Purple Cow

Is your product more boring than salt? Unlikely. So come up with a list of ten ways to change the product (not the hype) to make it appeal to a sliver of your audience.

My son has already told twenty other friends about these guys, and the little booklet of frog lore they include makes it even easier to share. (Did you know that some of the frogs they sell live to be seventeen years old?) This company’s obsessive focus on this niche made them the obvious choice.

Just like the two stores in New York: one is called Just Bulbs; the other is called Just Shades.

The act of making something very expensive and very custom is in itself remarkable.

Targeting this niche seems obvious, but the ability to be radically different has also made them profitable and fast-growing. Safe, it seems, is risky.

While we can’t predict what’s going to be remarkable next time, we can realize that there aren’t too many unexplored areas of innovation—just unexplored combinations.

When Comedy Central focus-group-tested South Park, it set a record, scoring just 1.5 out of 10 points with women. Three of the women in the group cried, they hated it so much. Scary? Sure. Weird? To some. But the group that mattered—adolescent boys and those who act like them—spread the word, and the show was a monster hit.

Remember, it’s not about being weird. It’s about being irresistible to a tiny group of easily reached sneezers with otaku. Irresistible isn’t the same as ridiculous. Irresistible (for the right niche) is just remarkable.

You don’t need a book about creativity or brainstorming or team building. You’ve already got a hundred (or a thousand) ideas your group doesn’t have the guts to launch. You don’t need more time or even more money. You just need the realization that a brand new business paradigm is now in charge, and once you accept the reality of the Cow, finding one suddenly gets much easier.

If your company wants you to pick one and only one product to feature this Christmas, start working on your resume. You’re not going to invent a Purple Cow with those sorts of odds and that kind of pressure.

If your boss wants focus groups to prove that a new productis guaranteed to be a success, don’t bother. If the focus group likes it, they’re probably wrong.

What you need is the insight to realize that you have no other choice but to grow your business or launch your product with Purple Cow thinking. Nothing else is going to work.

That means that launching ten products for $10 million each is a lot smarter than investing $100 million in TV to launch just one product. It means that if all ten products fail, you’ve just learned ten ways that aren’t going to work. You’re still ahead of where you’d be if the one TV launch had failed (which is far more likely than not.)