Purple Cow by Seth Godin Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Seth Godin
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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