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Overview
"This is a subversive book. It says that the marketer is not--and ought not to be--at the center of successful marketing. The customer should be. Are you ready for that?" --From the Foreword by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point.
Counter to traditional marketing wisdom, which tries to count, measure, and manipulate the spread of information, Seth Godin argues that the information can spread most effectively from customer to customer, rather than from business to customer. Godin calls this powerful customer-to-customer dialogue the ideavirus, and cheerfully eggs marketers on to create an environment where their ideas can replicate and spread.
In lively detail, Godin looks at the ways companies such as PayPal, Hotmail, GeoCities, even Volkswagen have successfully launched ideaviruses. He offers a "recipe" for creating your own ideavirus, identifies the key factors in the successful spread of an ideavirus (powerful sneezers, hives, a clear vector, a smooth, friction-free transmission), and shows how any business, large or small, can use ideavirus marketing to succeed in a world that just doesn't want to hear it anymore from the traditional marketers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780786870455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Books |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2001 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Section 1: Why Ideas Matter
Farms, Factories And Idea Merchants
magine for a second that you're at your business school reunion, trading lies and bragging about how successful you are and/or are about to become. Frank the jock talks about the dot-com company he just started. Suzie the ex-banker is now focusing her energy on rebuilding Eastern Europe. And then the group looks at you. With a wry look of amusement, you answer:
"Well, the futurethe really big money-is in owning a farm. A small one, maybe 100 acres. I intend to invest in a tractor of course, and expect that in just a few years my husband and I can cash out and buy ourselves a nice little brownstone in the city."
Ludicrous, no? While owning a farm may bring tremendous lifestyle benefits, it hasn't been a ticket to wealth for, say, 200 years.
What about owning a factory then? Perhaps the road to riches in the new economy would be to buy yourself a hotstamping press and start turning out steel widgets. Get the UAW to organize your small, dedicated staff of craftsmen and you're on your way to robber-baron status.
Most of us can agree that the big money went out of owning a factory about thirty years ago. When you've got high fixed costs and you're competing against other folks who also know how to produce both quantity and quality, unseemly profits fly right out the window.
Fact is, the first 100 years of our country's history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century, folks. The third century is about ideas.
Alas, nobody has a clue how to build a farm forideas, or even a factory for ideas. We recognize that ideas are driving the economy, ideas are making people rich and most important, ideas are changing the world. Even though we're clueless about how to best organize the production of ideas, one thing is clear: if you can get people to accept and embrace and adore and cherish your ideas, you win. You win financially, you gain power and you change the world in which we live. So how do you win? What do you need to do to change the status quo of whatever industry you're in, or, if you're lucky, to change the world?
If you're a farmer, you want nothing more than a high price for your soybeans. If you're a manufacturer of consumer goods, you want a display at the cash register at Wal-Mart. But what if you're an idea merchant..
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Section 1: Why Ideas Matter
- Introduction
- Farms, Factories And Idea Merchants
- Why Are Ideaviruses so Important?
- Five Things Ideaviruses Have In Common
- Seven Ways An Ideavirus Can Help You
- The Sad Decline of Interruption Marketing
- We Live In A WinnerTakeAlmostAll World
- The Traffic Imperative: Why Sites Fail
- We Used To Make Food. We Used To Make Stuff. Now We Make Ideas.
- People Are More Connected Than They Ever Were Before. We Have Dramatically More
- Friends Of
- Friends And We Can Connect With Them Faster And More Frequently Than Ever.
- There's A Tremendous Hunger To Understand The New And To Remain On The Cutting Edge.
- While Early Adopters (The Nerds Who Always Want to Know About The Cool New Thing
- In Their Field) Have Always Existed, Now We've Got More Nerds Than Ever Before.
- If You're Reading This, You're ANerd!
- Ideas Are More Than Just Essays And Books.
- Everything From New Technology To New Ways Of Creating, To New Products Are Winning Because of Intelligent Ideavirus Management By Their Creators.
- The End Of The Zero Sum Game
- Why Are Ideaviruses so Important?
- Section 2: How To Unleash An Ideavirus
- While It May Appear Accidental, It's Possible To Dramatically Increase The
- Chances Your Ideavirus Will Catch On And Spread.
- The Heart Of The Ideavirus: Sneezers
- Sneezers Are So Important, We Need To Subdivide Them.
- The Art Of The Promiscuous
- It's More Than Just Word Of Mouth
- An Ideavirus Adores A Vacuum
- Once It Does Spread, An Ideavirus Follows A Lifecycle.
- Ignore The Lifecycle And The Ideavirus Dies Out.
- Feed It Properly And You Can Ride It For A Long Time.
- Viral Marketing Is An Ideavirus, But Not All Ideaviruses Are Viral Marketing.
- What Does It Take to Build And Spread An Ideavirus?
- There Are Three Key Levers That Determine How Your Ideavirus Will Spread.
- Thirteen Questions Ideavirus Marketers Want Answered
- Five Ways to Unleash An Ideavirus
- Chances Your Ideavirus Will Catch On And Spread.
- Section 3: The Idea Virus Formula
- Managaing DigitallyAugmented Word Of Mouth
- Tweak The Formula And Make It Work
- Advanced Riffs On The Eight Variables You Can Tweak In Building Your Virus
- Sneezers
- Hive
- Velocity
- Vector
- Medium
- Smoothness
- Persistence
- Amplifier
- Tweak The Formula And Make It Work
- Section 4: Case Studies and Rifts
- The Vindigo Case Study
- Saving The World With An Ideavirus?
- Is Unleashing the Ideavirus An Ideavirus?
- Moving Private To Public
- You're In The Fashion Business!
- The Money Paradox
- Think Like A Music Executive (Sometimes)
- Is That Your Final Answer?
- A Dozen Ideaviruses Worth Thinking About
- Why I Love Bestseller Lists
- How A Parody Of Star Wars Outsold Star Wars
- Wassup?
- Judging A Book By Its Cover
- Being The Most
- In Defensive Of World Domination
- If You're A Member Of The Academy, You Go To Movies For Free.
- How An Ideavirus Can Drive The Stock Market
- Bumper Sticker Marketing
- No, You Go First!
- Digital Media Wants to Be Free
- Van Gogh Lost His Ear To Prove A Point
- But How Would We Make Money?
- Crossing The Chasm With An Ideavirus
- The Myth Of The Tipping Point
- The Compounding Effect
- Bill Gates' Biggest Nightmare
- Hey, Skinny!
- Get Big Fast? The Mistake So Many Companies Make.
- The Heart Of Viral Marketing
- The Great Advertising Paradox
- Saving The World With An Ideavirus?
- Permission: The Missing Ingredient
- How A Virus And Permission Team Up To Find Aliens
- The Art of Creating an Ideavirus
- Is He Really More Evil Than Satan Himself?
- Case Study: Why Digimarc Is Going To Fail
- Why Are These Cows Laughing?
- Never Drink Alone
- The Power of Parody
- Bee Stings And The Measles
- But Isn't It Obvious?
- Your Company's Worst Enemy
- Step By Step, Ideavirus Tactics
- The Future Of The Ideavirus: What Happens When Everyone Does It?
- The Art of Creating an Ideavirus
- Acknowledgments
- Index
What People are Saying About This
Jay Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing:
Take Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mark Twain. Combine their brains and shave their heads. What's left? Seth Godin.