uiscZ

Purple Cow
The Big Misunderstanding
The problem with the books I mentioned earlier – Crossing
the Chasm and The Tipping Point and Unleashing the Ideavirus –is
that many marketers got exactly the wrong idea.
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 natural.
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.
At the same time, the poor schnooks at Procter &
Gamble and Nike and Colgate-Palmolive are spending $4
billion a year on advertising.
Guess what 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.
Marketing in a post-TV world is no longer about making
a product attractive or interesting or pretty or funny
after it’s designed and built – it’s about designing the thing
to be virus-worthy in the first place. 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 frequent
purchases of print and TV advertising now move to
repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If
anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive
than it used to be. You’re just spending the money
earlier in the process (and repeating the process more
33