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Purple Cow
Sit There, Don’t Just Do Something
Marketing departments often feel a need to justify their existence.
If last year’s slogan feels old, they’ll spend a million
dollars to invent and propagate a new one. If retail sales are
down, marketers will hire a consultant to freshen up their
store look.
All too often, these marketing efforts are the result of a
compromise. Either a budget compromise (“We don’t have
enough money to launch a new product; let’s launch a new
slogan”) or a product compromise (“That will offend our
existing customer base; let’s do something less radical”).
Almost without exception, these compromises are worse than
doing nothing.
If you do nothing, at least you’re not going to short-circuit
your existing consumer networks by loading them up with a
lot of indefensible junk. When you do nothing, your sneezers
can still trumpet the original cool stuff that made you
popular in the first place. The constant “refreshing” of your
line with ever more mediocre messaging and products just
makes it harder for your few remaining fans to spread the
word.
Ben & Jerry’s avoided temptation for years. If they didn’t
have a super-cool flavor or a great promotional idea, they did
nothing. Yes to free ice cream once a year at every scoop
shop, but no to 5 percent off any pint this week at your local
store. McIntosh, a leading manufacturer of high-end stereo
equipment, has done the same thing. Instead of launching a
few amplifiers a year, McIntosh launches a few a decade. This
tactic may not satisfy the junior people in the Engineering
department (fewer cool projects), but it helps build the legend
and work the products through the adoption curve.
Doing nothing is not as good as doing something (great).
But marketing just to keep busy is worse than nothing at all.
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