From the Fast Company article, “In Praise of the Purple Cow,” by Seth Godin.
For years, marketers have
talked about the “five Ps” (actually, there are more than five, but everyone
picks their favorite handful): product, pricing, promotion, positioning,
publicity, packaging, pass along, permission ... No longer. It's time to add an
exceptionally important new P to the list: Purple Cow.
Weird? Let me explain.
Making and marketing
something remarkable means asking new questions -- and trying new practices.
Here are 10 suggestions.
1. Differentiate
your customers. Find the group that's
most profitable. Find the group that's most likely to influence other
customers. Figure out how to develop for, advertise to, or reward either group.
Ignore the rest. Cater to the customers you would choose if you could choose
your customers.
2. If
you could pick one underserved niche to target (and to dominate), what would it
be? Why not launch a product to
compete with your own that does nothing but appeal to that market?
3. Create
two teams: the inventors and the milkers. Put them in separate buildings. Hold a formal ceremony when you move a
product from one group to the other. Celebrate them both, and rotate people
around.
4. Do you have the email addresses of the 20% of your
customer base that loves what you do? If not, start getting them. If
you do, what could you make for them that would be superspecial?
5. 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 see
what's working and what's not.
6. Explore
the limits. What if you're the
cheapest, the fastest, the slowest, the hottest, the coldest, the easiest, the
most efficient, the loudest, the most hated, the copycat, the outsider, the
hardest, the oldest, the newest, or just the most! If there's a limit, you
should (must) test it.
7. Think
small. One vestige of the TV-industrial
complex is a need to think mass. If it doesn't appeal to everyone, the thinking
goes, it's not worth it. No longer. Think of the smallest conceivable market
and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from
there.
8. Find
things that are “just not done” in your industry, and then go ahead and do
them. For example, JetBlue Airways
almost instituted a dress code -- for its passengers! The company is still
playing with the idea of giving a free airline ticket to the best-dressed
person on the plane. A plastic surgeon could offer gift certificates. A book
publisher could put a book on sale for a certain period of time. Stew Leonard's
took the strawberries out of the little green plastic cages and let the
customers pick their own. Sales doubled.
9. Ask,
“Why not?” Almost everything you
don't do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don't do is the
result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, “Why not?”
10. What
would happen if you simply told the truth inside your company and to your
customers?
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