Too busy to read?

Slogans used to be important because you could put them in TV commercials and get your message across in just a few seconds. Today, that same conciseness is important but for a different reason. A slogan that accurately conveys the essence of your Purple Cow is a script. A script for the sneezer to use when she talks with her friends. The slogan reminds the user, "Here's why it's worth recommending us; here's why your friends and colleagues will be glad you told them about us." And best of all, the script guarantees that the word of mouth is passed on properly - that the prospect is coming to you for the right reason.

Don't try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.

No one is going to eagerly adapt to your product. The vast majority of consumers are happy. Stuck. Sold on what they've got. They're not looking for a replacement, and they don't like adapting to anything new. You don't have the power to force them to. The only chance you have is to sell to people who like change, who like new stuff, who are actively looking for what it is you sell. Then you hope that the idea spreads, moving from the early adopters to the rest of the curve. After the early adopters embrace what you're selling, they are the ones who will sell it to the early majority - not you. And they will sell it poorly.

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.

exceptional. Remarkable people with remarkable careers seem to switch jobs with far less effort. Remarkable people often don't even have a resume. Instead, they rely on sneezers who are quick to recommend them when openings come up. Remarkable people are often recruited from jobs they love to jobs they love even more. The secret doesn't lie in the job-seeking technique. It has to do with what these people do when they're not looking for a job. These Purple Cows do an outrageous job. They work on high-profile projects. These people take risks, often resulting in big failures. These failures rarely lead to a dead end, though. They're not really risks, after all. Instead, they just increase the chances that these people will get an even better project next time.

But it's the sneezers we care about, and we can leverage the fact that if we respect them, they'll listen. The four steps, then, are these: Get permission from people you impressed the first time. Not permission to spam them or sell them leftovers or squeeze extra margins from them. Permission to alert them the next time you might have another Cow. Work with the sneezers in that audience to make it easier for them to help your idea cross the chasm. Give them the tools (and the story) they'll need to sell your idea to a wider audience. Once you've crossed the line from remarkable to profitable business, let a different team milk it. Productize your services, servicize your products, let a thousand variations bloom. But don't believe your own press releases. This is the inevitable downward slide to commodity. Milk it for all it's worth, and fast. Reinvest. Do it again. With a vengeance. Launch another Purple Cow (to the same audience). Fail and fail and fail again. Assume that what was remarkable last time won't be remarkable this time.

Marketers for years have talked about the five Ps of marketing. (There are more than five of them, but everyone has their favorite five.) Some of them include: * Product * Pricing * Promotion * Positioning * Publicity * Packaging * Pass-along * Permission This is the marketing checklist: a quick way to make sure you've done your job, a way to describe how you're going to go about getting people to buy what the factory just made.

Marketing was really better called "advertising." Marketing was about communicating the values of a product after it had been developed and manufactured. That's clearly not a valid strategy in a world where the product attributes (everything from service to design) are now at the heart of what it means to be a marketer. Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. How can a Purple Cow company not be run by a marketer?

What could you measure? What would that cost? How fast could you get the results? If you can afford it, try it. "If you measure it, it will improve."