Transform your business by being remarkable
"Stop advertising and start innovating."
***
Sergio Zyman, the marketing guru who was there for most of Coca-Cola's rebirth, points out that two of the most popular TV commercials of all time-"I'd like to teach the world to sing" and "Mean Joe Greene"- sold not one more bottle of Coke. They entertained and got attention, but they translated into no incremental revenue. He jokes that the commercial should have been, "I'd like to teach the world to drink"
***
Tide is arguably the best laundry detergent in history. Every year, P&G invests millions of dollars and pays a top-flight team of chemists to push the performance of Tide further and further. Is that the right thing to do? Tide succeeded early on because of a mixture of good TV ads, very good distribution, and a greaty product. As the TV-industrial complex crumbled, though, the ads mattered less and less. Now, with the ascensiaon of Wal-Mart, the distribution is more crucial than ever. One chain of stores accounts for a third of Tide's sales. Without Wal-Mart, Tide is dead. So what should P&G do? Are they likely to come up with a true innovation, a remarkable breakthrough that even casual detergent buyers notice? Or are the incremental improvements largely a carryover from a different time, a time when people actually cared about their laundry? Orthodox Purple Cow thinking would have P&G take the profits while they're still there. Cut research spending, raise the price as much as is practical, and put the incremental profits into the creation of ever more radical and interesting new products. If the current R&D isn't likely to generate a noteworthy payoff, what's the point?
***
My friend and colleague Chip Conley runs more than a dozen hotels in San Francisco. His first hotel, the Phoenix, is in the one of the worst neighborhoods downtown. Chip got the hotel (it's really a motel) for next to nothing. He knew that it wasn't a hotel for everybody. In fact, no matter what he did to the Phoenix, hardly anyone would choose to stay there. Which is fine. Because "hardly anyone" can be quite enough if you've got a hotel with just a few dozen rooms. Chip redesinged the place. He painted it funky colors. Put hip style magazines in all the rooms. Had a cutting-edge artist paint the inside of the pool, and invited up-abd-coming rock-and-roll motel in the center of San Francisco. People looking for it found it.
***
Cow is worth repeating: Safe is risky.
***
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.
*İnnovators & early adopters
***
Lionel Pilane's dad was a French baker, and he inherited the family bakery when he was a young man. Rather than sitting still and tending to the fires, though, Lionel became obsessed with remarkable.
He did extensive research, interviewing more than eight thousand French bakers about their techniques. He pioneered the use of organic flour in France. He refused to bake baguettes, pinting out that they were fairly tasteless and very un-French (they're a fairly recent import from Vienna.) He acquired the largest collection of bread cookbooks in the world- and studied them. His sourdough bread is made with just, flour, water, starter, and sea salt, and it's baked in a wood-fired oven. Poilane refused to hire bakers -he told me they had too many bad habits to unlearn- and instead hired young men who were willing to apprentice with him for years. At first, the French establishment rejected his products, considering them too daring and different. But the overwhelming quality of the loaves and Poilane'^s desire to do it right finally won them over.Virtually every fancy restaurant in Paris now serves Poilane bread. People come from all over the world to wait in line in fromt of his tiny shop on Rue de Cherche Midi to buy a huge loaf of sourdough bread- or more likely, several loaves. The company he founded now ships loaves all over the world, turning handmade bread into a global product, one worth talking about. Last year, Lionel sold more than $10m worth of bread.
***
There are literally thousands of butchers in Italy, but only one of them is famous (and only one of them is rich). Dario Cecchini has been profiled in magazine articles and guidebooks. His 250-year-old butcher shop in Panzano almost always has a crowd. PEople come from all over the world to visit his shop-to hear him quote Dante and rhapsodize about the Fiorentina beefsteak. When the European Economic Union banned the sale of steak with the bones left in (because of the fear of mad cow disease), Dario Cecchini held a mock funeral and buried a steak in front of his store- complete with casket. Is his meat that much better? Probably not. But by turning the process of buying meat into an intellctual and political exercise, Dario has figured out more than one way to make money from a cow- this time, a purple one.
***
How Dutch Boy stirred up the paint business?
It's so simple it's scary. They changed the can. Paint cans are heavy, hard to carry, hard to close, hard to open, hard to pour from and no fun. Yet they've been around for a long time, and most people assumed there had to be a reason. Dutch Boy realized that there was no reason. They also realized that the can was an intehral part of the product- people don't buy paint; they buy painted walls, and the can makes the painting process much easier. Dutch Boy used this insight and introduced an easier-to-carry, easier-to-pour-from, -easier-to-close paint jug. Sales went way up- no suprise when you think about it .Not only did the new packaging increase sales, but it also got Dutch Boy paint more distribution (a higher retail price) This is marketing done right. Marketing where the marketer changes the product, not the ads.
***
Haagen-Dazs in Bronxville is just like all the other ice cream shops you've been to. They've got conesi bars, and frozen yogurt. Only two things are different about a Haagen-Dazs shop: it's cleaner and a lot better run. How come? Well, sitting on the counter is a stack of large business cards. The card lists the name and office phone number of the owner of the store. And then the card says, "If you have any comments at all about the store, please call me at home". And it lists the owner's home phone number. People who visit, notice. People who work there realize that the customers are noticing. It's all very remarkable. Stand in the store for twenty minutes, and you're sure to hear one customer mention the cars to another. If every store owner did this, it probably wouldn't work. But because it's so unusual, the customers take notice and the staff is on alert.
***
Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it .The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. How can a Purple Cow company not be run by a marketer?
***
kn: Purple cow, Seth Godin
***
Sergio Zyman, the marketing guru who was there for most of Coca-Cola's rebirth, points out that two of the most popular TV commercials of all time-"I'd like to teach the world to sing" and "Mean Joe Greene"- sold not one more bottle of Coke. They entertained and got attention, but they translated into no incremental revenue. He jokes that the commercial should have been, "I'd like to teach the world to drink"
***
Tide is arguably the best laundry detergent in history. Every year, P&G invests millions of dollars and pays a top-flight team of chemists to push the performance of Tide further and further. Is that the right thing to do? Tide succeeded early on because of a mixture of good TV ads, very good distribution, and a greaty product. As the TV-industrial complex crumbled, though, the ads mattered less and less. Now, with the ascensiaon of Wal-Mart, the distribution is more crucial than ever. One chain of stores accounts for a third of Tide's sales. Without Wal-Mart, Tide is dead. So what should P&G do? Are they likely to come up with a true innovation, a remarkable breakthrough that even casual detergent buyers notice? Or are the incremental improvements largely a carryover from a different time, a time when people actually cared about their laundry? Orthodox Purple Cow thinking would have P&G take the profits while they're still there. Cut research spending, raise the price as much as is practical, and put the incremental profits into the creation of ever more radical and interesting new products. If the current R&D isn't likely to generate a noteworthy payoff, what's the point?
***
My friend and colleague Chip Conley runs more than a dozen hotels in San Francisco. His first hotel, the Phoenix, is in the one of the worst neighborhoods downtown. Chip got the hotel (it's really a motel) for next to nothing. He knew that it wasn't a hotel for everybody. In fact, no matter what he did to the Phoenix, hardly anyone would choose to stay there. Which is fine. Because "hardly anyone" can be quite enough if you've got a hotel with just a few dozen rooms. Chip redesinged the place. He painted it funky colors. Put hip style magazines in all the rooms. Had a cutting-edge artist paint the inside of the pool, and invited up-abd-coming rock-and-roll motel in the center of San Francisco. People looking for it found it.
***
Cow is worth repeating: Safe is risky.
***
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.
*İnnovators & early adopters
***
Lionel Pilane's dad was a French baker, and he inherited the family bakery when he was a young man. Rather than sitting still and tending to the fires, though, Lionel became obsessed with remarkable.
He did extensive research, interviewing more than eight thousand French bakers about their techniques. He pioneered the use of organic flour in France. He refused to bake baguettes, pinting out that they were fairly tasteless and very un-French (they're a fairly recent import from Vienna.) He acquired the largest collection of bread cookbooks in the world- and studied them. His sourdough bread is made with just, flour, water, starter, and sea salt, and it's baked in a wood-fired oven. Poilane refused to hire bakers -he told me they had too many bad habits to unlearn- and instead hired young men who were willing to apprentice with him for years. At first, the French establishment rejected his products, considering them too daring and different. But the overwhelming quality of the loaves and Poilane'^s desire to do it right finally won them over.Virtually every fancy restaurant in Paris now serves Poilane bread. People come from all over the world to wait in line in fromt of his tiny shop on Rue de Cherche Midi to buy a huge loaf of sourdough bread- or more likely, several loaves. The company he founded now ships loaves all over the world, turning handmade bread into a global product, one worth talking about. Last year, Lionel sold more than $10m worth of bread.
***
There are literally thousands of butchers in Italy, but only one of them is famous (and only one of them is rich). Dario Cecchini has been profiled in magazine articles and guidebooks. His 250-year-old butcher shop in Panzano almost always has a crowd. PEople come from all over the world to visit his shop-to hear him quote Dante and rhapsodize about the Fiorentina beefsteak. When the European Economic Union banned the sale of steak with the bones left in (because of the fear of mad cow disease), Dario Cecchini held a mock funeral and buried a steak in front of his store- complete with casket. Is his meat that much better? Probably not. But by turning the process of buying meat into an intellctual and political exercise, Dario has figured out more than one way to make money from a cow- this time, a purple one.
***
How Dutch Boy stirred up the paint business?
It's so simple it's scary. They changed the can. Paint cans are heavy, hard to carry, hard to close, hard to open, hard to pour from and no fun. Yet they've been around for a long time, and most people assumed there had to be a reason. Dutch Boy realized that there was no reason. They also realized that the can was an intehral part of the product- people don't buy paint; they buy painted walls, and the can makes the painting process much easier. Dutch Boy used this insight and introduced an easier-to-carry, easier-to-pour-from, -easier-to-close paint jug. Sales went way up- no suprise when you think about it .Not only did the new packaging increase sales, but it also got Dutch Boy paint more distribution (a higher retail price) This is marketing done right. Marketing where the marketer changes the product, not the ads.
***
Haagen-Dazs in Bronxville is just like all the other ice cream shops you've been to. They've got conesi bars, and frozen yogurt. Only two things are different about a Haagen-Dazs shop: it's cleaner and a lot better run. How come? Well, sitting on the counter is a stack of large business cards. The card lists the name and office phone number of the owner of the store. And then the card says, "If you have any comments at all about the store, please call me at home". And it lists the owner's home phone number. People who visit, notice. People who work there realize that the customers are noticing. It's all very remarkable. Stand in the store for twenty minutes, and you're sure to hear one customer mention the cars to another. If every store owner did this, it probably wouldn't work. But because it's so unusual, the customers take notice and the staff is on alert.
***
Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it .The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. How can a Purple Cow company not be run by a marketer?
***
kn: Purple cow, Seth Godin
Yorumlar
Yorum Gönder