How Hits Happen: Forecasting Predictability in a Chaotic Marketplace

By Winslow Farrell

Book Overview

What makes a hit a hit? How does a movie like Titanic captivate the publics eye--and break box office records worldwide? What set Hootie & the Blowfish apart from countless other bands struggling to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887309070
• ISBN13: 9780887309076
• Release Date: June 1998
• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent ideas on creating your own hits

One truism we have often heard in strategy seminars is that you can't plan your way into a fad. Thus, the success of Ty's Beanie Babies or Tamagotchi cannot be the result of good strategy - they are merely accidents that we would all like to have. In How Hits Happen, the author postulates that hits of any sort actually have some common elements that we can seek when attempting to emulate Furbies and pet rocks.Most of this book details the history of large-scale artificial life simulations used by Coopers and Lybrand, and the text leans to the poetic rather than the practical, but there are still several nuggets of usable information:-Target people who "lead" your market. These are the equivalent of the "cool kids" of our Junior High School years - they tend to adopt new buying patterns before everyone else does, and others in the marketplace follow their lead.-Generate excitement about your products or services. Just another product is NOT noteworthy. To get people talking about you, you have to do something a little off the wall.-Understand the patterns customers use to distinguish a "good product" from a "bad product". This enables you to find the cues that will give the customer instantly good feelings about your product.-Remember that you are targeting customers who are human beings. They don't think of themselves as, say, young professionals. Most customers tend to think of themselves in terms of what they consume.-Create and nurture communities of evangelists who will preach the joys of doing business with your company. Involve them in your product design. Play golf with them. Give them specialtreatment for being your ambassadors to the market. Software companies, for example, often send pre-release beta versions of their products to their most ardent supporters.-Watch for signals that your market is about to change precipitously. The "explosions" that create hits can often be created with just a little push in the right place at the right time.-The internet is a powerful medium for generating hits. "Buzz" in an internet discussion group or on a web page can translate into powerful word-of-mouth advertising outside of the internet. This is true because many of the risk-seeking early adopters who help to "create" hits are spending a lot of time on the internet these days.-Manage availability to enhance your hit status. Sometimes, being ubiquitous helps build network externalities which make your product more valuable to the buyer as more and more customers get on the band wagon. In other instances, scarcity enhances perceived value by making your product something the customer has to work to obtain. In all, we'd like to see a book like this that is a bit more prescriptive than descriptive, but How Hits Happen is still engaging and thought-provoking. I would definitely suggest this book as a source of ideas for anyone involved in product development.

Its not about the msg, its about the perspective.

This book to me is 5 stars. To those that rate it one star, have to ask themselves why did they buy it in the first place. Any idea is worth as much as you want it to be. This world has enough of critical and judgemental people who can't see a good thing when its starring at them in their eyes. As for me I get an inspiration and it sheds a flood light on my marketing deadlock. Like the saying goes there is nothing new under the sun, just the way we see things to get a new insight to a old problem. To those that rate it one star, I think you have to read Edward De Bonos "Parallel Thinking" as a pre-requisite for any other non-fiction reading.

Excellent High-Level Business Overview of How Hits Happen

Win Farrel has written a very useful high-level book on the dynamics of how hits happen. This book is clearly intended for executives and emphasizes the business case and benefits of using nonlinear dynamics, complexity theory, adaptive agents, and other tools to model the dynamics of how hits happen, rather than the heavy math and details necessary to implement such models. The reviewers who have given this book poor reviews have lost track of the purpose of the book - it is not intended as an implementation guide. There is certainly a need for a technical book which goes into great detail about how to implement and use these models. However, when one deals with very complex models, there is a need for two sets of documentation and books 1) a more generalized document for the executives which tells them what the tools can do, their business case for using them, and how they can benefit from them, and 2) an extremely technical implementation guide. There are a lot of interesting analytical technologies being developed by various researchers, including some of those covered in Farrell's book, which have ultimately failed to provide real-world benefits because their developers (often academics) have not built the business case for their tool, seeded the technology to key decisionmakers, and achieved any significant usage. Farrell's book provides the business case for using these models for certain marketing and strategic planning applications in the media, technology, consumer goods, retail, and entertainment industries. If you are looking for more technical information, buy the books recommended at the end of Farrell's book.

Casts refreshing new insights into marketing approaches

Farrell casts refreshing new insights into marketing approaches and the reasons products evolve from a good ideas to brilliant explosive successes. It's the explosion that he analyzes so well. I am an art dealer and reference book publisher, and it's obvious that this book is essential for anyone in any business.

A WIN-WIN SCENARIO!

This books presents one of the most lucid and readable accounts into the world of non-linear dynamics and fractal technology. Mr. Farrell brilliantly frames the practical application of this technology onto our "pop-culture" economy.This engaging yarn is funny, enlightening, clever and most of all insightfull. I'm glad to hear from an actual "ROCKET SCIENTIST" for once. This book is great stuff. Now I'm coping with our "post Tickle-Me-Elmo" economy."He Blinded Me with Science" T. DolbyTruly, Adam Tinkoff