Purple Cow (8 page)
You do not equal the project. Criticism of the project is
not
criticism of you. The fact that we need to be reminded of this points to how unprepared we are for the era of the Cow. It’s people who have projects that are
never
criticized who ultimately fail.
not
criticism of you. The fact that we need to be reminded of this points to how unprepared we are for the era of the Cow. It’s people who have projects that are
never
criticized who ultimately fail.
Will you do some things wrong in your career and be justly criticized for being unprepared, sloppy, or thoughtless? Sure you will. But these errors have nothing at all to do with the ups and downs you’ll experience as a result of being associated with the Purple Cow. When you launch a clunker, the criticism of the failure will be real, but it won’t be about you—it’ll be about the idea. The greatest artists, playwrights, car designers, composers, advertising art directors, authors, and chefs have all had significant flops—it’s part of what makes their successful work great.
Cadillac’s new CTS, in my humble opinion, is perhaps the ugliest car ever produced outside the Soviet bloc. Cadillac has been roundly criticized in car magazines, at dealerships, and on countless online bulletin boards. Guess what? These cars are selling. Fast. It’s a rebirth for a tired brand, the biggest success Cadillac has had in decades. What difference does it make that the “official” critics don’t like the car? The people who are buying it love it.
On the list of most profitable movies of 2002, right next to
Spider-Man
and
Goldmember,
is a surprise:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Criticized by Hollywood for being too low-key (and by the independents for not being original or edgy), this $3 million sleeper succeeded for exactly those two reasons. A cheap, feel-good date movie was just exceptional enough to stand out—and the market grabbed it.
Spider-Man
and
Goldmember,
is a surprise:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Criticized by Hollywood for being too low-key (and by the independents for not being original or edgy), this $3 million sleeper succeeded for exactly those two reasons. A cheap, feel-good date movie was just exceptional enough to stand out—and the market grabbed it.
Almost forty years ago, Bob Dylan, one of my favorite Purple Cows, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. He was practically burned in effigy. The act of “going electric” was viewed as treason. He had abandoned the cause, they said, and they were angry. “They” were also wrong.
In 2001, billionaire Mike Bloomberg ran for mayor of New York. He was criticized, shunned, booed, and worst of all, dismissed as a dilettante. But he won. Go figure.
After the failure of the Apple Newton (wonderfully satirized in
Doonesbury
as a bizarre technological dead end), the folks who invented the Palm Pilot had their work cut out for them. Early models didn’t work. Early co-ventures failed. They blew a trademark fight and lost their name to a Japanese pen company. The easy and smart thing to do would have been to give up and go do good work at some R&D lab. But the founders persisted, continuing to make their device single-minded (when conventional wisdom demanded multipurpose devices) and cheap (when conventional wisdom demanded expensive high-tech introductions). The founders were exceptional, and they won.
Doonesbury
as a bizarre technological dead end), the folks who invented the Palm Pilot had their work cut out for them. Early models didn’t work. Early co-ventures failed. They blew a trademark fight and lost their name to a Japanese pen company. The easy and smart thing to do would have been to give up and go do good work at some R&D lab. But the founders persisted, continuing to make their device single-minded (when conventional wisdom demanded multipurpose devices) and cheap (when conventional wisdom demanded expensive high-tech introductions). The founders were exceptional, and they won.
Only when Palm tried to play it safe did they start to stumble. Three years in a row of incremental feature creep has cost them market share and profit.
Compare these successes to the Buick. The Buick is a boring car. It’s been boring for almost fifty years. Few people aspire to own a Buick. The Buick isn’t easy to criticize, but it’s also not very successful, is it?
Drugstore.com
is another boring company. They have a boring Web site, selling boring stuff. (When was the last time someone got excited about Braun launching a new toothbrush?) Is there much to criticize about the way they do business? Not really. But there’s no Cow there. As a result, very few new customers go out of their way to do business with them.
is another boring company. They have a boring Web site, selling boring stuff. (When was the last time someone got excited about Braun launching a new toothbrush?) Is there much to criticize about the way they do business? Not really. But there’s no Cow there. As a result, very few new customers go out of their way to do business with them.
So how are you going to predict which ideas are going to backfire and which are guaranteed to be worth the hard work they take to launch? The short answer: You can’t.
Hey, if it was easy to become a rock star, everyone would do it!
You can’t know if your Purple Cow is guaranteed to work. You can’t know if it’s remarkable enough or too risky. That’s the point. It’s the very unpredictability of the outcome that makes it work.
The lesson is simple—boring always leads to failure.
1
Boring is always the most risky strategy. Smart businesspeople realize this, and they work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it’s not going to work, but they accept the fact that that’s okay.
1
Boring is always the most risky strategy. Smart businesspeople realize this, and they work to minimize (but not eliminate) the risk from the process. They know that sometimes it’s not going to work, but they accept the fact that that’s okay.
Follow the Leader
Why do birds fly in formation? Because the birds that follow the leader have an easier flight. The leader breaks the wind resistance, and the following birds can fly far more efficiently. Without the triangle formation, Canada geese would never have enough energy to make it to the end of their long migration.
A lot of risk-averse businesspeople believe that they can follow a similar strategy. They think they can wait until a leader demonstrates a breakthrough idea, and then rush to copy it, enjoying the break in wind resistance from the leader.
If you watch the flock closely, though, you’ll notice that the flock doesn’t really fly in formation. Every few minutes, one of the birds from the back of the flock will break away, fly to the front, and take over, giving the previous leader a chance to move to the back and take a break.
The problem with people who would avoid a remarkable career is that they never end up as the leader. They decide to work for a big company, intentionally functioning as an anonymous drone, staying way back to avoid risk and criticism. If they make a mistake and choose the wrong bird to follow, they lose. When a big company lays off ten thousand people, most of those people probably don’t deserve to get fired. They were doing what they were told, staying within the boundaries, and following instructions. Alas, they picked the wrong lead bird.
Even if you find a flock that’s pretty safe, in our turbulent world, it’s harder and harder to stay in formation, and we often find ourselves scurrying to find a new flock. The ability to lead is thus even more important because when your flock fades away, there may be no other flock handy.
This is true not just for individual careers, of course. Companies have the same trouble. They follow an industry leader that stumbles. Or they launch a thousand imitations of their first breakthrough product-never realizing that the market is drying up.
For years, the record business has been dominated by a few major players, and they work hard to follow each other’s lead. The labels have similar pricing, merchant policies, contracts, and packaging. Each label avoids criticism by sticking with the pack.
But when the market changes—when technology reshuffles the deck—the record labels are all in trouble. With no practice leading, no practice trying the unknown, they’re trapped, panicked, and in serious trouble. Their trade organization, the RIAA, is spending millions of dollars lobbying Congress to get legislation to keep the world just the way it is. In the long run, of course, they’ll fail. You can’t keep the world the way it is, even if you buy the influence of Congress.
The lesson of the Cow is worth repeating:
Safe is risky.
Safe is risky.
What tactics does your firm use that involve following the leader? What if you abandoned them and did something very different instead? If you acknowledge that you’ll never catch up by being the same, make a list of ways you can catch up by being different.
Case Study: The Aeron Chair
Before Herman Miller, desk chairs were invisible. A desk chair got spec’ed and acquired by the Purchasing or Human Resources department gnomes, and unless you were the CEO, you didn’t get much say in where you sat. And you might not have even noticed the difference between one cushy desk chair and another.
The buyers of desk chairs were searching for a safe and easy choice. The manufacturers listened carefully to the buyers and made safe and easy choices. This was a dull market with dull results.
When Herman Miller introduced the $750 (gasp) Aeron chair in 1994, they took a radical risk. They launched a chair that looked different, worked differently, and cost a bunch. It was a Purple Cow. Everyone who saw it wanted to sit in it, and everyone who sat in it wanted to talk about it. The designers at Herman Miller knew that the chair was expensive enough that it wasn’t a safe purchase for the ordinary purchasing agent. They also knew that it was quite likely that they wouldn’t sell many chairs at all.
Herman Miller got it right, though. Sitting in the Aeron chair sent a message about what you did and who you were, and buying the chairs for your company sent a message as well. Soon after the Aeron came out, Seth Goldstein—founder of SiteSpecific (the first online direct-marketing ad agency)—took his very first venture-capital check and went straight out to buy more than a dozen Aeron chairs. That got him on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal.
Wall Street Journal.
This isn’t a case of inventing some gimmick to create an example of the much fabled but rarely achieved viral marketing. Instead, it’s about putting the marketing investment into the product instead of into the media. Millions of Aeron chairs have been sold since its introduction in 1994, and the chair is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
“The best design solves problems, but if you can weld that to the cool factor, then you have a home run,” says Mark Schurman of Herman Miller. Another way of saying that Herman Miller realized that making a safe chair was the single riskiest thing they could do.
Projections, Profits, and the Purple Cow
Mass marketing demands mass products. And mass products beg for mass marketing.
This equation leads to a dangerous catch-22, one with two parts.
Part One: Boring Products.
Companies that are built around mass marketing develop their products accordingly. These companies round the edges, smooth out the differentiating features, and try to make products that are bland enough to work for the masses. These companies make spicy food less spicy, and they make insanely great service a little less great (and a little cheaper). They push everything—from the price to the performance—to the center of the market. They listen to the merchandisers at Kmart and Wal-Mart or the purchasing agents at Johnson & Johnson and make products that will appeal to everybody.
Companies that are built around mass marketing develop their products accordingly. These companies round the edges, smooth out the differentiating features, and try to make products that are bland enough to work for the masses. These companies make spicy food less spicy, and they make insanely great service a little less great (and a little cheaper). They push everything—from the price to the performance—to the center of the market. They listen to the merchandisers at Kmart and Wal-Mart or the purchasing agents at Johnson & Johnson and make products that will appeal to everybody.
After all, if you’re going to launch a huge ad campaign by direct mail or in trade magazines or in daily newspapers or on television, you want your ads to have the maximum possible appeal. What’s the point of advertising to everyone a product that doesn’t appeal to everyone? By following this misguided logic, marketers ensure that their products have the minimum possible chance of success.
Remember, those ads reach two kinds of viewers:
• The highly coveted innovators and adopters who will be bored by this mass-marketed product and decide to ignore it.
• The early and late majority who are unlikely to listen to an ad for any new product, and are unlikely to buy it if they do.
By targeting the center of the market and designing the product accordingly, these marketers waste their marketing dollars. Exhibit A: The dozens of consumer-focused dot-com companies who wasted more than a billion (a billion!) dollars advertising watered-down products to the mass market. Your grocery store is also a very public graveyard for mediocre products designed for the masses.
As we’ve already seen, the only way an idea reaches the bulk of the market is to move from left to right. You can no longer reach everyone at once. And if you don’t grab the attention and enthusiasm of the sneezers, your product withers.
Part Two: Scary Budgets.
In order to launch a product for the masses, you need to spend big. It’s not unusual to spend a million dollars to launch something local, and spend a hundred times that to do an effective national rollout. For most of the three hundred major movies launched by Hollywood every year, the studios spend more than $20 million on marketing for
each movie.
In order to launch a product for the masses, you need to spend big. It’s not unusual to spend a million dollars to launch something local, and spend a hundred times that to do an effective national rollout. For most of the three hundred major movies launched by Hollywood every year, the studios spend more than $20 million on marketing for
each movie.
The problem with a scary budget is that you have to make the ads work, and quickly. If you don’t break through the clutter, capture imagination and attention, get retailers excited and stocking your product, and get the factory unloading its inventory, well, it’s over. You’ve wasted your shot; you don’t get a second chance, and the product is considered dead.
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