uiscZ

In Search of Otaku
Purple Cow
The Japanese have invented some truly useful words. One
of them is otaku. Otaku describes something that’s more
than a hobby but a little less than an obsession. Otaku is the
overwhelming desire that gets someone to drive across
town to try a new ramen-noodle shop that got a great
review. Otaku is the desire to find out everything about
Lionel’s new digital locomotive – and to tell your fellow
hobbyists about it.
People read Fast Company because they have an otaku about
business. They visit trade shows to stay on the cutting edge
– not just to help their company survive, but because they
like that edge. Otaku, it turns out, is at the heart of the
Purple Cow phenomenon.
As we saw earlier, your company can’t thrive just by fulfilling
basic needs. You must somehow connect with passionate
early adopters and get those adopters to spread the
word through the curve. And that’s where otaku comes in.
Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They’re
the ones who will take the time to learn about your product,
take the risk to try your product, and take their
friends’ time to tell them about it. The flash of insight is
that some markets have more otaku-stricken consumers
than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to
identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion
of lesser markets – regardless of relative size.
There’s a healthy vein of hot-sauce otaku in the United
States, for example. Chili-heads in search of ever hotter
elixirs, the biggest possible burn, have made the production
of these insane sauces into a real business. Examples
Dave’s Insanity, Blair’s After Death Hot Sauce, Mad Dog 357,
Pain 100%, Mad Dog Inferno, Boar’s Breath, Sweet Mama
Jamma’s Mojo Juice, Melinda’s XXXX, Mad Cat, Lost in
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