Marketing guru Seth Godin has been kind enough to write a little book about sellable products. Again his reasoning is very sound:
- People are well immunized to paid TV advertizements.
- What really matters is the word of mouth- marketing, finding early adopters and people who will sneeze the idea virus around.
- But people will only talk about remarkable products – for example they would certainly talk about a Purple Cow if they saw one, because Purple Cow is “different”.
If your product is to have a chance at the market, it must be remarkable. If your product is remarkable, people will talk about it and even recommend it to each others. When was the last time you recommended something to someone. I’m right now recommending Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow.
The key discovery in Purple Cow is that shops are filled with “good” average stuff and if your product is like the ten other products on the same shelf, your product will be just “average”. If you, for example, start to sell soap and your marketing message is “My soap is so good, …it’s great, …high quality, …superb, …wonderful .. well guess what that’s the same marketing message most of your well established competitors are using and that message will get you nowhere.
Therefore think how can you make your “soap” remarkable allowing early adopters to find and test your product. Then hopefully among the early adopters are some super-sneezers who will start to sneeze the idea virus to the population at large. Ok, lets practice making a soap worth talking. I’m pretty certain people would talk about soaps that contain …moisturizing lotion (oops Dove already did that)… olive oil…(oops somebody already did that)…beer (oops somebody already did that)…
Ok, obviously we need to be more creative..how about…
- Nicotine… for treating tobacco abstinence and besides that nicotine is a 100% natural pesticide (“it kills bugs”)… heureka it’s almost an anti-malaria bug. “Anti-bug soap” might also be valued by programmmers.
- Garlic – vampire repellant #1
- Viagra…does you skin feel “too” soft… not much longer
- Guarana & coffee… the most refeshing soap prevents your skin from falling into sleep
- Aphrodisiac things…you’re feeling unlucky , it’s because you didn’t use this product
- Holy water… you can never have enough extra plessings – right?
- Surgically removed human fat… “Human Recycling reaching new heights “
- Celebrity bathwater soap series… you’ve never been so intimate with Britney Spears… or Tom Jones
- Armpits & Toes… a soap with anti-fungal medicin (ok there’s a tiny risk that Head & Shoulders will sue you)
- Skunk extract… for intimacy challenged individuals; a human repellant #1
…making a product worth talking…easy… And if you can combine that with a property that makes it worth buying, you’ve got a really remarkable product