ideen für blaues bad
i'm going to give youfour specific examples, i'm going to cover at the end about how a company called silktripled their sales; how an artist named jeff koonswent from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of moneyand having a lot of impact; to how frank gehry redefinedwhat it meant to be an architect. and one of my biggest failuresas a marketer in the last few years -- a record label i startedthat had a cd called "sauce." before i can do thati've got to tell you about sliced bread,
and a guy named otto rohwedder. now, before sliced breadwas invented in the 1910s i wonder what they said? like the greatest inventionsince the telegraph or something. but this guy named otto rohwedderinvented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did,on the patent part and the making part. and the thing about the inventionof sliced bread is this -- that for the first 15 yearsafter sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it;
it was a complete and total failure. and the reasonis that until wonder came along and figured out how to spreadthe idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. that the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everythingwe've talked about at this conference, is not always about what the patentis like, or what the factory is like -- it's about can you getyour idea to spread, or not. and i think that the wayyou're going to get what you want,
or cause the change that you wantto change, to happen, is to figure out a wayto get your ideas to spread. and it doesn't matter to mewhether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual,or you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. i think that all this stuff appliesto everybody regardless of what we do. that what we are living inis a century of idea diffusion. that people who can spread ideas,regardless of what those ideas are, win. when i talk about iti usually pick business,
because they make the best picturesthat you can put in your presentation, and because it's the easiestsort of way to keep score. but i want you to forgive mewhen i use these examples because i'm talking about anythingthat you decide to spend your time to do. at the heart of spreading ideasis tv and stuff like tv. tv and mass media made it really easyto spread ideas in a certain way. i call it the "tv-industrial complex." the way the tv-industrial complex works,is you buy some ads, interrupt some people,that gets you distribution.
you use the distribution you getto sell more products. you take the profitfrom that to buy more ads. and it goes around and around and around, the same way that the military-industrialcomplex worked a long time ago. that model of,and we heard it yesterday -- if we could only getonto the homepage of google, if we could only figure outhow to get promoted there, or grab that person by the throat, and tell them about what we want to do.
if we did that then everyone would payattention, and we would win. well, this tv-industrial complex informedmy entire childhood and probably yours. i mean, all of these products succeededbecause someone figured out how to touch people in a waythey weren't expecting, in a way they didn'tnecessarily want, with an ad, over and over again until they bought it. and the thing that's happened is,they canceled the tv-industrial complex. that just over the last few years, what anybody who marketsanything has discovered
is that it's not workingthe way that it used to. this picture is really fuzzy, i apologize;i had a bad cold when i took it. (laughter) but the product in the blue boxin the center is my poster child. i go to the deli; i'm sick;i need to buy some medicine. the brand manager for that blue productspent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting mewith tv commercials and magazine ads and spam
and coupons and shelvingallowances and spiff -- all so i could ignoreevery single message. and i ignored every message because i don't havea pain reliever problem. i buy the stuff in the yellow boxbecause i always have. and i'm not going to invest a minuteof my time to solve her problem, because i don't care. here's a magazine called "hydrate."it's 180 pages about water. articles about water, ads about water.
imagine what the worldwas like 40 years ago, with just the saturday evening postand time and newsweek. now there are magazines about water. new product from coke japan: water salad. coke japan comes outwith a new product every three weeks, because they have no ideawhat's going to work and what's not. i couldn't have writtenthis better myself. it came out four days ago -- i circled the important partsso you can see them here.
they've come out... arby's is going to spend85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of tom arnold, hoping that that will get people to goto arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich. now, i had tried to imagine what couldpossibly be in an animated tv commercial featuring tom arnold,that would get you to get in your car, drive across townand buy a roast beef sandwich. now, this is copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyonewho needs to hear your idea.
"the world revolves around me." me, me, me, me. my favorite person -- me. i don't want to get emailfrom anybody; i want to get "memail." so consumers, and i don't just meanpeople who buy stuff at the safeway; i mean people at the defense departmentwho might buy something, or people at, you know, the new yorkerwho might print your article. consumers don't care about youat all; they just don't care. part of the reason is -- they've gotway more choices than they used to, and way less time.
and in a world where we havetoo many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to dois just ignore stuff. and my parable hereis you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep drivingbecause you've seen cows before. cows are invisible. cows are boring. who's going to stop and pull overand say -- "oh, look, a cow." nobody. but if the cow was purple --isn't that a great special effect? i could do that again if you want.
if the cow was purple,you'd notice it for a while. i mean, if all cows were purpleyou'd get bored with those, too. the thing that's going to decidewhat gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: "is it remarkable?" and "remarkable" is a really cool word, because we think it just means "neat," but it also means"worth making a remark about."
and that is the essenceof where idea diffusion is going. that two of the hottest carsin the united states is a 55,000-dollar giant car, big enough to hold a mini in its trunk. people are paying full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't haveanything in common. every week, the number onebest-selling dvd in america changes. it's never "the godfather,"it's never "citizen kane,"
it's always some third-rate moviewith some second-rate star. but the reason it's number oneis because that's the week it came out. because it's new, because it's fresh. people saw it and said"i didn't know that was there" and they noticed it. two of the big success storiesof the last 20 years in retail -- one sells things that aresuper-expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that areas cheap as they can make them. the only thing they have in commonis that they're different.
we're now in the fashion business,no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion business. and people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashionbusiness -- they're used to it. the rest of us have to figure outhow to think that way. how to understand that it's not about interruptingpeople with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. but it's a totally differentsort of process
that determines which ideas spread,and which ones don't. they sold a billion dollars'worth of aeron chairs by reinventingwhat it meant to sell a chair. they turned a chair from somethingthe purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbolabout where you sat at work. this guy, lionel poilã¢ne,the most famous baker in the world -- he died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mineand a dear friend. he lived in paris.
last year, he sold 10 million dollars'worth of french bread. every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker at a time,in a wood-fired oven. and when lionel started his bakery,the french pooh-pooh-ed it. they didn't want to buy his bread. it didn't look like "french bread." it wasn't what they expected. it was neat; it was remarkable; and slowly, it spreadfrom one person to another person
until finally, it became the officialbread of three-star restaurants in paris. now he's in london, and he shipsby fedex all around the world. what marketers used to do is makeaverage products for average people. that's what mass marketing is. smooth out the edges; go for the center;that's the big market. they would ignore the geeks,and god forbid, the laggards. it was all about going for the center. but in a world wherethe tv-industrial complex is broken, i don't think that's a strategywe want to use any more.
i think the strategy we want to useis to not market to these people because they're really goodat ignoring you. but market to thesepeople because they care. these are the peoplewho are obsessed with something. and when you talk to them, they'll listen, because they like listening --it's about them. and if you're lucky, they'll telltheir friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. it'll spread to the entire curve.
they have something i call "otaku" --it's a great japanese word. it describes the desireof someone who's obsessed to say, drive across tokyo to trya new ramen noodle place, because that's what they do:they get obsessed with it. to make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problemyou want to solve that doesn't havea constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible. instead, you have to finda group that really, desperately cares
about what it is you have to say. talk to them and make it easyfor them to tell their friends. there's a hot sauce otaku,but there's no mustard otaku. that's why there's lots and lotsof kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. not because it's hardto make interesting mustard -- you could make interesting mustard -- but people don't,because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends.
krispy kreme has figuredthis whole thing out. it has a strategy, and what they do is, they enter a city, they talkto the people, with the otaku, and then they spread through the city to the people who've justcrossed the street. this yoyo right here cost 112 dollars,but it sleeps for 12 minutes. not everybody wants itbut they don't care. they want to talk to the peoplewho do, and maybe it'll spread. these guys make the loudestcar stereo in the world.
it's as loud as a 747 jet. you can't get in,the car's got bulletproof glass, because it'll blow outthe windshield otherwise. but the fact remains that when someone wants to puta couple of speakers in their car, if they've got the otakuor they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this. it's really simple -- you sellto the people who are listening, and just maybe,those people tell their friends.
so when steve jobs talksto 50,000 people at his keynote, who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial -- that's the only thing keepinghis company in business -- it's that those 50,000 peoplecare desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial,and then tell their friends. pearl jam, 96 albums releasedin the last two years. every one made a profit. how? they only sell them on their website.
those people who buy them have the otaku, and then they tell their friends,and it spreads and it spreads. this hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars,10 times the standard. but hospitals are buying itfaster than any other model. hard candy nail polish,doesn't appeal to everybody, but to the people who love it,they talk about it like crazy. this paint can right here savedthe dutch boy paint company, making them a fortune. it costs 35 percent morethan regular paint
because dutch boy made a can that peopletalk about, because it's remarkable. they didn't just slapa new ad on the product; they changed what it meantto build a paint product. amihotornot.com -- everyday250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and i cantell you they are hard graders -- they didn't get this wayby advertising a lot. they got this way by being remarkable, sometimes a little too remarkable. and this picture framehas a cord going out the back,
and you plug it into the wall. my father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildreneveryday, changing constantly. and every single personwho walks into his office hears the whole storyof how this thing ended up on his desk. and one person at a time,the idea spreads. these are not diamonds, not really. they're made from "cremains." after you're cremated you canhave yourself made into a gem.
oh, you like my ring? it's my grandmother. fastest-growing businessin the whole mortuary industry. but you don't have to be ozzie osborne -- you don't have to besuper-outrageous to do this. what you have to do is figure out what peoplereally want and give it to them. a couple of quick rules to wrap up. the first one is: designis free when you get to scale. the people who come upwith stuff that's remarkable
more often than not figure outhow to put design to work for them. number two: the riskiest thingyou can do now is be safe. proctor and gamble knows this, right? the whole model of beingproctor and gamble is always about average productsfor average people. that's risky. the safe thing to do nowis to be at the fringes, be remarkable. and being very good is oneof the worst things you can possibly do.
very good is boring. very good is average. it doesn't matter whetheryou're making a record album, or you're an architect,or you have a tract on sociology. if it's very good, it's not going to work,because no one's going to notice it. so my three stories. silk put a product that does not needto be in the refrigerated section next to the milkin the refrigerated section. sales tripled. why? milk, milk, milk, milk, milk -- not milk.
for the people who were thereand looking at that section, it was remarkable. they didn't triple their saleswith advertising; they tripled it by doingsomething remarkable. that is a remarkable piece of art. you don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushesin the middle of new york city is remarkable. frank gehry didn't just change a museum;
he changed an entire city's economy by designing one building that peoplefrom all over the world went to see. now, at countless meetings at, you know, the portland city council,or who knows where, they said, we need an architect --can we get frank gehry? because he did somethingthat was at the fringes. and my big failure?i came out with an entire -- (music) a record album and hopefullya whole bunch of record albums
in sacd, this remarkable new format -- and i marketed it straight to peoplewith 20,000-dollar stereos. people with 20,000-dollar stereosdon't like new music. so what you need to dois figure out who does care. who is going to raise their hand and say, "i want to hear what you're doing next," and sell something to them. the last example i want to give you. this is a map of soap lake, washington.
as you can see, if that's nowhere,it's in the middle of it. but they do have a lake. and people used to come from milesaround to swim in the lake. they don't anymore. so the founding fathers said,"we've got some money to spend. what can we build here?" and like most committees, they were going to buildsomething pretty safe. and then an artist came to them --this is a true artist's rendering --
he wants to build a 55-foot talllava lamp in the center of town. that's a purple cow;that's something worth noticing. i don't know about you, but if they build it,that's where i'm going to go. thank you very much for your attention.