Remarkable t-shirts?
It’s just ink and cotton…
But these (some of them) are pretty clever. Who said all that’s left is commodity products?
Marketing plan for a marketing book
Loyal readers will remember that I used permission marketing techniques to market my book Permission Marketing. If you wrote to (it still works): free@permission.com, you get the first four chapters of the book for free. I ended up with an astonishing 150,000 plus requests, and it made the book successful.
With Unleashing the Ideavirus, I decided to follow the advice in the book and give the book away for free. (it’s still free at www.ideavirus.com). We ended up, by my estimate, spreading 2 million copies around the world that way. As that happened, the hardcover edition went to #5 on Amazon US, reaching #4 in Japan.
So, with My new book, Purple Cow the challenge was to create a plan that represented the ideas in the book itself. In a nutshell:
Sell what people are buying
Focus on the early adopters and sneezers
Make it remarkable enough for them to pay attention
Make it easy for them to spread
Let it work its own way to the mass market.
So, I started with a topic I knew a population was interested in–new marketing ideas. Books about change are important, but nobody gets excited about change they way they get excited about Jet Blue.
Working with my colleagues at Fast Company, we put an excerpt from the book on the cover of the February issue (In Praise of the Purple Cow). In that article, we mentioned that subscribers and readers could get a free copy of the book if they paid $5 for postage and handling (while supplies last, only in the USA, close cover before striking): Get a Free Copy of Purple Cow….
So far so good. More than 650 people signed up in the first 24 hours, and ALL the free books we allocated (about 5,000) will be gone soon after I write this.
The next step was to do something else remarkable and make it easy to spread the idea. So here goes: The book is NOT available on Amazon and NOT available for sale one at a time. The only way to buy one is to buy TWELVE! Visit the Purple Cow web page and you can see how you can buy a set. Obviously, the goal is to get you to share 11 with your colleagues, further spreading the word.
Did I mention that we ship the book in a real honest-to-goodness milk carton? We do.
So, pretty soon the 4,000 copies we allocated for this bulk offer will be gone.* Then what happens?
Well, my hope is that after seeding the sneezers, the book itself is remarkable enough and Purple enough that other people will want a copy. By then, my big-time New York publisher (who shall be revealed soon) will have books ready for every bookstore in the land.
This plan, which seems risky and chaotic, is exactly the sort of thing I’m recommending for most new products. Small risks, focused audiences, limited mass marketing. Not that risky. But if you’re used to the other way, yes, chaotic.
*if you do the math, you can see it was hardly risky at all. With 10,000 copies printed, the first print run is extremely unlikely to lose money, even at the extremely low retail pricing we’re using to get it started. You know what’s risky? What’s risky is telling you my plans in advance, because when they fail (and they do! often!) I look pretty dumb. But here I am, as a public service, marketing out loud.
A Purple Cow I just stumbled upon
I finally had four Jet Blue flights in a row, enough time to watch my copy of Memento. This movie cost about $5 million to make and was one of the most profitable movies of the year (last year… the year before?).
It succeeded because it was remarkable. The movie runs backward. There are websites around the world devoted to decoding it. And the official site (which couldn’t have cost $10,000 to make) is brilliant and only reinforces the puzzle.
Just as I sought out the movie (“people who bought Pi also bought Memento…”) and told you about it, thousands of others did the same–
That’s the point of the Purple Cow. Spend your money on reaching people who care, and who sneeze.
Start with the site and then see the film
My new book!
I promise this isn’t the last time you’ll be hearing about Purple Cow from me, and I promise not to hype it or bore you… BUT… it’s a marketing book, it’s self-published, it’s a limited edition and you can’t buy just one copy at a time. I’m selling twelve-packs at the apurplecow site. (my goal is for people to buy a bunch and share them–which is part of the point of the book.)
It’s at the printer now and we’re shipping in four weeks. You can find an excerpt in this month’s Fast Company magazine. And we’re about half sold out of the entire print run in two days. I hope you enjoy it.
Gloo in Business Week
This company has launched a protocol, not a product, and it’s amazing to see how quickly a few motivated/crazy people can turn a mere idea into a hot product. The guys at gloo labs may be onto something.
How cool is this?
Check out glooLabs. This is a new invention/operating system/protocol/device inspired by something I invented one day in the shower.
In a nutshell, devices using the gloo technology are able to use a wifi wireless network to grab music (or other content) from your computer and play it through your stereo (or whatever).
So… in the short term, if you’ve got a bunch of music on your Mac, you can use a powerful remote control (just jazz? just Coltrane? just songs from last week?) and play it on your stereo. In the long run, because the protocol is open, developers will come up with ways to synch or program or who knows what.
I’m pretty excited that something I helped dream up is now a real live product, and I also believe that this is a major step forward for anybody who’s interested in how the digital home shapes up–smart devices using dumb networks and open systems.
Someone way smarter than me…
…will actually understand the articles at knovel.com. All I know is that there is some very serious knowledge exchange going on at this site. (They specialize in helping scientists and engineers communicate technical ideas and access texts and databases.)
It’s stuff like this that’s really allowing the web to change more of the world than we ever thought it would.
Now that copyright is broken…
…can a web organization fix it?
I’m not sure, but this presentation (narrated by the amazing Christopher Lydon) is certainly worth thinking about. “Creative Commons.”.
I happen to think the idea is extremely well presented (when was the last time you saw multimedia done this well? Probably the Kikkoman thing below…) and an interesting thought. What happens when we give authors the ability to grant certain permissions automatically? What happens when we make it easy to unleash the ideavirus without giving away all rights?
Let’s see what happens…
…And then it happens!
One of the coolest things about the fast-moving world of the Net is that you can write about a new idea and then, a few months later, it’s a real thing.
Of course, they didn’t get the idea from me, but it’s nice to see it becoming real.
Today’s New York Times features profiles of two companies A New Tack in Fighting Spam that are fighting spam with a tactic I wrote about on June 19th: Stopping Spam
Now, if I could just figure out how to pick stocks.
When people become cogs
The cornerstone of the industrial revolution was the simple idea that management could dramatically increase productivity by buying machines that did what they were told, were cheap and could scale.
As we’ve moved to a service economy, though, machines can’t handle much of the work. People do.
I thought of this the other day as I got yet another outbound telemarketing call, this one from the local Yellow Pages. The caller, when pressed, admitted he was calling me from India.
I spoke to him for a while and then his supervisor. They were both risking their jobs, though, because everything they did was ruled by the script. Follow the script or lose your job. Follow the script or see your pay docked. Follow the script or you don’t get a good commission.
What so many people in the USA and Europe don’t realize is that their jobs are being scripted. Relentlessly. And once they’re scripted, why exactly should the boss keep paying you? There’s someone cheaper– in another state, in a prison, in a beautiful country with a low cost of living–who can follow your script instead of you.
This is the giant unwritten headline of our post-industrial economy. If your job isn’t creative/interactive or local, it’s probably going to go away. Offshore software programmers charge by the line, and the boss doesn’t have to meet them or give them benefits. Just because you can code/call/file/process or type doesn’t mean you’re secure. The winners are going to be the bosses (quick, become a boss!) and the fast-changing creative types. That and the folks with a jackhammer on your local street corner.
This is great news for people willing to work cheap, especially those with talent and a local economy with a low cost of living. Of course, they’re not safe either, because there’s always someone willing to take their place once they become too expensive.
I think our export of “good” jobs is a fine thing. It makes the world a smaller, better and more prosperous place. When you woke up this morning, though, that probably wasn’t the first thing on your mind. You were worried about your favorite person–you.
So, what should you do? Now, before it’s too late, realize one basic truth: Safe is Risky.
Cogs don’t take risks. But cogs are the ones that are next to go.