Customer Reviews

How Hits Happen: Forecasting Predictability in a Chaotic Marketplace

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Overall I didn't find many new lessons and I didn't know how to use the lesson I got in the book.

The biggest lesson I got is a new approach of complexity model to predict a market success. Is it a brand new lesson? Well, not exactly. We all learnt some 'critical mass' and 'networking effect' in business strategy course. However, it does arouse my interest and that's why I bought it. Yet as I read through the book, I found the author provided many examples to prove that complexity model/non-linear model is an appropriate one to predict a hit. But the problem is I already buy-in the theory before I bought the book. What I really want is a method or some tips that I can use in my everyday work. However, I didn't find it. The book did mention some computer simulation program; however, I don't know the program and I don't have the program.

Net, I found this book could be a good introductory book on complexity in business world. Yet recommend 'not to buy' for business managers who need direct applications on their everyday business.

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 special
treatment 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.

In "How Hits Happen", Winslow Farrell provides what will be for many managers a first glimpse at how market leaders will be thinking in the post-linear world of the new economy. Farrell clearly shows that the current extrapolative, generalizing, top-down, spreadsheet-oriented view of the world is becoming an increasingly distorted lens for viewing markets and what drives them. Powerful, creative successes are nonlinear, arising seemingly spontaneously from the relatively simple interaction of large numbers of independently acting and communicating people.

The relevance of this book goes far beyond the entertainment industry from which it draws its examples-hits are an emergent phenomenon in every market. Farrell provides numerous examples of what happens when markets catch fire, when the "buzz" surrounding a product travels like a contagion through the network of relationships in a population, fanning out from the "in" crowd to the rest of us.

"How Hits Happen" is the bottom-up counterpoint to Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm", the hit marketing manifesto for the high tech community that has become the default worldview in Silicon Valley. Moore described how new product adoption is driven by influencers, in a trickle-down process between distinct segments of a market-- segments separated by gaps and chasms. Farrell draws on the fascinating and relevant tools of complexity theory and multi-agent simulation to show *how* influence works, *why* there are gaps and chasms, and that managers can adaptively interact with markets to recognize hit potential. Perhaps the most important lesson is that we can add "energy" at the right place and the right time to help turn product potential into phenomenal success.

But be forewarned-- the book leaves a number of questions unanswered. Such as "What are the warning signs of an impending hit?", "How do we adapt to emergent market behavior to fan the flames?", and "When and at what level should action be taken?" Farrell and his team at Coopers ! & Lybrand are on to something big, pioneering the application of complex adaptive systems, artificial life, and simulation to real-world businesses. Neatly wrapped answers are lacking only because these are the early days, and much lies waiting to be discovered.

Despite the high ratio of description to prescription, I encourage anyone interested in why products like Barbie, VHS and Windows win in the market to read this book. This is exciting territory-- the forces have been set into motion for a dramatic shift in business thinking.

--Ken Karakotsios Author of "SimLife" software, co-founder & CEO of Salamander Interactive

I have read this book and I think the author has revealed us future of how we will analyze the market. We have seen many hits and flops over the years. Some hits were expected and started with much fanfare while other came out of no where. I don't think there has been any systematic approach to how this kind of hit happens. All analysis has been 20-20 hindsight. In this book, the author proposes a new way of study how hit happens, not by looking from top to bottom but from bottom to top by using computer model that stimulates the real world. I think his idea is breakthrough in marketing research and new way of using computer simulation to solve mysteries of hits. One problem, I have with this book is that while I understand this book's purpose is not to delve into technical aspect of computer model, I wish he explain a bit more. I am curious about how to construct adaptive agent. Not to the detail of building one but to understand if there are some flaws. After all building any model to simulate the real world is not easy.

I sensed that Farrell's company is on to something. Perhaps it takes a better mind than his to understand it, or at least a better writer to describe it.

It is quite likely, though, that the book was never intended to clarify the subject, and is simply one of the many business books funded and promoted by consulting companies trying to drum up more business by hitting the bestseller list - hence the endless references to Titanic, etc. (I worked in book publishing, and saw this all the time.)

If a single message came through, I can offer it here for free: Nothing suceeds like sucess, a.k.a. Everyone loves a winner.

I was very disappointed, having expected new insights into this interesting topic. Instead, I found the content simplistic and the writing style consultant-trendy. I've tried to re-read and capture new meaning from the text twice, but to no avail.

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.

I agree with the reviewer who said this should have been condensed into a magazine article. In a nutshell, Farrell says that hits are non-linear events in which crowd psychology and feedback play a key role, in other words it can't be modelled by summing the buying behaviors and preferences of each individual. Of course this is obvious, so Farrell's contribution is to say that complexity theory and software agents can be useful for modelling these situations, and have been used by his consulting firm and others. This is interesting, but Farrell never provides any real details of how the modelling is done, what the problems are, etc. Instead, much of the book is filled with fluffy business anecdotes and observations, such as how the movie Titanic succeeded in dominating entertainment culture in 1997. I get the impression he is the glib "Mr. Outside" of the projects he's involved with, and perhaps doesn't have a really good grasp of the technical substance. Either that, or this book is essentially a brochure for his firm's services.

What can be said in few words, Winslow Farrell said it in millions of words. I would ask for a refund tomorrow!

This value of this entire book could have been put into a medium length magazine article. Reader gets very little take aways. In fact, after reading it, I believe the wording of the praise for the book indicates that those 'recommending' it were trying hard not to lie while saying something positive....