Purple Cows and Star Trek Conventions

It’s a New World

I’ve been reading Purple Cow by Seth Godin. The man does make you think in spite of his easy writing style. It is a new world out there where conventional wisdom fails to deliver success and I am trying to find my place in it. To live long and prosper as Spock would say. One of the things Seth suggests is checking out Star Trek conventions.

The temptation of safe

I have always been a fairly normal guy and stayed withing the normal range of behaviors with one or two exceptions. Back when I used to wear neckties, I always searched for remarkable ones. You wouldn’t catch me wearing a standard rep stripe. I devoted quite a bit of effort doing this because I wanted to stand out just a little. It was my otaku. (A Japanese word meaning more than a hobby but not quite an obsession) For everything else, I didn’t want to push the boundaries. I was afraid to be too different. Where did I learn that?

Seth Godin says:

“Where did you learn how to fail? If you’re like most Americans, you learned in the first grade. That’s when you started figuring out that the safe thing to do was to fit in. The safe thing to do was to color inside the lines, don’t ask too many questions in class, and whatever you do, be sure your homework assignment fits on the supplied piece of card stock.”

The Long Tail and Options

Today, the mass market is failing. Customers like the long tail where there are lots of options and reject one size fits all. Successful companies find the Purple Cow- the outrageous, unexpected and insanely popular product. So what can an ordinary guy do in this new world? How can he come up with a successful new product? It certainly isn’t by making an old product better. It probably has no relationship with the old product. Also he must avoid products for the vast center of go along people. He must market to the edge. You need to find something that can get the edge exited. Something that is unexpected, outrageous and will go viral when the right people find it.

Go Someplace new and wacky

So how does an ordinary guy find the Purple Cow. Well he starts by not looking in the same old places. He gets acquainted with activities that only a few people on the edge like but they like those activities a lot. It is their otaku or maybe even obsession. So that is why I am looking for the next Star Trek convention. I need to see what otaku really looks like and what ideas I get about my own personal Purple Cow. Shucks! I just missed the one in San Francisco last month. Now it looks like Vancouver in June.