The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing Violate Them at Your Own Risk

21

The Law of Acceleration

Successful programs are not built on fads,

 

they’re built on trends.

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A fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little.

Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost 

invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term.

A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a 

company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a 

result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution 

networks.

(A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-

breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.)

When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is 

typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely 

dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they 

were worth.

Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, 

clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the 

bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11.

Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being 

handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.

Here’s the paradox. If you were faced with a rapidly rising business, with all the characteristics of a fad, 

the best thing you could do would be to dampen the fad. By dampening the fad, you stretch the fad out 

and it becomes more like a trend.

You see this in the toy business. Some owners of hot toys want to put their hot toy name on everything. 

The result is that it becomes an enormous fad that is bound to collapse. When everybody has a Ninja 

turtle, nobody wants one anymore.

The Ninja turtle is a good example of a fad that collapses in a hurry because the owner of the concept 

got greedy. The owner fans the fad rather than dampening it.

On the other hand, the Barbie doll is a trend. When Barbie was invented years ago, the doll was never 

heavily merchandised into other areas. As a result, the Barbie doll has become a long-term trend in the 

toy business.

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The most successful entertainers are the ones who control their appearances. They don’t overextend 

themselves. They’re not all over the place. They don’t wear out their welcome.

Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Parker, made a deliberate attempt to restrict the number of 

appearances and records the King made. As a result, every time Elvis appeared, it was an event of 

enormous impact. (Elvis himself contributed to this strategy by overdosing early and severely 

dampening his future appearances. Likewise Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.)

Forget fads. And when they appear, try to dampen them. One way to maintain a long-term demand for 

your product is to never totally satisfy the demand.

But the best, most profitable thing to ride in marketing is a long-term trend.