The Power of Having a Platform
If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?
A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.
Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.
Having this kind of leverage gives you two advantages when you make the decision to create a remarkable product or service. First it gives you the initial push to get your message spread quickly. Without this initial push, I would argue that there is a chance that not enough people will hear about your offering to cause the “ideavirus” to take off.
The second advantage is that with such big initial marketing push, everyone will know that the idea was yours. If you are a very small online business and you figure out a way to be remarkable there is a decent chance that one of your larger competitors will see what you are doing and start doing it themselves.
In the world of business there seems to be large rewards for being the first to do something innovative. However if no one knows about you and your remarkable feature is cloned by one of your larger competitors, then the public perception may be that they were actually first to market.
For these reasons I would heavily suggest that you work on building leverage in your online business. Leverage will give you a platform and having a platform will diminish the chances that any remarkable product or service you create will go to waist.
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July 6th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Marketing Without Money by John Lyons and Edward de Bono has much the same idea as Seth Godin and has much more substance to it. (Be remarkable and other people will talk about you, and you won’t need to do the marketing.) Seth’s book is really just the one idea.
Remarkable means either huge cost reduction or something new. If it is really new it will likely be ignored (heard of the Sarich orbital engine lately?) If you put out the initial stuff that goes viral your name will probably stay attached. But this means that it needs to be market ready.