Free Purple Cow by Seth Godin

a name so well known it was practically generic. And the product was terrific. What could Curad hope to accomplish?
    Curad developed a Purple Cow—bandages with characters printed on them.
    Kids, the prime consumers of small bandages, loved them. So did parents who wanted to make the boo-boos get better even faster! And of course, when the first kid with Curads wore them to school, every other kid wanted them, too.
    It didn’t take very long at all for Curad to grab a chunk of market share away from the market leader.
    Could you make a collectible version of your product?
     

Sit There, Don’t Just Do Something
     
    Marketing departments often feel a need to justify their existence. If last year’s slogan feels old, they’ll spend a million dollars to invent and propagate a new one. If retail sales are down, marketers will hire a consultant to freshen up their store look.
    All too often, these marketing efforts are the result of a compromise. Either a budget compromise (“We don’t have enough money to launch a new product; let’s launch a new slogan”) or a product compromise (“That will offend our existing customer base; let’s do something less radical”). Almost without exception, these compromises are worse than doing nothing.
    If you do nothing, at least you’re not going to short-circuit your existing consumer networks by loading them up with a lot of indefensible junk. When you do nothing, your sneezers can still trumpet the original cool stuff that made you popular in the first place. The constant “refreshing” of your line with ever more mediocre messaging and products just makes it harder for your few remaining fans to spread the word.
    Ben & Jerry’s avoided temptation for years. If they didn’t have a super-cool flavor or a great promotional idea, they did nothing. Yes to free ice cream once a year at every scoop shop, but no to 5 percent off any pint this week at your local store. McIntosh, a leading manufacturer of high-end stereo equipment, has done the same thing. Instead of launching a few amplifiers a year, McIntosh launches a few a decade. This tactic may not satisfy the junior people in the Engineering department (fewer cool projects), but it helps build the legend and work the products through the adoption curve.
    Doing nothing is not as good as doing something (great). But marketing just to keep busy is worse than nothing at all.
    What would happen if you took one or two seasons off from the new-product grind and reintroduced wonderful classics instead? What sort of amazing thing could you offer in the first season you came back (with rested designers)?
     

Case Study: United States Postal Service
     
    Very few organizations have as timid an audience as the United States Postal Service. Dominated by conservative big customers, the Postal Service has a very hard time innovating. The big direct marketers are successful because they’ve figured out how to thrive under the current system, and they’re in no mood to see that system change. Most individuals are in no hurry to change their mailing habits, either.
    The majority of new policy initiatives at the Postal Service are either ignored or met with nothing but disdain. But ZIP+4 was a huge success. Within a few years, the Postal Service diffused a new idea, causing a change in billions of address records in thousands of databases. How?
    First, it was a game-changing innovation. ZIP+4 makes it far easier for marketers to target neighborhoods, and much faster and easier to deliver the mail. The product was a Purple Cow, completely changing the way customers and the Postal Service deal with bulk mail. ZIP+4 offered both dramatically increased speed in delivery and a significantly lower cost for bulk mailers. These benefits made it worth the time it took mailers to pay attention. The cost of ignoring the innovation would be felt immediately on the bottom line.
    Second, the Postal Service wisely singled out a few early adopters. These