I like Seth Godin, the American author, marketer and entrepreneur. His books are easy and enjoyable to read and make points that are very sensible. So if you have the time, do pick up Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable or Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us or Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? or many of the other books and posts that he has written.

Attached is his 17-minute or so talk that he gave at TED, ‘How to Get Ideas to Spread.’ You will find it worth your while watching it.

In the talk, Godin makes the following points:

• Idea diffusion is very important and people who spread ideas win. Sliced bread was a commercial failure until Wonder spread the idea.
• Till now (more so in a country like India rather than a highly developed country like the USA) television advertising has been the main vehicle to spread ideas and products. However, simply buying attention by putting ads on television is not working as well as it used to do a few decades ago. Today, we live in a world with too much choice and very little time and potential consumers are just ignoring stuff. (Amazingly, Al Ries and Jack Trout made a similar argument when they propounded the concept of positioning some 45 years ago!)
• Marketers tend to make average products for average people (the middle of the bell shaped curve); they tend to ignore the innovators and early adopters. Average people tend to ignore average products.
• In today’s world with many choices and little time, it is necessary to be remarkable (differentiated?) to get noticed. People will ignore the normal cows but will notice the purple cow (till all cows become purple).
• Concentrate on people who care for your product or what you have to say. They, in turn, will talk about your product to their friends (become ‘sneezers’).
• Design is key to making remarkable products.
• Being very good is not good enough; you just have to be remarkable.

Visual courtesy : https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/