I’m a little obsessed with the Tabasco story.
First thing: people have a bottle of Tabasco in their house and in their restaurant. It solves their "hot sauce problem". If someone asks for it, you’ve got some. This is a very good thing for the Tabasco people.
Second thing: people only buy more Tabasco when they run out of it. Which doesn’t happen so often, at least in most blue states. Replenishment only is not as good as people buying something because they like buying it.
And the third thing, the biggest change, is that there are now thousands of brands of hot sauce, many of which are far better than Tabasco, and millions of people are buying not one flavor, but several. And they buy more varieties because they want to, not because they have to.
June 2, 2006
Mark Ramsey is usually right. This time he’s wrong, twice. "Podcasting" has a bad name.
Mark says "podcasting" is a bad name, and that something understandable, like "audiomag" would be better, because more people would know what it is.
I guess TV should have been called "pictureradio".
Not only is podcasting one of the great names of our generation, but it could have been even braver, not less brave. If you’ve going to invent a new product that is more than just an incremental improvement, then that new product requires a new slot in the mind, a new way of thinking. Giving it a name that permanently links it to old thinking doesn’t help. "Sneakers" is better than "athletic shoe".
Sometimes, you’re able to come up with a name that manages to be incremental to a tiny, very influential portion of the population and just strange to the rest of us. So, in this case, "pod" referred to iPod–but just to the 5% of online techies that were instrumental in spreading the word in 2004 (two very long years ago). In other words, the architecture of the name perfectly matched the vector the word needed to travel to make it. Compare that to the brave but foolish "RSS." (Really Stupid Slogan).
Sure, "email" couldn’t be anything but email, and that was a pretty chicken name. But in general, if you need people to think differently, it helps to be brave when you name something new.
June 1, 2006
