Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
52
 www.ideavirus.com
An Ideavirus Adores A Vacuum
It’s very hard to keep two conflicting ideaviruses in your head at the same time
(Communism: evil or benign? Martha Stewart: pro or con? Can’t have both). So if an idea
already inhabits space in your consumer’s brain, your idea can’t peacefully coexist. It usually
has to dislodge a different idea, the incumbent, and that’s always tough.
Given that, the best friend of an ideavirus is a vacuum. When “60 Minutes” ran the story
about runaway acceleration in Audi cars, it was an ideal ideavirus. Why? Because most people
had never driven an Audi. Most people had never interacted with the Audi company. Most
people didn’t have a best friend who loved his Audi. As a result, the virus rushed in, filled the
vacuum and refused to be dislodged.
Audi, of course, did exactly the wrong thing in fighting the virus. They issued a tight-lipped
response and relied on engineering data to PROVE that they were right. Very correct, very
German and totally ineffective. It cost the company billions of dollars in lost sales.
Audi didn’t have to go out and spread the idea that Audi’s were good cars. That would have
been pretty straightforward if they were starting from scratch. Instead, Audi had to 
undo
the
idea that had been spread by “60 Minutes”. And responding “did not” to TV’s “did too” was
a recipe for failure.
Instead, they could have countered the virus by filling in the rest of the vacuum. I would
have advised them to put an Audi 5000 in every major shopping mall in America. Let people
sit in it. Invite them to take the “Audi Sudden Acceleration Test” and see for themselves
what the car was like. By creating a more vivid and forceful alternative to a television hatchet
job, Audi could have unleashed its own countervirus.
At the beginning, the Internet was a vacuum. A Yahoo! or an eBay or an Amazon could walk
in and propagate its ideavirus fast and cheap. Today, though, launching a new search engine
or a new email service is hard indeed. Why? Because the vacuum’s gone.

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