Purple Cow

Purple Cow
Who Wins in the World of the Cow
It’s fairly obvious who the big losers are – giant brands with
big factories and quarterly targets, organizations with significant
corporate inertia and low thresholds for perceived
risks. Once addicted to the cycle of the TV-industrial
complex, these companies have built hierarchies and
systems that make it awfully difficult to be remarkable.
The obvious winners are the mid-sized and smaller companies
looking to increase market share. These are the companies
that have nothing to lose, but more important, they
realize that they have a lot to gain by changing the rules of
the game. Of course, there are big companies that get it and
have the guts to take the less risky path, just as there are small
companies that are stuck with their current products and
strategies.
As I write this, the number-one song in Germany,
France, Italy, Spain, and a dozen other countries in Europe
is about ketchup. The song is called “Ketchup,” and it is by
two sisters you never heard of. The number-two movie in
America is a low-budget animated movie in which talking
vegetables act out Bible stories. Neither thing is the sort of
product you’d expect from a lumbering media behemoth.
Sam Adams beer was remarkable, and it captured a huge
slice of business from Budweiser. Hard Manufacturing’s
$3,000 Doernbecher crib opened up an entire segment of
the hospital crib market. The electric piano let Yamaha steal
an increasingly larger share of the traditional-piano segment
away from the entrenched market leaders. Vanguard’s
remarkably low-cost mutual funds continue to whale away at
Fidelity’s market dominance. BIC lost tons of market share
to Japanese competitors when they developed pens that were
remarkably fun to write with, just as BIC stole the market
away from fountain pens a generation or two earlier.
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