fast-food experience, perhaps McDonald’s France is reaching a far larger audience than they could ever hope to reach the old way.
What would happen if you told the truth?
But What About the Factory?
This is certainly the biggest objection to Purple Cow thinking. Your company has been successful. You grew (probably on the strength of the TV-industrial complex). You invested in people, policies, distribution, a product line, and a factory. A system that every employee has bought into—it’s who you are.
And now, apparently overnight, nothing is working the way it should. If you’re Burger King, you switch ad agencies (again). If you’re Motorola, you lay off ten thousand people. Small companies suffer, too, but more quietly.
Most big companies think that marketing is in crisis. They see that what they used to do doesn’t work the way it used to. They want to protect their huge investment in infrastructure, and they believe that fixing their marketing is the answer.
Your boss and your coworkers are likely to resist when you share the thoughts in this book. They’ll point out that it’s marketing’s job to market—that good marketing could fix the products you’ve got now. You don’t have time for remarkable products anyway, they say. You need success right now.
Well, if you don’t have time to do it right, what makes you think you’ll have time to do it over?
I wrote this book to give you ammunition to make your case. Give everyone a copy. Not just the Marketing department. Everybody. Let them see that every single industry is feeling the same pain you are. Perhaps they’ll realize that the problem isn’t in your advertising—it’s much bigger than that.
Before you spend another dollar on another brain-dead ad campaign, trade show, or sales conference, spend some time with your engineers and your customers. Challenge your people to start with a blank sheet of paper and figure out what they’d do if they could do just about anything. If they weren’t afraid of failing, what’s the most audacious thing they’d try?
The new CEO of Best Buy, Brad Anderson, is a brilliant strategist. He’s got a sharp eye for the key moments in the evolution of his company. He said, “Instead of selling 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.”
Best Buy could have done what just about every other regional electronics retailer facing a slowdown does: Buy some more newspaper ads. Play with the pricing. Lay some people off. Whine a bit and buckle down. Instead, Best Buy opted to follow a harder path, one that led to a remarkable experience for the consumer. At first, this looked like a longer, slower way to make their business grow, but in retrospect, it was a lot faster (and a lot cheaper) than running a bunch of boring ads and staying just where they were.
Remarkable isn’t always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software. Getting in the habit of doing the “unsafe” thing every time you have the opportunity is the best way to learn to project—you get practice at seeing what’s working and what’s not.
The Problem with Cheap
Cheap is one of the only remarkable items that never seems to run out of appeal. For just about any repeatedly purchased item, all other things being equal, the cheap one will gain market share.
The problem with cheap is that once you start, your competitor will likely play the same game. In an incremental price war, how will one player beat the other and still win economically? IKEA can do it. Wal-Mart can do it. Can you?
Cheap is a lazy way out of the battle for the Purple Cow. Cheap is the last refuge of a
What would happen if you told the truth?
But What About the Factory?
This is certainly the biggest objection to Purple Cow thinking. Your company has been successful. You grew (probably on the strength of the TV-industrial complex). You invested in people, policies, distribution, a product line, and a factory. A system that every employee has bought into—it’s who you are.
And now, apparently overnight, nothing is working the way it should. If you’re Burger King, you switch ad agencies (again). If you’re Motorola, you lay off ten thousand people. Small companies suffer, too, but more quietly.
Most big companies think that marketing is in crisis. They see that what they used to do doesn’t work the way it used to. They want to protect their huge investment in infrastructure, and they believe that fixing their marketing is the answer.
Your boss and your coworkers are likely to resist when you share the thoughts in this book. They’ll point out that it’s marketing’s job to market—that good marketing could fix the products you’ve got now. You don’t have time for remarkable products anyway, they say. You need success right now.
Well, if you don’t have time to do it right, what makes you think you’ll have time to do it over?
I wrote this book to give you ammunition to make your case. Give everyone a copy. Not just the Marketing department. Everybody. Let them see that every single industry is feeling the same pain you are. Perhaps they’ll realize that the problem isn’t in your advertising—it’s much bigger than that.
Before you spend another dollar on another brain-dead ad campaign, trade show, or sales conference, spend some time with your engineers and your customers. Challenge your people to start with a blank sheet of paper and figure out what they’d do if they could do just about anything. If they weren’t afraid of failing, what’s the most audacious thing they’d try?
The new CEO of Best Buy, Brad Anderson, is a brilliant strategist. He’s got a sharp eye for the key moments in the evolution of his company. He said, “Instead of selling 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.”
Best Buy could have done what just about every other regional electronics retailer facing a slowdown does: Buy some more newspaper ads. Play with the pricing. Lay some people off. Whine a bit and buckle down. Instead, Best Buy opted to follow a harder path, one that led to a remarkable experience for the consumer. At first, this looked like a longer, slower way to make their business grow, but in retrospect, it was a lot faster (and a lot cheaper) than running a bunch of boring ads and staying just where they were.
Remarkable isn’t always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software. Getting in the habit of doing the “unsafe” thing every time you have the opportunity is the best way to learn to project—you get practice at seeing what’s working and what’s not.
The Problem with Cheap
Cheap is one of the only remarkable items that never seems to run out of appeal. For just about any repeatedly purchased item, all other things being equal, the cheap one will gain market share.
The problem with cheap is that once you start, your competitor will likely play the same game. In an incremental price war, how will one player beat the other and still win economically? IKEA can do it. Wal-Mart can do it. Can you?
Cheap is a lazy way out of the battle for the Purple Cow. Cheap is the last refuge of a
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