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it—is it a fad that has to spread fast before it dies, or will the idea have legs (and thus you can invest in spreading it over time)?
    Put all of your new product developments through this analysis, and you’ll discover which ones are most likely to catch on. Those are the products and ideas worth launching.
     

The Big Misunderstanding
     
    The problem with the books I mentioned earlier— Crossing the Chasm and The Tipping Point and Unleashing the Ideavirus —is that many marketers got exactly the wrong idea.
    Marketers who read these books often conclude that these ideas are gimmicks that work every once in a while, or that the ideas sound organic and automatic and natural. An idea becomes an ideavirus. It crosses the chasm. It tips. All these consumers seem to be busy doing your job, spreading your idea from one person to another, so you can sit back and wait for success to happen.
    At the same time, the poor schnooks at Procter & Gamble and Nike and Colgate-Palmolive are spending $4 billion a year on advertising.
    Guess what? Both groups are wrong. While ideaviruses are occasionally the result of luck (consider the Macarena, say, or the Pet Rock), the vast majority of product success stories are engineered from the first day to be successful.
    Marketing in a post-TV world is no longer about making a product attractive or interesting or pretty or funny after it’s designed and built—it’s about designing the thing to be virus-worthy in the first place. Products that are engineered to cross the chasm—with built-in safety nets for wary consumers—are way more likely to succeed than are products not engineered that way. Services that are worth talking about get talked about.
    The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You’re just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often). This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best (perhaps only) strategy for growth.
    The Purple Cow isn’t cheap, but it works. We need to understand that investing in the Cow is even smarter than buying a Super Bowl ad.

Who’s Listening?
     
    I’m guilty of a little hyperbole. With all the hand wringing over the death of the TV-industrial complex and the predictions of the demise of all mass media, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that ads don’t work at all—that every consumer avoids and ignores all of them.
    Of course, this isn’t true. Ads do work—not as well as they used to, and perhaps not cost effectively, but they do attract attention and generate sales. Targeted ads are far more cost effective, yet most advertising and marketing efforts are completely untargeted. They are hurricanes, whipping through a marketplace horizontally, touching everyone in the same way, regardless of who they are and what they want. There’s a huge amount of waste here, so much that it’s easy to assert that advertising isn’t working. Yes, sometimes this hurricane allows you to skip the painstaking work of moving from the left to the right. Sometimes the entire market needs something, knows they need it, and are willing to listen. The key word here, though, is sometimes.
    Sometimes is pretty rare—so rare that it’s wasteful. It’s wasteful because the vast majority of ads reach people who are not in the market for what’s being sold, or who aren’t likely to tell their friends and peers about what they’ve learned.
    But a very different kind of ad does work. Why? What is it about some ads and some products that makes them successful, while others fail? Why, for example, do the little text-only ads on Google perform so well while the flashy, full-page, annoying banners on Yahoo! do so poorly?
    We have to start with another look at the power in the marketing