Thummer as Purple Cow

I recently had the founder of a music technology company tell me that he wanted to hire me to evangelize his company's music technology products, because I “must be an incredible evangelist to have gotten such amazing national press for the Thummer” (e.g., the Wall Street Journal story and a forthcoming story by CBS News Sunday Morning).

He missed the point completely. The Thummer is getting remarkable press because the Thummer is remarkable – literally “worthy of remark.” The Thummer is, in Seth Godin’s memorable phrase, a Purple Cow.

Here’s the essence of Godin’s Purple Cow Theory, drawn from the above-linked article:
When was the last time you noticed a cow? Saw a cow on the side of the road, pulled over and gawked… Not likely. Cows, after you've seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring.

A purple cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow — the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows — is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to.

Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible. The world is full of boring stuff — brown cows — which is why so few people pay attention. Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not just slapping on the marketing function as a last-minute add-on, but also understanding from the outset that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, then it's invisible — no matter how much you spend on well-crafted advertising.
Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things that the right customers care about can have an enormous payoff.

If being a Purple Cow is such an effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn't everyone do it? Because people are so afraid. "Playing it safe" and "following the rules" seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing; not standing out is the same as being invisible. The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need a Purple Cow. Today, the one sure way to fail is to be boring. Your one chance for success is to be remarkable.

The Thummer is not just remarkable, it’s remarkable in four different ways – (1) its unparalleled expressive power, (2) its unprecedented ease of learning, (3) its revolutionary Dynamic Tonality, and (4) its shockingly low price (compared to other button-field controllers like the Tenori-On and Monome, which don’t even come close to the Thummer on any of the first three points).

These are exactly the benefits needed to disrupt the music products industry.

As Bill Gates once famously said, “to create a new standard, it takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new and really captures peoples' imagination.”

It takes a Purple Cow – a purple cow like the Thummer.