by Seth Godin in Purple Cow
"Is your product more boring than salt? Unlikely. So come up with a list of ten ways to change the product (not the hype) to make it appeal to a sliver of your audience."
"Think small. One vestige of the TV-industrial complex is a need to think mass. If it doesn't appeal to everyone, the thinking goes, it's not worth it. No longer. Think of the smallest conceivable market, and describe a product that overwhelms it with its remarkability. Go from there."
"Outsource. If the factory is giving you a hard time about jazzing up the product, go elsewhere. There are plenty of job shops that would be delighted to take on your product. After it works, the factory will probably be happy to take the product back."
"Build and use permission asset. Once you have the ability to talk directly to your most loyal customers, it gets much easier to develop and sell amazing things. Without the filters of advertising, wholesalers, and retailers, you can create products that are far more remarkable."
"Copy. Not from your industry, but from any other industry. Find an industry more dull than yours, discover who's remarkable (it won't take long), and do what they did."
"Go one more. Or two more. Identify a competitor who's generally regarded as at the edges, and outdo them. Whatever they're known for, do that thing even more. Even better, and even safer, do the opposite of what they're doing."
Find things that are 'just not done' in your industry, and do them. JetBlue almost instituted a dress code for passengers. They're still playing with the idea of giving a free airline ticket to the best-dressed person on the plane. A plastic surgeon could offer gift certificates. A book publisher could put a book on sale. Stew Leonard's took the strawberries out of the little green plastic cages and let the customers pick their own-and sales doubled."
"Ask 'Why not?' Almost everything you don't do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don't do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, 'Why not?'"
