invented.
The last hurdle is that ideavirus networks are hard to ignite in markets that are fairly satisfied. Because marketers have overwhelmed consumers with too much of everything, people are less likely to go out of their way to tell a friend about a product unless they’re fairly optimistic that the friend will be glad to hear about it. When was the last time someone told you about a new pain reliever ? It’s a boring topic, and your friend is not going to waste your time. There’s too much noise, and consumers are less eager than ever to add to it.
This is true not just for consumer products but also for business and industrial purchases. People who buy for businesses—whether it’s advertising, parts, service, insurance, or real estate—just aren’t as needy as they used to be. The folks who got there before you have a huge inertia advantage. If you want to grow your market share or launch something new, you have a significant challenge ahead.
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 any more. Marketing is dead. Long live marketing.
The Death of the TV-Industrial Complex
Remember the much-maligned “military-industrial complex”? The idea behind it was simple. The government spent money on weapons. Companies received tax dollars to build weapons. These companies hired labor. They paid taxes. The taxes were used to buy more weapons. A virtuous cycle was created: The government got bigger, employment went up, and it appeared that everyone was a winner.
The military-industrial complex was likely responsible for many of the world’s ills, but it was undeniably a symbiotic system. As one half of it grew and prospered, so did the other.
Little noticed over the past fifty years was a very different symbiotic relationship, one that arguably created far more wealth (with large side effects) than the military-industrial complex did. I call it the
TV-industrial complex.
The reason we need to worry about it is that it’s dying. We built a huge economic engine around the idea of this system, and now it’s going away. The death of the complex is responsible for much of the turmoil at our companies today
TV-industrial complex.
The reason we need to worry about it is that it’s dying. We built a huge economic engine around the idea of this system, and now it’s going away. The death of the complex is responsible for much of the turmoil at our companies today
The system was simple. Find a large market niche that’s growing and not yet dominated. Build a factory. Buy a lot of TV ads. The ads will lead to retail distribution and to sales. The sales will keep the factory busy and create profits.
Astute businesses then used all the profits to buy more ads. This led to more distribution and more factories. Soon the virtuous cycle was in place, and a large, profitable brand was built.
As the brand was built, it could command a higher price, generating larger profits and leaving more money for more TV ads. Consumers were trained to believe that “as seen on TV” was proof of product quality, so they looked for products on television. Non-advertised brands lost distribution and, ultimately, profits.
No, it’s not rocket science, but that’s partly why it worked so well. Big marketers with guts (like Procter & Gamble) were able to dominate entire categories by using this simple idea.
The old system worked for Revlon. Charles Revson was one of the first big TV advertisers, and advertising grew his company dramatically. Where did he spend his profits? On more TV ads.
In 1962, a smart ad agency hired Jay Ward, creator of Bullwinkle, and asked him to make a commercial. He invented Cap’n Crunch and came back with an animated commercial. Then, and only after that was done, did the cereal company go about actually making a cereal. Quaker knew that if they had a commercial, they could run enough ads to imprint the Cap’n into just about every kid in America. The cereal was secondary
You could never afford to introduce Cap’n Crunch today, regardless of who made your commercial. Kids won’t listen. Neither will adults.
Consumers were kids in the candy store; they had pockets filled with shiny money and they had a real desire to buy stuff. We shopped on TV and we shopped in stores. We were in a hurry and we wanted to fill our houses, our fridges, and our garages.
A quick look down this list of Procter & Gamble brands turns up significant proof of the presence of the TV-industrial complex. Is it possible to read the list without filling your head with images and jingles?
Bold, Bounce, Bounty, Cascade, Charmin, Cheer, Cover Girl, Crest, Dawn, Downy, Folgers, Head & Shoulders, Herbal Essences, Ivory, Max Factor, Miss Clairol, Mr. Clean, Nice ’n Easy, Noxzema, NyQuil, Oil of Olay, Old Spice, Pampers, Pepto-Bismol, Pringles, Safeguard, Scope, Secret, Tampax, Tide, Vicks, Vidal Sassoon, and Zest. Throw in particularly annoying product pitches like Wisk and Irish Spring, and the point is obvious. Advertising this stuff used to work. Really well.
It’s hard for me to overstate the effectiveness of this system. Every time you buy a box of breakfast cereal, you’re seeing the power of TV at work. Due to a commercial you likely saw thirty years ago, you’re spending an extra dollar or two on a box of puffed wheat or sugared corn. Over your lifetime, that’s thousands of dollars in cost premium for TV ads just for breakfast cereal.
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