Read Purple Cow for Free Online

individual products, but also the status of entire markets. Consider classical music for a second.
    The classical music industry is now officially moribund. The big labels are hurting. Orchestras are seeing recording money dry up. There are virtually no commercially important new works being written or recorded.
    Why?
    Because no one is listening.
    The influential sneezers already have all the music they’re ever going to buy. Everything old that was worth recording has been recorded—and quite well, thank you. So the sneezers have stopped looking.
    Because the sneezers have stopped looking, all of those folks farther down the curve, who seek their advice or listen to the radio stations, are busy buying cut-rate $8 versions of the classics. There’s no money there for the record companies and the orchestras. Because listeners have stopped looking, composers are turning to film scores or lawn care as a way to make a living. There’s an attention blockade, and no player in the music business has enough money to change the dynamic. Music marketers can’t buy enough ads or reach enough sneezers to spread the word about interesting new music. So the entire market stops.
    The insight here is not that the music industry ought to figure out a better way to solve this problem. They don’t need a better form of advertising. The insight might be that there isn’t a better way. The Naxos music label (they’re the guys who sell the $8 CDs) is doing great. Why? Because they organized the product-marketing in all its forms—around the idea that sneezers wanted good, cheap versions of the music they already knew. Naxos was right. The market stopped listening. Naxos won.
    Sony’s classical label can’t compete because they’re not organized at the product level or the promotion level to win at that game. So they wither.
    When faced with a market in which no one is listening, the smartest plan is usually to leave. Plan B is to have the insight and guts to go after a series of Purple Cows, to launch a product/service/promotional offering that somehow gets (the right) people to listen.

Not All Customers Are the Same
     
    Michael Schrage writes about a large bank that discovered that 10 percent of their customers were using their online banking service every day, while the remainder were using it about once a month. At first glance, a consultant would argue that the bank should stop spending so much on the service, as it was appealing to only the innovators and some early adopters. Further digging, however, showed that this group also accounted for about 70 percent of the bank’s deposits.
    It’s easy to look at the idea diffusion curve and decide that the juicy, profitable, wonderful place to be is right in the center, where all the people are. However, that’s rarely true. Often, the valuable slices are located to one side or the other. What this bank might realize is that by focusing on these innovative customers, the bank may be able to bring in even more highly profitable risk-seeking customers, leaving the slow and declining sector to seek other (less profitable) banks.
    Differentiate your customers. Find the group that’s most profitable. Find the group that’s most likely to sneeze. Figure out how to develop /advertise/reward either group. Ignore the rest. Your ads (and your products!) shouldn’t cater to the masses. Your ads (and products) should cater to the customers you’d choose if you could choose your customers.
     

The Law of Large Numbers
     
    The magic of mass media and the Web is all tied up in the large numbers: 20 million people watching The Sopranos; 100 million watching the Super Bowl; a billion watching the Oscars; 3 million people using KaZaA at the same time, all the time; 120 million registered Yahoo! users. The numbers are compelling.
    What if just one out of a thousand Oscar viewers tried your product? What if one member of every family in China sent you a nickel?
    The problem with large numbers is