For the new bibliography the period was extended to , but for practical reasons the scope was limited to the geographical area south of the Limpopo, and certain material, for example books in African languages, sheet music, maps and periodicals, was excluded. Provides definitions of approximately , English words, arranged alphabetically in twenty volumes, with cross-references, etymologies, and pronunciation keys, and includes a bibliography.
Presents extended reviews of noteworthy books, short reviews, essays and articles on topics and trends in publishing, literature, culture and the arts. Includes lists of best sellers hardcover and paperback. A Book by British Museum. Department of Printed Books. Committee on Resources of American Libraries. It could be remarkable. It could help spread the word about a remark- able product. If the goal of the advertiser was to create a measura- ble impact — to create ads that actually got people to sit up, take notice, and tell their colleagues — the ads would be a lot better than they are today.
They entertained and got atten- tion, but they translated into no incremental revenue. So what? I think your business has plenty of great opportunities to do great things. Once you see that the old ways have nowhere to go but down, it becomes even more imperative to create things worth talking about.
What I can do, though, is highlight the takeaway ideas, the specific things you can do tomorrow to start on your way to the Purple Cow. How, then, does an elevator company compete? Until recently, selling involved a lot of golf, dinners, and long- term relationships with key purchasing agents at major real estate developers. No doubt this continues, but Otis Elevator Company has radically changed the game by developing a Purple Cow. The prob- lem? Every elevator ride is basically a local.
The elevator stops five, ten, fifteen times on the way to your floor. While your elevator is busy stopping at every floor, the folks in the lobby are getting more and more frustrated. When you approach the elevators, you key in your floor on a centralized control panel. In return, the panel tells you which elevator will take you to your floor. With this simple pre-sort, Otis has managed to turn every elevator into an express.
Your elevator takes you immediately to the twelfth floor and races back to the lobby. This means that buildings can be taller, they need fewer elevators for a given number of people, the wait is shorter, and the building can use precious space for peo- ple, not for elevators. A huge win, implemented at remarkably low cost. Not likely. Tide is arguably the best laundry detergent in history. Is that the right thing to do? Tide succeeded early on because of a mixture of good TV ads, very good distribution, and a great product.
As the TV-industrial complex crumbled, though, the ads mattered less and less. Now, with the ascension of Wal- Mart, the distribution is more crucial than ever. Without Wal-Mart, Tide is dead. 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?
Cut research spending, raise the price as much as is practical, and put the incre- mental profits into the creation of ever more radical and interesting new products. Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in building something new. If we look at the idea diffusion curve, we see that the bulk of product sales come after a product has been adopted by the consumers willing to take a chance on something new.
Those early adopters create an environment where the early and late majority feel safe buying the new item. The big insight here, though, is that the vast majority of the curve ignores you. Every time. People in the early and late majority listen to their experienced peers but are going to ignore you. It is so tempting to skip the left and go for the juicy center.
Regardless of industry, successful new products and services follow this familiar pattern after they are intro- duced. First they are purchased by the innovators. These are the people in a given market who like having some- thing first. They may not even need the product; they just want it.
Early adopters are the folks who can actually benefit from using a new product and who are eager to maintain their edge over the rest of the population by seeking out new products and services. It might be a new investment device zero-coupon bonds, say or even a new TV show, but in any meaningful mar- ket, this audience is both sizable and willing to spend money.
Trailing after the early adopters are the early and late majority. First, these people are really good at ignoring you. The early and late majority want protocols and systems and safety that new products rarely offer.
Countless products never manage to get far enough along the curve to reach these folks. Finally, the laggards complete the curve, getting around to buying a cassette deck when the rest of us have moved on to CDs.
If anything, these people are the adapters. The vast majority of consumers are happy. The only chance you have is to sell to peo- ple who like change, who like new stuff, who are actively looking for what it is you sell. Then you hope that the idea spreads, moving from the early adopters to the rest of the curve. And they will sell it poorly. Moore talks at length about moving through the rest of the curve.
I high- ly recommend his book. You must design a product that is remarkable enough to attract the early adopters — but is flexible enough and attractive enough that those adopters will have an easy time spreading the idea to the rest of the curve.
Digital cameras have been attractively priced for about five years. At the beginning, only gadget-heads and com- puter geeks bought them. Over time, the camera manufacturers obsessed about fixing both prob- lems and were rewarded with dramatically increased sales. Digital cameras are well on their way to replacing film cameras. This shift was not caused by great ad campaigns from the camera companies. Instead, it is the direct result of early adopters successfully selling the cameras to their friends.
Digital cameras spread because they offer convenience and price advantages over film cameras. Better still, these advantages are obvious, easy to talk about, easy to demon- strate, and just begging to be brought up every time an early adopter sees a laggard pull out a film camera.
Being remarkable in the right way helps you in two ways. And second, it makes it easier for these early adopters to per- suasively sell their peers on the rest of the curve. Ideas That Spread, Win A brand or a new product offering is nothing more than an idea.
I call ideas that spread, ideaviruses. Sneezers are the key spreading agents of an ideavirus. These are the experts who tell all their colleagues or friends or admirers about a new product or service on which they are a perceived authority.
Sneezers are the ones who launch and maintain ideaviruses. Every market has a few sneezers. Finding and seducing these sneezers is the essential step in creating an ideavirus. So how do you create an idea that spreads? The everybody products are all taken. The sneezers in these huge markets have too many choices and are too satisfied for it to be likely that you will capture their interest. The way you break through to the mainstream is to tar- get a niche instead of a huge market.
The early adopters in this market niche are more eager to hear what you have to say. The sneezers in this market niche are more likely to talk about your product. And best of all, the market is small enough that a few sneezers can get you to the critical mass you need to create an ideavirus.
After it dominates the original niche, it will migrate to the masses. How smooth and easy is it to spread your idea? How often will people sneeze it to their friends? Do they believe each other? How reputable are the people most likely to promote your idea? How persistent is it — is it a fad that has to spread fast before it dies, or will the idea have legs and thus you can invest in spreading it over time?
Those are the products and ideas worth launching. Marketers who read these books often conclude that these ideas are gimmicks that work every once in a while, or that the ideas sound organic and automatic and natu- ral. An idea becomes an ideavirus. It crosses the chasm. It tips. All these consumers seem to be busy doing your job, spreading your idea from one person to another, so you can sit back and wait for success to happen.
Both groups are wrong. While ideaviruses are occasionally the result of luck consider the Macarena, say, or the Pet Rock , the vast majority of product success stories are engineered from the first day to be successful. Products that are engineered to cross the chasm — with built-in safety nets for wary consumers — are way more likely to succeed than are products not engineered that way.
Services that are worth talking about get talked about. The hard work and big money you used to spend on fre- quent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expen- sive than it used to be.
This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best perhaps only strategy for growth. We need to understand that investing in the Cow is even smarter than buying a Super Bowl ad. Ads do work — not as well as they used to, and perhaps not cost-effectively, but they do attract attention and generate sales. Targeted ads are far more cost-effective, yet most advertising and marketing efforts are completely untargeted.
They are hurricanes, whipping through a marketplace horizontally, touching everyone in the same way, regardless of who they are and what they want. Yes, sometimes this hurricane allows you to skip the painstaking work of moving from the left to the right. Sometimes the entire market needs something, knows they need it, and are willing to listen. The key word here, though, is sometimes. But a very different kind of ad does work. What is it about some ads and some products that makes them suc- cessful, while others fail?
Why, for example, do the little text-only ads on Google perform so well while the flashy, full-page, annoying banners on Yahoo! We have to start with another look at the power in the marketing equation. In the old days, marketers targeted consumers. Implicit in the idea of targeting, though, is the conceit that it was up to the marketers to decide who would pay attention and when.
Today, of course, the opposite is true. They choose whether you are listened to or ignored. How do they decide? Are some consumers more likely than others to listen?
What separates the listeners from the others? Compare this to a loud, unwelcome interruption of a less-focused consumer, and the difference is clear. At any given moment, in any given market, some people are all ears. They want to hear from you. They look through the Yellow Pages, subscribe to trade magazines, and visit Web sites looking for more information. Some of these people will eventually buy; some are just looking.
So here comes the big idea: It is useless to advertise to anyone except interested sneezers with influence. The rest of the time, you need to be investing in the Purple Cow. Products, services and techniques so useful, interesting, outrageous, and note- worthy that the market will want to listen to what you have to say.
No, in fact, you must develop products, services, and techniques that the market will actually seek out. Their low-cost structure, underused airports, and young, non-union staff give them an unfair advantage. The coffee bar phenomenon was invented by them, and now whenever we think coffee, we think Starbucks.
Their low-cost index funds make it impossible for a full-service broker to compete. Their free shipping and huge selection give them an unfair advantage over the neighborhood store. Their flexibility allows them to intro- duce half a dozen salad-based entrees, capturing a big chunk of the adult market. Because they have to program original shows only one night a week, HBO can focus and invest and cream the networks. None of these companies are using the old-fashioned advertising-based techniques to win.
Consider classical music for a second. The classical music industry is now officially moribund. The big labels are hurting. Orchestras are seeing record- ing money dry up. There are virtually no commercially important new works being written or recorded. Because no one is listening. Everything old that was worth recording has been recorded — and quite well, thank you. So the sneezers have stopped looking.
Because listeners have stopped looking, composers are turning to film scores or lawn care as a way to make a living. So the entire market stops. The insight here is not that the music industry ought to figure out a better way to solve this problem. Because they organized the product-marketing in all its forms — around the idea that sneezers wanted good, cheap versions of the music they already knew.
Naxos was right. The market stopped listening. Naxos won. So they whither. When faced with a market in which no one is listening, the smartest plan is usually to leave. At first glance, a consultant would argue that the bank should stop spending so much on the service, as it was appealing to only the innovators and some early adopters.
Often, the valuable slices are located to one side or the other. What this bank might realize is that by focusing on these innovative customers, the bank may be able to bring in even more highly profitable risk-seeking cus- tomers, leaving the slow and declining sector to seek other less profitable banks. Ignore the rest. Your ads and your products! The numbers are compelling. What if just one out of a thousand Oscar viewers tried your product?
What if one member of every family in China sent you a nickel? If you reach million people, but only. Years ago, when I first predicted the demise of the ban- ner ad as we know it, people laughed at me. CPM is the cost per thousand ad impressions. What advertisers who measured the vast minority soon realized was that every time they bought a thousand ban- ners, they got exactly zero clicks. The banners had a hit rate of less than.
The law of large num- bers was at work. Today, you can buy banner ads for less than a dollar a thousand. A 99 percent drop. The funny thing is that I lost money on the deal. Sure, there are always gimmicks that work animated online pages or product tie- ins with reality TV shows come to mind , but the vast major- ity of ordinary advertising is victim to this unrepealable law. SoundScan is a neat company with a fascinating product. Working with retailers and record companies, SoundScan knows exactly how many copies of every released album are sold, every week, in the entire country.
In , the New York Times reported that of the more than 6, albums distributed by the major labels, only albums sold more than , copies last year. Often a lesser brand has no chance at all. His first hotel, the Phoenix, is in one of the worst neighborhoods downtown. In fact, no matter what he did to the Phoenix, hardly anyone would choose to stay there. Which is fine. Chip redesigned 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-and- coming rock-and-roll stars to stay at the place.
Within months, the plan worked. By intentionally ignoring the mass market, Chip created something remarkable: a rock-and-roll motel in the center of San Francisco.
People looking for it found it. Are they outperforming you? If you could pick one underserved niche to tar- get and to dominate , what would it be?
Why not launch a product to compete with your own — a prod- uct that does nothing but appeal to this market? Why is it so hard to be Purple? This, of course, is nonsense. The Cow is so rare because people are afraid. Nobody gets unanimous praise — ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed.
Criticism comes to those who stand out. Where did you learn how to fail? We run our schools like factories. We line kids up in straight rows, put them in batches called grades , and work very hard to make sure there are no defective parts.
Nobody standing out, falling behind, running ahead, making a ruckus. Playing it safe. Following the rules. Those seem like the best ways to avoid failure. And in school, they may very well be. Alas, these rules set a pattern for most people like your boss? These are the rules that ultimately lead to failure.
In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible. In good times, however, those same people will tell you to relax, take it easy; we can afford to be conservative, to play it safe. The good news is that the prevailing wisdom makes your job even easier.
Since just about everyone else is petrified of the Cow, you can be remarkable with even less effort. So it seems that we face two choices: to be invisible, anonymous, uncriticized, and safe, or to take a chance at greatness, uniqueness, and the Cow. Sure, they offer cuisine from twenty or thirty cultures, and the food is occasionally quite good, but there are precious few remarkable places here.
The restaurants are just plain dull compared to the few amazing restaurants in New York. After spending all that money and all that time opening a restaurant, the entrepreneur is in no mood to take yet another risk.
As a result, the owner makes a living, rarely having to worry about a bad review or offending anyone. Several decades ago, when Andrew Weil went to Harvard Medical School, the curriculum was much the same as it is today. The focus was on being the best doctor you could be, not on challenging the medical establishment. Weil took a different path than his peers did.
Today, his books have sold millions of copies. He gets the satisfaction of knowing that his writing, speaking, and clinics have helped hundreds of thousands of people. All because he did something that most of his classmates would view as reckless and risky.
The fascinat- ing thing is that while the vast majority of those doctors are overworked, tired, and frustrated at the system they helped create and work every day to maintain, Andrew Weil is having a blast. Being safe is risky. 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. Sure you will. Cadillac has been roundly criticized in car magazines, at dealerships, and on countless online bulletin boards.
These cars are selling. The people who are buying it love it. A cheap, feel-good date movie was just exceptional enough to stand out — and the market grabbed it. He was practically burned in effigy. He had abandoned the cause, they said, and they were angry. In , 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. Early co-ventures failed. They blew a trademark fight and lost their name to a Japanese pen company. But the founders persisted, continuing to make their device single-minded when conventional wisdom demanded multi-purpose devices and cheap when con- ventional wisdom demanded expensive high-tech introduc- tions.
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.
Few people aspire to own a Buick. 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. 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?
Hey, if it was easy to become a rock star, everyone would do it! Smart business- people realize this, and they work to minimize but not eliminate the risk from the process. Because the birds that fol- low 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, Canadian 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 fol- low 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. 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 crit- icism. If they make a mistake and choose the wrong bird to follow, they lose. They were doing what they were told, staying within the boundaries, and following instructions. Alas, they picked the wrong lead bird.
The ability to lead is thus even more important because when your flock fades away, there may be no other flock handy. Companies have the same trouble. They follow an indus- try leader that stumbles. Or they launch a thousand imi- tations of their first breakthrough product — never realiz- ing that the market is drying up. The labels have similar pricing, merchant policies, contracts, and packaging. Each label avoids crit- icism by sticking with the pack.
But when the market changes — when technology reshuf- fles the deck — the record labels are all in 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. The lesson of the Cow is worth repeating: Safe is risky.
What if you abandoned them and did something very different instead? 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. They launched a chair that looked different, worked different- ly, and cost a bunch. It was a Purple Cow. Everyone who saw it wanted to sit in it, and everyone who sat in it want- ed to talk about it. 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. Another way of saying that Herman Miller realized that making a safe chair was the single riskiest thing they could do. And mass prod- ucts beg for mass marketing. This equation leads to a dangerous catch, one with two parts. Part One: Boring Products. Companies that are built around mass marketing develop their products according- ly. These companies round the edges, smooth out the dif- ferentiating 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.
By following this misguided logic, marketers ensure that their products have the minimum possible chance of success. Exhibit A: The dozens of consumer-focused dot-com companies who wasted more than a billion a bil- lion!
Your grocery store is also a very public grave- yard for mediocre products designed for the masses. You can no longer reach everyone at once. Part Two: Scary Budgets. In order to launch a product for the masses, you need to spend big. The problem with a scary budget is that you have to make the ads work, and quickly.
It takes a while to reach the sneez- ers, who take a while to reach the rest of the popu- lation. Dozens of astonishingly great products were introduced during the dot-com boom.
Alas, most of them never had a chance to diffuse. For example, a weatherproof package receptacle that only you and the UPS man knew the com- bination for. Or a tiny electronic gizmo that told you which bars, clubs, and restaurants in your town were hot and what was playing. Or a Web site where you could easi- ly give feedback to big companies — and get your problems fixed. In each case, a fledgling company spent most of its cap- ital on mass marketing.
Marketing that came too soon and disappeared before the idea could spread. Compare this to the success of just about every movie that has surprised Hollywood over the past decade.
The filmmakers wisely focus on making a remarkable movie instead. So a few innovators the folks who go to see every movie, just about stumble onto the film, and the word starts to spread. It seems obvious, yet just about every product aimed at a large audience consumer and industrial falls into this trap. 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 pio- neered the use of organic flour in France. He acquired the largest collection of bread cook- books in the world —and studied them.
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. Virtually every fancy restaurant in Paris now serves Poilane bread. People come from all over the world to wait in line in front 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.
Figure out what works, and do it more! Mass marketers have always resisted this temptation. When my old company approached the head of one of the largest magazine publishers in the world and pitched a technology that would allow advertisers to track who saw their ads and responded to them, he was aghast.
He real- ized that this sort of data could kill his business. One reason the Internet ad boomlet faded so fast is that it forced advertisers to measure — and to admit what was going wrong.
Well, creators of the Purple Cow must measure as well. Every product, every interaction, every policy is either working persuading sneezers and spreading the word or not. Companies that measure will quickly optimize their offerings and make them more virus-worthy. Zara, a fast-growing retailer in Europe, changes its clothing line every three or four weeks. What would that cost? How fast could you get the results?
If you can afford it, try it. Their mouses mice? And the lack of cutting-edge technology is a key part of their success. That means no free milk shakes for Max. Presents an analysis of current marketing trends, maintaining that the marketing campaigns that succeed are those that cater to the inclination of consumers to believe the best story, irrespective of the facts. Lessons in applying passion and perseverance from prominententrepreneurs In the world of entrepreneurship, your vision solidifies yourresolve when things get tough, and it reminds you why you went intobusiness in the first place.
Authors, brothers, and serialentrepreneurs, Matthew and Adam Toren have compiled a wealth ofvaluable information on the passionate. Everything in our world, from marketing to technology to distribution to the capital markets, is moving at a faster pace than ever.
Yet most companies view change as a threat, and survival as the goal. This book transforms all that. It contains a simple yet revolutionary idea: we can evolve. Beliebers, Swifties, Directioners? Paleos, vegans, carb loaders, ovolactovegetarians?
Pretty weird. Mets fans, Yankees fans, Bears fans? Definitely weird. Face it. So why are companies still trying to build products for the masses? Why are we still acting. Do you want more free book summaries like this? Learn how to transform your business by daring to be different and becoming remarkable. Imagine being on a road. Home Purple Cow New Edition. Purple Cow.
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