The Problem with Compromise
The old saying is
right: “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” If the goal of
marketing is to create a Purple Cow, and the nature of the Cow is
to be extreme in some attribute, it’s inevitable that compromise
can only diminish your chances of success.
Compromise is about
sanding down the rough edges to gain buy-in from other
constituencies. Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavor, while
habanero pecan is not. While there may be just a few people who are
unwilling to eat vanilla ice cream, there are legions of people who
are allergic to nuts, sensitive to spicy food, or just plain
uninterested in eating a challenging scoop of ice cream. The safe
compromise choice for a kid’s birthday party is the vanilla. But
vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around
vanilla.
In almost every
market, the boring slot is filled. The product designed to appeal
to the largest possible audience already exists, and displacing it
is awfully difficult. Difficult because the very innocuousness of
the market-leading product is its greatest asset. How can you
market yourself as “more bland than the leading brand”? The real
growth comes with products that annoy, offend, don’t appeal, are
too expensive, too cheap, too heavy, too complicated, too
simple—too something. (Of course, they’re too too for some people, but just perfect for
others.)
Bootstrapping
entrepreneurs often upend existing industries because the dominant
players in an industry are the last places you’ll find empowered
mavericks. The market-leading companies may owe their dominance to
the Purple Cow they marketed years and years ago, but today,
they’re all about compromising themselves to continued
profitability. The seeds of their destruction lie in their
dependence on being in the middle.
If someone in your organization is charged with creating a new Purple Cow, leave them alone! Don’t use internal reviews and usability testing to figure out if the new product is as good as what you’ve got now. Instead, pick the right maverick and get out of the way.