Sheer innovation is not enough

In 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder  an American inventor and engineer who created the first automatic bread-slicing machine for commercial use. It was first used by the Chillicothe Baking Company.What a great idea: a simple machine that could take a loaf  of bread and...slice it. The machine was a complete failure.

This was the beginning of the advertising age, and that meant that a good product with lousy marketing had very little chance of success. In 1927 Rohwedder successfully designed a machine that not only sliced the bread but wrapped it. In 1930 Continental Baking Company introduced Wonder Bread as a sliced bread.

It wasn’t until about twenty years later the first innovation first automatic bread-slicing machine – when a new brand called Wonder started marketing sliced bread – that the invention caught on. It was the packaging and the advertising (“builds strong bodies twelve ways”) that worked, not the sheer convenience and innovation of pre-slicing bread.

Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth noticing,exceptional, new. Interesting-  It’s a Purple Cow.

-Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.

In the book “Purple Cow” the author Seth Godin talks about why you need to put a Purple Cow  into everything you build.

Source: “Purple Cow”  by Seth Godin