This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

 CHAPTER EIGHT 
More of the Who: Seeking the Smallest
Viable Market
The virtuous cycle and network effects
Every very good customer gets you another one.
Dead-end customers aren’t worth the trouble. Silent customers, jealous
customers, people who think you need to be kept a secret . . . you can’t
grow your work on a cul de sac.
Your best customers become your new salespeople.
Your work to change the culture thrives when the word spreads, and if
you want the word to spread, you need to build something that works better
when it gets spread.
That creates the positive cycle you’re seeking. The one that makes
change happen.
The most effective remarkability comes from design
The fax machine was remarkable. It spread not because of a clever ad
campaign, but because users chose to talk about it.
Why?
Because the fax machine works better if your colleagues have one too.
Bob Metcalfe saw this firsthand when he invented Ethernet. 3Com’s
original offering permitted three users to hook up their PCs and share a
printer. That’s a marginal benefit, not much to talk about.
But once users began to share data, everything changed. Now, you were
in one of two states: in the network or off the network. And if you were
isolated, off the network, that was painful. The more people joined the

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network, the more people talked about the network. That made isolation
even more painful.
The original slide behind Metcalfe’s Law had just two lines on it. The
straight line shows that the cost of adding each person to the network goes
up slowly. The curved line, though, shows that the value of adding one
more person to the network is exponentially greater.
This simple network effect is at the heart of every mass movement and
every successful culture change. It happens when remarkable is designed
right into the story of your change, and more important, when the product
or service works better when I use it with others.
The conversation I’m motivated to have with my peers becomes the
engine of growth. Growth creates more value, which leads to more growth.