Start With Why

 Advertising Age 
summed 
it up best: "More U.S. Homes Have Outhouses than TiVos." (At the 
time, there were 671,000 homes with outhouses in the United States, 
compared with 504,000 to 514,000 homes with TiVo.) Not only were 
sales poor, but the company has not fared well for its shareholders 
either. At the time of the initial public offering in the fall of 1999, 

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HOW A TIPPING POINT TIPS 
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TiVo stock traded at slightly over $40 per share. A few months later 
it hit its high at just over $50. The stock declined steadily for the rest 
of the year, and except for three short periods since 2001, it has 
never since traded over $10.
If you apply the principles of The Golden Circle, the answer is 
clear—people don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, 
and TiVo attempted to convince consumers to buy by telling them 
only WHAT the product did. Features and rational benefits. The 
practical-minded, technophobic mass market's response was 
predictable. "I don't understand it. I don't need it. I don't like it. 
You're scaring me." There were a small number of TiVo loyalists, 
probably about 10 percent, those who just "got it," who didn't need 
an explicit articulation of WHY. They exist to this day, but there 
were not enough of them to create the tipping point that TiVo 
needed and predicted.
What TiVo should have done is talked about what they believed. 
They should have talked about WHY the product was invented in 
the first place, and then ventured out to share their invention with 
the innovators and early adopters who believed what they believed. 
If they had started their sales pitch with WHY the product existed in 
the first place, the product itself would have become the proof of the 
higher cause—proof of WHY. If their Golden Circle was in balance, 
the outcome might have been quite different. Compare the original 
list of features and benefits with a revised version that starts with 
WHY:
If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control of every 
aspect of your life, boy do we have a product for you.
It pauses live TV.
Skips commercials.
Rewinds live TV.

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START WITH WHY 
138 
Memorizes your viewing habits and records shows on your behalf 
without you needing to set it.
In this version, all the features and rational benefits serve as 
tangible proof of WHY the product exists in the first place, not the 
reasons to buy, per se. The WHY is the belief that drives the 
decision, and WHAT it does provides us a way to rationalize the 
appeal of the product.
Confirming their failure to tap the right segment of the market, 
TiVo offered a very rational explanation of what was happening. 
"Until people get their hands on it," Rebecca Baer, a spokeswoman 
for TiVo, told the
New York Times
in 2000, "they don't understand 
why they need this." If this line of logic was true, then no new 
technology would ever take hold. A fact that is patently untrue. 
Though Ms. Baer was correct about the mass market's failure to 
understand the value, it was TiVo's failure to properly communicate 
and rally the left side of the bell curve to educate and encourage the 
adoption that was the reason so few people "got their hands on it." 
TiVo did not start with WHY. They ignored the left side of the curve 
and completely failed to find the tipping point. And for those 
reasons, "people didn't get their hands on it," and the mass market 
didn't buy it.
Fast-forward almost a decade. TiVo continues to have the best 
digital video-recording product on the market. Its unaided aware-
ness continues to be through the roof. Nearly everyone knows now 
what the product is and what it does, yet the company's future is by 
no means secure.
While millions of viewers may say they "TiVo" things all the 
time, unfortunately for TiVo, they aren't using a TiVo system. 
Rather, they "TiVo" shows using a digital video recorder provided 
by the cable or satellite company. Many try to make the argument 
that TiVo's failure was due to the cable companies' superior 

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HOW A TIPPING POINT TIPS 
139 
distribution. But we know that people often go out of their way, pay 
a premium or suffer an inconvenience to buy a product that 
resonates on a visceral level with them. Until recently, people who 
wanted a custom Harley-Davidson motorcycle waited upwards of 
six months to a year to take delivery of their product. By any 
standard, that's just bad service. Consumers could have just walked 
into a Kawasaki dealership and walked right out with a brand-new 
bike. They could have found a very similar model with similar 
power and maybe even for less money. But they suffered the 
inconvenience willingly, not because they were in the market for a 
motorcycle, but because they wanted a Harley.
TiVo is not the first to ignore these sound principles and won't be 
the last. The meager success of satellite radio technology like Sirius 
or XM Radio has followed a similar path. They offered a well-
publicized, well-funded new technology that attempted to convince 
users with a promise of rational features and benefits—no 
commercials and more channels than the competition. Throw in an 
impressive array of celebrity endorsements, including rap star 
Snoop Dog and 1970s pop icon David Bowie, and the technology 
still didn't stick. When you start with WHY, those who believe what 
you believe are drawn to you for very personal reasons. It is those 
who share your values and beliefs, not the quality of your products, 
that will cause the system to tip. Your role in the process is to be 
crystal clear about what purpose, cause or belief you exist to cham-
pion, and to show how your products and services help advance 
that cause. Absent a WHY, new ideas and technologies quickly find 
themselves playing the price-and-feature game—a sure sign of an 
absence of WHY and a slide into commodity status. It is not the 
technology that failed, it was how the companies tried to sell it. 
Satellite radio has not displaced commercial radio in any meaning-
ful way. Even when Sirius and XM merged, hoping the joined force 
of their companies would help change their luck, shares for the 

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START WITH WHY 
140 
combined company sold for less than 50 cents apiece. And, last time 
I checked, XM was offering a discount, a promotion, free shipping 
and a claim of being "America's #1 satellite radio service with over 
170 channels" to push their product.
Give the People Something to Believe In
On August 28, 1963, 250,000 people from across the country de-
scended on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to hear Dr. Martin Luther 
King Jr. give his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The organizers 
didn't send out 250,000 invitations and there was no
Web site to 
check the date. How did they get a quarter of a million people to 
show up on the right day at the right time?
During the early 1960s, the country was torn apart by racial 
tensions. There were riots in dozens of cities in 1963 alone. America 
was a country scarred by inequality and segregation. How the civil 
rights movement lifted an idea that all men are created equal to 
become a movement with the power to change a country is 
grounded in the principles of The Golden Circle and the Law of 
Diffusion.
Dr. King was not the only person alive during that time who 
knew WHAT had to change to bring about civil rights in America. 
He had many ideas about WHAT needed to happen, but so did 
others. And not all of his ideas were good. He was not a perfect 
man; he had his complexities.
But Dr. King was absolute in his conviction. He
 knew
change had 
to happen in America. His clarity of WHY, his sense of purpose, 
gave him the strength and energy to continue his fight against often 
seemingly insurmountable odds. There were others like him who 
shared his vision of America, but many of them gave up after too 
many defeats. Defeat is painful. And the ability to continue head-on, 
day after day, takes something more than knowing what legislation 
needs to be passed. For civil rights to truly take hold in the country, 

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its organizers had to rally everyone. They may have been able to 
pass legislation, but they needed more than that, they needed to 
change a country. Only if they could rally a nation to join the cause, 
not because they had to, but because they wanted to, could any 
significant change endure. But no one person can effect lasting 
change alone. It would take others who believed what King 
believed.
The details of HOW to achieve civil rights or WHAT needed to 
be done were debatable, and different groups tried different strate-
gies. Violence was employed by some, appeasement by others. Re-
gardless of HOW or WHAT was being done, there was one thing 
everyone had in common—WHY they were doing it. It was not just 
Martin Luther King's unflappable conviction that was able to stir a 
population, but his ability to put his WHY into words. Dr. King had 
a gift. He talked about what he believed. And his words had the 
power to inspire:
"I believe."
"I believe."
"I believe."
"There are two types of laws," he shared, "those that are just and 
those that are unjust. A just law," Dr. King expounded, "is a man- 
made code that squares with the moral law. An unjust law is a code 
that is out of harmony with the moral law.... Any law that uplifts the 
human personality is just. Any law that degrades human per-
sonality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segre-
gation distorts the soul and damages the personality." His belief was 
bigger than the civil rights movement. It was about all of mankind 
and how we treat each other. Of course, his WHY developed as a 
result of the time and place in which he was born and the color of 
his skin, but the civil rights movement served as the ideal platform 
for Dr. King to bring his WHY, his belief in equality, to life.

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People heard his beliefs and his words touched them deep in-
side. Those who believed what he believed took that cause and 
made it their own. And they told people what they believed. And 
those people told others what they believed. Some organized to get 
that belief out more efficiently.
And in the summer of 1963, a quarter of a million people showed 
up to hear Dr. King deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps 
of the Lincoln Memorial.
But how many people showed up for Dr. King?
Zero.
They showed up for themselves. It was what