Free Purple Cow by Seth Godin Page A

were individuals in organizations that were technically savvy and were extremely sensitive to both pricing and speed issues. These early adopters were also in a position to sneeze the benefits to other, less astute, mailers.
    The lesson here is simple: The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need the Purple Cow. Half-measures will fail. Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things the right customers care about, on the other hand, can have a huge payoff.

In Search of Otaku
     
    The Japanese have invented some truly useful words. One of them is otaku. Otaku describes something that’s more than a hobby but a little less than an obsession. Otaku is the overwhelming desire that gets someone to drive across town to try a new ramen-noodle shop that got a great review. Otaku is the desire to find out everything about Lionel’s new digital locomotive—and to tell your fellow hobbyists about it.
    People read Fast Company because they have an otaku about business. They visit trade shows to stay on the cutting edge—not just to help their company survive, but because they like that edge. Otaku, it turns out, is at the heart of the Purple Cow phenomenon.
    As we saw earlier, your company can’t thrive just by fulfilling basic needs. You must somehow connect with passionate early adopters and get those adopters to spread the word through the curve. And that’s where otaku comes in.
    Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They’re the ones who will take the time to learn about your product, take the risk to try your product, and take their friends’ time to tell them about it. The flash of insight is that some markets have more otaku -stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets—regardless of relative size.
    There’s a healthy vein of hot-sauce otaku in the United States, for example. Chili-heads in search of ever hotter elixirs, the biggest possible burn, have made the production of these insane sauces into a real business. Examples? Dave’s Insanity, Blair’s After Death Hot Sauce, Mad Dog 357, Pain 100%, Mad Dog Inferno, Boar’s Breath, Sweet Mama Jamma’s Mojo Juice, Melinda’s XXXX, Mad Cat, Lostin Boiling Lake, Satan’s Revenge, and the always popular Trailer Trash. At the same time that dozens of entrepreneurs have created successful hot-sauce businesses with no advertising, no one has made any impact selling mustard.
    Arguably, there are more people who enjoy mustard than people who enjoy brain-scorching 25,000-Scoville-unit hot sauce. Yet hot sauce is a business and mustard isn’t. Why? Because very few people will order mustard by mail or request a different brand at a restaurant. They don’t have the otaku.
    Smart businesses target markets where there’s already otaku.
    Go to a science fiction convention. These are pretty odd folks. Do you appeal to an audience as wacky and wonderful as this one? How could you create one? (Jeep did. So did Fast Company and the Longaberger basket company. There are similar groups in the investing community, the market for operating systems, and the market for million-dollar stereo systems. Products differ, but sneezers and early adopters stay the same.)
     

Case Study: How Dutch Boy Stirred Up the Paint Business
     
    It’s so simple it’s scary. They changed the can.
    Paint cans are heavy, hard to carry, hard to close, hard to open, hard to pour from, and no fun. Yet they’ve been around for a long time, and most people assumed there had to be a reason.
    Dutch Boy realized that there was no reason. They also realized that the can was an integral part of the product—people don’t buy paint; they buy painted walls, and the can makes the painting process much easier.
    Dutch Boy used this insight and introduced an easier-to-carry, easier-to-pour-from, easier-to-close paint jug.