Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Do Anything.
Fallacy: Build a Better Mousetrap
We still believe that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will start lining up
on your porch. But too many examples today—computers and watches, to name
two—suggest otherwise.
The computer industry has been packed with great ideas that were sitting in
back rooms until someone dragged them out the door and pushed them with a
passion. Xerox invented the mouse, icons, and windows. The ideas were great;
but they were only ideas. Only Apple’s passionate belief in those ideas put them
into play—into the Macintosh computer—and changed the world.
This theme also played out with watches in the 1970s. The Swiss actually
invented the quartz-powered digital watch, but held off introducing it. Then
Hattori of Japan took the digital technology and started smashing the Swiss over
the head with it, almost eliminating them from the watch market, with which
“Swiss” had been synonymous for decades.
Consider the converse: If you execute your idea without passion, others will
think you lack confidence in the idea, and they will lose confidence, too.
Execute passionately. Marginal tactics executed passionately almost always
will outperform brilliant tactics executed marginally.
Fallacy: There’ll Be a Perfect Time (The Bedrock Fallacy)
The too-typical planning effort can be illustrated by the fable of Bedrock Wheel
Company.
Some Neanderthals were working on developing a wheel. Design toiled on
different concepts— oblongs, rounded rectangles, and so forth—while Planning

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was considering some market applications.
Design finally created a prototype: a perfect circle. Sales and Marketing
gushed. They knew they had a unique product with a huge market.
But Bedrock’s Planners shouted, “Wait! Not so fast. We’re not ready.”
When pressed, the lead planner offered his visionary and ultimately
disastrous reasons: “Look, you can see the trends. Men are tired of chasing
woolly mammoths for food. So men will want to ride on these wheels. And men
love speed; look, for example, at the way they have sex. So they’ll want to go
faster and faster on these wheels. That means you’ll need wheels with traction—
a smooth wheel won’t work.”
Naturally, an impatient fellow Bedrock executive finally asked, “So what do
you recommend?”
“Simple,” the prophetic planner announced.
“Delay the launch. We need to wait until man invents vulcanized rubber.”
Preposterous? No; business. Years ago a Bloomington-based company
created some astonishingly good multimedia software. This company wasn’t just
positioned to ride the multimedia wave—it was the wave. But the founders
wanted an insanely great product. Did the world want that? No. The world
wanted what the software company had right then. The world needed a plain old
wheel and was ready to pay for it.
The company’s endless analysis and waiting ended up proving that he who
hesitates is lost. Other companies caught up and passed this company before the
company released version 1.0.
Today’s good idea almost always will beat tomorrow’s better one.