Last night, I spoke of the thought of going against the status quo. In particular, I argued that the industry’s current form is due to those who went against the status quo – those who went against the grain to deliver something that the market wanted, or didn’t know it wanted yet. Tonight, I’d like to take that logic a step further.
In a sense, these brave organizations who pushed against the status quo were busy creating their own Purple Cows. They experimented and searched for their own ways to create remarkable products that would stand out in a crowd of brown. Each of these innovations helped lift companies like ADV, like NIS to the level of remarkable, for different reasons.
Still, as any marketer will tell you, a cow only stays purple for so long. As an identity grows established and people begin to grow used to the image, the purple cow begins to fade into the herd. These companies will need to find new purple cows, and new ways of attracting different parts of the markets they currently reside.
These could be simple things, like a promise to listen to feedback on the company forum or guarantee that the phones will be picked up by a human during business hours. Or, they could be grander gestures, like “free” bonuses, promises of detailed liner notes with all releases, or special pre-order bonuses for big titles. They key point to this, no matter how big or small, is that the company does that one special something to stand out.
With the market turning, and entering its comfortable rut for the fall and winter, the time is perfect for someone to rise up with a Purple Cow of his own. Whether it will happen or not is unknown. However, it will be interesting to see whether this opportunity is used wisely, or if we’ll see another unsurprising fourth quarter from the anime industry as a whole.
