Unleash Your Ideavirus - Part Two

Five Principles That Are Really New!

Marketers have been pursuing word of mouth for years. There are five important principles that idea merchants with an ideavirus understand -- principles that marketers pursuing old-fashioned word of mouth didn't use:

1. Idea merchants understand that creating the virus is the single most important part of their job. So they'll spend all of their time and money creating a product and an environment that feed the virus.
2. Idea merchants understand that as long as they can recognize and manipulate the key elements of idea propagation -- the identification of sneezers, the persistence, the smoothness, the vector, and the velocity -- they can dramatically improve a virus's chances of success.
3. Idea merchants remind themselves on a regular basis that digital word of mouth amounts to a permanent, written record online, a legacy that will follow the product, for good or for ill, forever.
4. Idea merchants realize that the primary goal of a product or service is not just to satisfy the needs of one user. The goal is to deliver so much wow, to be so cool, to be so neat, and to be so productive that the one user tells five friends. Products market themselves by creating and reinforcing ideaviruses.
5. Idea merchants know that because an ideavirus follows a life cycle, they will have to decide when to shift from paying to spread it to charging users and profiting from it.

An Ideavirus Adores a Vacuum

It's very hard to keep two conflicting ideaviruses in your head at the same time. (Communism: benign or evil? Martha Stewart: pro or con? It's one or the other -- you can't have both.)

Because of that, the best friend of an ideavirus is a vacuum. Back in 1987, when 60 Minutes featured a story about runaway acceleration of Audi cars, the ideavirus spread like wildfire. Why? Because most people had never driven an Audi. Most people had never interacted with Audi as a company. Most people didn't have best friends who loved their Audis. As a result, the virus rushed in, filled the vacuum, and refused to be dispersed.

Audi, of course, did exactly the wrong thing to fight the virus. The company issued a tight-lipped response and relied on engineering data to prove its case. Very correct, very German -- and totally ineffective. It cost the company billions of dollars in lost sales.

Instead, Audi could have countered the virus by filling in the rest of the vacuum: Put an Audi 5000S in every major shopping mall in the United States. Let people sit in it. Invite everyone to take the "Audi Sudden-Acceleration Test" and see for themselves what the car feels like. By creating a forceful alternative to a television hatchet job, Audi could have unleashed its own countervirus.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Your Ideavirus

Once it begins to spread, your ideavirus follows a life cycle. If you ignore the life cycle, the ideavirus dies out. But if you pay close attention to the life cycle, you can nourish your ideavirus and help it live for a long time.

Tom Peters cowrote In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies (Harper & Row, 1982). Through some smart marketing moves (not to mention a great virus), the book became an epidemic, and turned into one of the world's best-selling business books.

Tom's career could have followed the arc of almost every other business writer -- a big hit followed by a long decline into obscurity. But instead of ignoring the life cycle, he insists on riding it. Every few years Tom unleashes a new ideavirus. He writes mind-blowing articles (such as "The Brand Called You," August:September 1997) and follows them up with books and exhausting worldwide speaking tours. When he shows up in a town to give a speech, perhaps one-third of the people there are already dyed-in-the-wool, stark-raving Tom Peters fans. And the rest of the audience? They've been brought there by the fans, ready to be exposed to Tom's virus, prepared to be turned into fans themselves.

By leveraging the base that his first book brought him, Tom has built a career out of launching new ideaviruses.

Other companies and ideas have ridden their first wave and then disappeared. People no longer clamor to dance the Hustle or to get into Studio 54. (They couldn't even if they wanted to: It closed down.) They don't visit the once-hot JenniCAM Web site or pay a premium for front-row seats to Cats. Why not? Because instead of institutionalizing the process of improving, honing, and launching ideaviruses, the "owners" of these viruses milked them until they died.