waste their marketing dollars. Exhibit A: The dozens of consumer-focused dot-com companies who wasted more than a billion (a billion!) dollars advertising watered-down products to the mass market. Your grocery store is also a very public graveyard for mediocre products designed for the masses.
As we’ve already seen, the only way an idea reaches the bulk of the market is to move from left to right. You can no longer reach everyone at once. And if you don’t grab the attention and enthusiasm of the sneezers, your product withers.
Part Two: Scary Budgets. In order to launch a product for the masses, you need to spend big. It’s not unusual to spend a million dollars to launch something local, and spend a hundred times that to do an effective national rollout. For most of the three hundred major movies launched by Hollywood every year, the studios spend more than $20 million on marketing for each movie.
The problem with a scary budget is that you have to make the ads work, and quickly. If you don’t break through the clutter, capture imagination and attention, get retailers excited and stocking your product, and get the factory unloading its inventory, well, it’s over. You’ve wasted your shot; you don’t get a second chance, and the product is considered dead.
The front-loading of the budget does two things to your product:
• It means you get very few chances to launch new products because each one is so expensive. Thus, you won’t make risky bets, and you’ll be even more likely to introduce boring, me-too products.
• It doesn’t give you a chance to ride through the idea diffusion curve. It takes a while to reach the sneezers, who take a while to reach the rest of the population. But your front-loaded budget means that by the time the bulk of the population hears about what you’ve done, you’ve burned out the retailers, destroyed your inventory, or, worst of all, driven your start-up company into bankruptcy.
Dozens of astonishingly great products were introduced during the dot-com boom. Alas, most of them never had a chance to diffuse. For example, a weatherproof package receptacle that only you and the UPS man knew the combination for. Or a tiny electronic gizmo that told you which bars, clubs, and restaurants in your town were hot and what was playing. Or a Web site where you could easily give feedback to big companies—and get your problems fixed.
In each case, a fledgling company spent most of its capital on mass marketing. Marketing that came too soon and disappeared before the idea could spread.
Compare this to the success of just about every movie that has surprised Hollywood over the past decade. When a Blair Witch or a Greek Wedding comes along, it doesn’t get launched with a huge marketing budget. The film-makers wisely focus on making a remarkable movie instead. So a few innovators (the folks who go to see every movie, just about) stumble onto the film, and the word starts to spread.
It seems obvious, yet just about every product aimed at a large audience (consumer and industrial) falls into this trap.
What would happen if you gave the marketing budget for your next three products to the designers? Could you afford a world-class architect/designer/sculptor/director/author?
Case Study: The Best Baker in the World
Lionel Poilane’s dad was a French baker, and he inherited the family bakery when he was a young man. Rather than sitting still and tending to the fires, though, Lionel became obsessed with remarkable.
He did extensive research, interviewing more than eight thousand French bakers about their techniques. He pioneered the use of organic flour in France. He refused to bake baguettes, pointing out that they were fairly tasteless and very un-French (they’re a fairly recent import from Vienna). He acquired the largest collection of bread cookbooks in the world—and studied them.
His sourdough bread is made with just flour, water, starter, and sea salt, and
As we’ve already seen, the only way an idea reaches the bulk of the market is to move from left to right. You can no longer reach everyone at once. And if you don’t grab the attention and enthusiasm of the sneezers, your product withers.
Part Two: Scary Budgets. In order to launch a product for the masses, you need to spend big. It’s not unusual to spend a million dollars to launch something local, and spend a hundred times that to do an effective national rollout. For most of the three hundred major movies launched by Hollywood every year, the studios spend more than $20 million on marketing for each movie.
The problem with a scary budget is that you have to make the ads work, and quickly. If you don’t break through the clutter, capture imagination and attention, get retailers excited and stocking your product, and get the factory unloading its inventory, well, it’s over. You’ve wasted your shot; you don’t get a second chance, and the product is considered dead.
The front-loading of the budget does two things to your product:
• It means you get very few chances to launch new products because each one is so expensive. Thus, you won’t make risky bets, and you’ll be even more likely to introduce boring, me-too products.
• It doesn’t give you a chance to ride through the idea diffusion curve. It takes a while to reach the sneezers, who take a while to reach the rest of the population. But your front-loaded budget means that by the time the bulk of the population hears about what you’ve done, you’ve burned out the retailers, destroyed your inventory, or, worst of all, driven your start-up company into bankruptcy.
Dozens of astonishingly great products were introduced during the dot-com boom. Alas, most of them never had a chance to diffuse. For example, a weatherproof package receptacle that only you and the UPS man knew the combination for. Or a tiny electronic gizmo that told you which bars, clubs, and restaurants in your town were hot and what was playing. Or a Web site where you could easily give feedback to big companies—and get your problems fixed.
In each case, a fledgling company spent most of its capital on mass marketing. Marketing that came too soon and disappeared before the idea could spread.
Compare this to the success of just about every movie that has surprised Hollywood over the past decade. When a Blair Witch or a Greek Wedding comes along, it doesn’t get launched with a huge marketing budget. The film-makers wisely focus on making a remarkable movie instead. So a few innovators (the folks who go to see every movie, just about) stumble onto the film, and the word starts to spread.
It seems obvious, yet just about every product aimed at a large audience (consumer and industrial) falls into this trap.
What would happen if you gave the marketing budget for your next three products to the designers? Could you afford a world-class architect/designer/sculptor/director/author?
Case Study: The Best Baker in the World
Lionel Poilane’s dad was a French baker, and he inherited the family bakery when he was a young man. Rather than sitting still and tending to the fires, though, Lionel became obsessed with remarkable.
He did extensive research, interviewing more than eight thousand French bakers about their techniques. He pioneered the use of organic flour in France. He refused to bake baguettes, pointing out that they were fairly tasteless and very un-French (they’re a fairly recent import from Vienna). He acquired the largest collection of bread cookbooks in the world—and studied them.
His sourdough bread is made with just flour, water, starter, and sea salt, and
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