Purple Cow Tipping and other seductive marketing memes

This article in Fast Company seeks to burst Malcom Gladwell's bubble by upending whatever we know about "viral marketing." The first, and easiest, part of the dismantling is to show that what we imagine as newfangled "network marketing" theory is a decades-old theory about "Influentials." Actually, the theory is probably older than that, but it just never had a catchy name.

The second phase of the dismantling is to trot out a scientist:

In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

I think Watts is onto something. I don't think targeting a supernode alone is enough to spark the wildfire. Recently, I tried doing some @-spamming on Twitter and finally Tim O'Reilly retweeted my post to over a million followers. This created a flood of retweeting that lasted for about two days. But then it dropped off. My link didn't achieve enough escape velocity to bounce from one Twitter heavyweight to a new one. And then the link faded into obscurity.

But that could simply mean that I need a hybrid of Gladwell and Godin, and make my product or pitch extraordinary enough that it can jump from supernode to supernode. Hell, I could slap a catchy slogan to this, call it "Purple Cow Tipping," and voila, I'm an overnight marketing guru.

My point is that after the fact, it's easy to imagine a pattern, call it something new, and arrive at a new marketing theory.

My guess is that when we actually observe the foot soldiers in marketing departments, for every success that was begot through viral marketing, there's a handful of other ones through ol' fashioned mass exposure.

In other words, all marketing theories are a wash, and the real principle of marketing is to simply try everything.