I wanted to give you four specific examples that I'm gonna cover at the end  about how a product called Silk tripled their sales by doing one thing, how an  artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of  money and having a lot of impact, to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant  to be an architect and one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few  years, a record label I started that had a CD called sauce. Before I can do that, I got to tell you about sliced bread and a guy named Otto Rohweder. Now, before  sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said, like the  greatest invention since the telegraph or something, but this guy named Otto  Rohwedder invented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on  the patent part and the making part. And the thing about the invention of sliced  bread is this that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available, no one  bought it. No one knew about it. It was a complete and total failure. And the  reason is that until wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it that the success of sliced bread, like the success  of almost everything we've been talking about at this conference, is not always  about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like, it's about, can you get  your idea to spread or not? And I think that the way you're going to get what you  want, or cause the change that you want to change to happen, is you're going to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread. And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop, or you're an intellectual, or you're in business or  flying hot air balloons, I think that all this stuff applies to everybody, regardless of what we do, that what we are living in is a century of IDEA diffusion, that people  who can spread ideas, regardless of what Those ideas are win. And when I talk  about I usually pick business because they make the best pictures that you can  put in your presentation, and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score.  But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples, because I'm talking  about anything that you decide to spend your time to do. At the heart of  spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV, TV and mass media made it really easy  to 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. Use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads, and it goes around and around and around  the same way the military industrial complex worked a long time ago. That that  model of and we heard it yesterday. If we could only get on the home page of  Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, if we could only  figure out how to grab that person by the throat and tell them about what we  want to do. We'd do that. Then everyone would pay attention. We would win.  Well, this TV industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably  yours, and all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how  to touch people in a way that they weren't expecting, in a way they didn't  necessarily want, with an ad over and 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 markets anything has  discovered is it's not working the way that it used to. This picture is really fuzzy. I apologize I had a bad cold when I took it, but the product in the blue box in the  center is my poster child, right? I go to the deli. I'm sick. I need to buy some  medicine. The Brand Manager for that blue product spent $100 million trying to  interrupt me in one year, $100 million interrupting me with TV commercials and  magazine ads and spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiffs. Also I could ignore every single message, and I ignored every message because I  don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff in the yellow box I always  have, and I'm not going to invest a minute of 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 world was like 40  years ago, when it was a Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water, new products from coke Japan, water salad.  Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks because they  have no idea what's going to work and what's not this. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days ago. I circled the important parts so you can  see them here. They've come out. Arby's going to spend $85 million promoting  an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get people to go  to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich. Now I want you to try to imagine what  could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold that  would get you to get in your car drive across town and buy a roast beef  sandwich. This is Copernicus, and he was right when he's talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea. The world revolves around me, me, me, me, me, me,  my favorite person, me. I don't want to get email from anybody. I want to get me  mail so consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway. I  mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something, or people at the New Yorker who might print your article. Consumers don't care about you at  all. They just don't care. Part of the reason is they got way more choices than  they used to and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable  here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving  because you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's  going to stop and pull over 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 wanted, if the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows are purple, then  you'd get bored with those too. The thing that's going to decide what 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  essence of where idea diffusion is going that two of the hottest cars the United 

States is a $55,000 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 have anything in common. Every week, the number one best selling DVD  in America changes. It's never the Godfather, it's never Citizen Kane. It's always  some third rate movie with some second rate star. But the reason it's number  one is because that's the week it came out, because it's new, because it's fresh,  because people saw it and said, I didn't know that was there, and they notice it.  Two of the big success stories last 20 years in retail. One sells things that are  super expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they  can make them the only thing they have in common is 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 the thing is, people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business. They're used to it. The rest of us have to  figure out how to think that way, how to understand that it's not about  interrupting people with big full page ads or insisting on meetings with people,  but it's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread and  which ones don't. This chair, they sold a billion dollars worth of Aeron chairs by  reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair from something the  purchasing department bought to something that was a status symbol about  where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poulen, the most famous Baker in the  world. He died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a  dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year, he sold $10 million 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 poohed 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 spread from one person  to another person, until finally it became the official bread of three star  restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by FedEx all around the  world. What marketers used to do is make average 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 where the TV industrial  complex is broken, I don't think that's the strategy we want. Use anymore. I think the strategy want to use is to not market to these people because they're really  good at ignoring you, but market to these people because they care. These are  the people who 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 tell  their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread through the  entire curve. They have something I call otaku. It's a great Japanese word. It  describes the desire of someone who's obsessed, to say, drive across Tokyo to  try a 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 problem you 

want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost  impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really desperately cares about what it is. You have to say, talk to them and make it easy for them to tell your  friends, there's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku. That's why  there's lots and lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces and not so many kinds of  mustard, not because it's hard to make interesting mustard. You can make  interesting mustard, but people don't because no one's obsessed with it, and  thus no one tells their friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out.  Krispy Kreme has a strategy. And what they do is they enter a city, they talk to  the people with the otaku and then they spread through the city to the people  who just crossed the street. This yo yo right here costs $112 but it sleeps for 12  minutes. Not everybody wants it, but they don't care. They want to talk to the  people who do, and maybe it'll spread. These guys make the loudest car stereo  in the world. It's as loud as a 747, jet. You can't get in the car's got bulletproof  glass on the windows, because they'll blow out the windshield otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple speakers in their car, if  they've got the otaku, or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead  and they pick this. It's really simple. You sell to people who are listening, and  maybe, just maybe those people tell their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to  50,000 people at his keynote right, who are all tuned in from 130 countries  watching his two hour commercial, that's the only thing keeping his company in  business, is that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two  hour commercial and then tell their friends. Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in  the last two years. Everyone made a profit. How they only sell them on their  website. Those people who buy them on their website have the otaku, and then  they tell their friends, and it spreads. And it spreads. This hospital crib costs  $10,000.10 times the standard, but hospitals are buying it faster 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, saved the  Dutch boy paint company, making them a fortune. Cost 35% more than regular  paint because Dutch boy made a can that people talk about because it's  remarkable. They didn't just slap a new ad on the product. They changed what it meant to build a paint product. Am ihoundknot.com every day, 250,000 people  go to this site, run by two volunteers. And I can tell you, they're hard graders,  and they didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being  remarkable, sometimes a little too remarkable. And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the wall. My father has this on his desk,  and he sees his grandchildren every day, changing constantly, and every single  person who walks into his office hears the whole story of 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 get cremated, you  can have yourself made into a gem. Oh, you like my ring. It's my grandmother. 

Fastest growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to  be Ozzy Osbourne. You don't have to be super outrageous to do this. What you  have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them. A couple  quick rules to wrap up. The first one is, design is free when you get to scale, and the people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not, figure  out how to put design to work for them. Number two, the riskiest thing you can  do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this. The whole model of being  Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people, that's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes be remarkable and being  very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring.  Very good is average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album,  or you're an architect or you have a track 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 need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in  the refrigerated section, sales tripled. Why? Milk? Milk, milk, milk, not milk? For  the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They  didn't triple their sales with advertising. They tripled it by doing something  remarkable. That is a remarkable piece of art. You don't have to like it, but a 40  foot tall dog made out of bushes in 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 people from all over the world went to see now at  countless meetings, at, you know the Portland City Councilor, who knows where they say, we need an architect? Can we get Frank Gehry? Because he did  something that was at the fringes. And my big failure, I came out with an entire a record album, and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD format,  this remarkable new format, and I marketed it straight to people with $20,000  stereos. People with $20,000 stereos don't like new music. So what you need to  do is 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 miles around to swim in the lake. They don't anymore. So the  Founding Fathers at Soap Lake said, we got some money to spend. What could  we build here? And like most committees, they were going to build something  pretty safe. And then an artist came to them. This is a true artist rendering. He  wants to build a 55 foot tall lava 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.



Modifié le: lundi 4 août 2025, 10:38