Mythology in marketing.
About a month after we’d decided upon the name Zeus Jones, Eric brought up the myth of Zeus’ origin. Son of the king of the Titans – the original gods – Zeus ended up killing his dad, ushering in a new era of gods on Olympus. It was an unintended theme, but I’ve sometimes wondered whether having a mythological archetype on our side hasn’t helped us in some way.
I was reminded about this by the launch of Cuil, which – even though it launched on a Sunday evening – generated masses and masses of coverage from all the A-list bloggers and even hit the traditional media.
However, Cuil’s buzz hasn’t been generated because it’s a better product. In review after review, Cuil returns results that are worse than Google’s (and in some cases Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s too).
Instead – I think – their buzz has been driven because they have explicitly leveraged the Zeus creation myth. Founded by a husband/wife engineering team who left Google, they have built their product to exploit the weaknesses of Google, even down to the black screen v. Google’s white. Adding to the mythology is the fact that Google also apparently tried to eat buy Cuil at birth.
It will be interesting to see where this one goes.