Why Copycats Can’t Succeed Today?
Shake-it-up thinking for success in marketing, entrepreneurship and life.
This is an essay about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable. It is a plea for originality, passion, guts, and daring. You can’t be remarkable by following someone else who’s remarkable.
One way to figure out a great theory is to look at what’s working in the real world and determine what the successes have in common. But what could the Four Seasons and Motel 6 possibly have in common? Or Nieman Marcus and Wal-Mart? Or Nokia (bringing out new hardware every 30 days or so) and Nintendo (marketing the same Game Boy for 14 years in a row)?
It’s like trying to drive, looking in the rearview mirror! The thing that all of those companies have in common is that they have nothing in common. They are outliers. They’re on the fringes. Superfast or superslow. Very exclusive or very cheap. Extremely big or extremely small. The reason it’s so hard to follow the leader is this: The leader is the leader precisely because he did something remarkable. And that remarkable thing is now taken - so it’s no longer remarkable when you decide to do it.
Seth Godin is a marketing consultant, author and visionary. His many best-selling books include All Marketers are Liars
For more cutting-edge marketing wisdom, read Trump University Marketing 101
