Where do remarkable products come from?

If your goal is growth, the only way to achieve it is to market a product or service worth talking about--a purple cow (as I called them in my last book). With all the clutter out there, you're either remarkable or invisible.

As this idea has spread, people keep coming back to me, saying (okay, whining) three things:

1. Our stuff is boring and we can't change it.
2. I want to make a purple cow, but my boss won't let me.
3. I don't have any great ideas for making something remarkable.

This is my answer.

1. Our Stuff Is Boring! (Innovation Is Soft, Not Hard)

Most writing on innovation is about paradigm shifts, big projects, huge R&D, and technical innovations. It's about nanotechnology and space farming. Most real innovation, though, is actually about stuff such as fast lube-job shops, cell-phone pricing plans, and purple ketchup.

These are what I like to call "soft innovations." That's what really works--the commonsense, creative stuff that requires initiative and curiosity, not an advanced degree. If it satisfies the consumer and gets him to tell other people what you want him to tell them, it's a soft innovation. And if it catches on and becomes something the consumer wants, then it becomes a "free prize."

A free prize is the thing that makes a product remarkable. It's the thing that gets talked about. And more often than not, the free prize has nothing to do with the core benefit the product offers. It's something extra. Free prizes are fashionable or fun or surprising. They rarely deliver more of what we were buying in the first place.

Is soft innovation a gimmick? No, it's the gimmick transformed. It's yogurt in a tube so you don't need a spoon to eat it. It's filmlike strips that whiten teeth without any messy trays or lasers. It's a mail slot added to every FedEx truck to make it easier to drop off a package. (See boxes throughout this story for the champions behind these soft innovations.)

A gimmick is cheap--a trick, a ruse, something not worth the time or attention. Once it becomes something consumers want and talk about--the prize in the Cracker Jack box--it stops being a gimmick. And the only way to find out is to try it.

Were frequent-flier miles a gimmick? At first, people treated them that way. Today, American Airlines understands that they are one of its great assets. Is product design a gimmick? If we need a music player or a car, shouldn't we focus on the way the thing works, not the way it makes us feel? Well, unless you're driving a used Yugo and listening to an old Aiwa cassette player, I think you've already voted with your dollars.

People don't buy a watch just to tell time. They can check the time with a more accurate device than anything mankind could have conceived (until a couple of decades ago) for a few dollars at the drugstore. Turns out, they also want a watch that is beautiful, slim, lightweight, handsome, Russian, Swiss, retro, clunky, prestigious, expensive, glamorous, almost invisible, without computerized parts, with a second hand, with a pedigree, and with a sense of humor. A Franck Muller watch (such as the Perpetual Calendar with Retrograde Monthly Equation, Tourbillon and Split-Second Chronometer) could easily cost well into the five figures without the fancy jewels. Muller figured out what his customers wanted. He doesn't sell watches. He sells tourbillons with complications. After buying a Muller complication, what are the chances you'll say to a friend, "Wanna see my watch?" The product is the marketing.

So if you're committed to selling just the time (whatever "time" means for your product or service), then you're doomed to slow growth and commodity pricing. After all, you can't improve time. If, however, you embrace the fact that people rarely buy what they say they're buying, you have a chance to create a free prize.

The reason soft innovation works is that all breakthroughs (big and small) require quantum leaps. Of course, it's much easier to create a quantum leap with style or in-sight or guts (a nontechnical breakthrough) than it is to change the physics of the product you offer. Muller doesn't tell time better. Instead, he adds soft innovations that are different.

The perception of how we should do innovation is wrong. We've drawn it as a complicated, expensive, time-consuming process that should be done like most corporate initiatives: slowly, expensively, with massive buy-in and with lots of planning. No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.

We often believe that it's someone else's job (the guys in R&D) to make the cool stuff--we just sell it, market it, and service it. That's wrong. In our fashion-crazy world, we're all marketers, and being a marketer means changing the product, not changing the ads.