2 Years Ago This Week: “A FORCE of Nature.”
On May 22 they showed up.
Chicago was besieged by MILLIONS of Cicadas, 2 years ago this week.
Suddenly, without warning, they started popping, seemingly out of nowhere. Emerging from holes in the ground. The first day, a smattering.
Then more. And more … in days, our entire property, and suburbs for miles around, were swarming with them.
In only a few days, the noise rose to a deafening screech.
86 decibels in my front yard. (As an audio geek, I have to include that little factoid.)
Who is this they?
The 17 year cicadas.
Yep, every 17 years, in strips of land through Illinois and Wisconsin, when the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees, the cicadas appear. Cicadas are the insects that make that buzzing sound in the trees in the summertime.
These particular cicadas have a seventeen-year life cycle. They invisibly feed on tree roots deep in the ground all that time, and suddenly, as though summoned by an invisible command, they burrow from the darkness to the day in unison.
Nymphs crawl out of the ground, shed their shells and winged creatures fly up into the trees. Mating calls begin, a shrill buzz you can hear a quarter mile away. Males and females converge, lay their eggs in the trees.
Eggs hatch and hatchlings drop to the ground and the insects dig down into the ground to find a tree root (as far down as ten feet) and the cycle begins again.
For about five weeks you could go nowhere within miles of here without hearing them. The droning, clicking and buzzing raged from about 6 in the morning till evening. So loud it drowned out conversation.
Soon after they came, the predators showed up too, in full force. Seagulls arriving from Lake Michigan, eating the bugs in our trees. Dragonflies. Bats crossing the evening sky. Squirrels and dogs in the neighborhood having an Old Country Cicada Buffet.
Seventeen is a prime number (there’s a species of 13 year cicadas too, also a prime number) – not divisible by any other number so predators can’t match the time cycle.
When the cicadas come, there are so many, the predators cannot even possibly keep up. More stupid, blundering bugs than all the seagulls and dragonflies and bats and squirrels and dogs can conceivably eat.
‘Nother interesting factoid: Once the cicadas started to dwindle, the predators cleaned up fast. The cicadas vanished even faster than they had come. Our neighborhood is quiet once again until 2024 when the Force Of Nature returns.
I hope you see the business parallel to this.
To predators, the appearance of the cicadas is an anomaly, like planets randomly colliding. It isn’t planned for, prepared for, not incorporated into some strategic plan. Just a Nice Big Meal that happened to show up one happy May 22.
To the cicadas, however, it’s a deliberate, strategic, ingenious plan for survival and proliferation. It’s been going on for hundreds, actually hundreds of thousands of years. It’s systematic.
A Force Of Nature.
It always fascinates me how living things manage to adapt to fill every ecological niche, even once-every-13 or -17 year niches. DNA – and Nature itself – is profoundly intelligent and resourceful.
As an aside, I have studied this extensively and discovered that this adaptation, this evolution that fills the earth with every imaginable variety of flora and fauna, is not random, not one bit. Contrary to what some would have you believe, by the way. It’s an engineered process. Pre-programmed to adapt and evolve. Makes Taguchi look like child’s play. Living things succeed no more by accident than you do.
You don’t invest in stocks by throwing darts at a dartboard and neither does nature. Nature is calculated. So too must you be.
Random Predator vs. Calculated Cicada
There are many ways that you can harness the Cicada example and apply it in your marketplace. In any marketplace.
In real estate it’s this sequence:
Loose credit – more building – more building, more inventory and sales – even looser credit – more building – eventual inventory glut.
Sales peak and head down – more mortgages go bad – banks tighten credit – even less sales, even more inventory, even more foreclosures – no building.
Demand recovers (eventually) – inventory gets sold out – then shortage – then price increases …and on and on it goes.
The same thing, in essence happens in every industry.
High demand/low supply = excitement – which leads to
High supply/low demand = tears (depression). Depression leads to low supply – demand catches fire again (eventually) and we’re back to the races.
When we’re in the middle of any one phase, few remember the cyclical nature of the market.
Whatever is in front of them seems like “the way it IS”
“The biggest problem people have is they mistake the finite with the infinite and fail to properly value those few things that actually are infinite.”
-Guru Maharaji McCarthy. AKA Ken.
As bugs go, Cicadas are among the dumbest. Klutzier than moths. They fall on their back and flop around and can’t get up. I was watching this thinking, “Dang, I bet every neuron in their teeny, tiny brains must be devoted to that complicated 17 year reproductive cycle with no room left over for, say, getting along in life.”
No doubt that’s true. But there’s a lesson in that too. If the planning, timing and execution are right, a lot of other things can go wrong and it works anyway. You don’t have to be perfect, so long as you can take everyone else by surprise. If there’s an avalanche of publicity when it launches, it might not matter so much that the clerk at the store is totally incompetent.
Take Apple’s iPhone launch. It was on the front page of almost every newspaper, and hey, if some store was out of stock, it didn’t derail Apple’s plans.
Quantity can be a perfectly good substitute for quality, if the conditions are right.
In my own Marketing microcosm, a number of people have pulled of Cicada-like product launches: Rich Shefren’s series of coaching programs, Brad Fallon’s Stompernet, Chris Carpenter’s renaissance of Google Cash. All of them successful. What I want you to understand is, this can be done in any market. Think of The Secret DVD that took the world by storm. They pulled the rabbit out of the hat and no predator can really knock it off at this point.
At some point in the cyclic nature of the world, planet earth will be ripe for a similar smash product. I don’t have any doubt that a person intimately familiar with the self-help biz could identify a series of such smash hits over the last 50 years. The “once in a lifetime” opportunity – the proverbial Pet Rock or Rubik’s Cube – could actually be a cyclic phenomenon, not a one time anomaly. Random to the prey, but planned and calculated by you.
Perry Marshall
About the Author
Entrepreneur Magazine says: "Perry Marshall is the #1 author and world's most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers save literally billions of dollars in Adwords stupidity tax."
He is referenced across the Internet and by The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.
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I just started reading you and I find it very interesting.
A masterfully written article… and fun to read.
A close friend of mine was a Gangster Disciple (GD) here in Chicago and their level of organization and structure was amazing. He was a killer (never actually killed anyone, but went to jail for attempted murder of a rival) but it wasn’t random. They ran their gang by the “5 P’s Rule” Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance. They understood the concept of being Calculated vs Random Predators… but that was in the 80′s before drugs became the focal point in gangs. Anywho…
I have a question about your article:
How does this fit into what you always talk about regarding LASER focus on a specific niche? It seems like this strategy works well if you have a TON of time (like the cicadas) or a TON of money (like Apple).
Have any other readers used this strategy for their niche business?
Raza,
I don’t know that the 17 Year Plague model is applicable to most people. It’s certainly only applicable every once in awhile and even then, you have to have a lot of SOME resource to pull it off. But…. maybe you have some resource that is in plentiful supply. If so, what Plague can you pull off?
Perry
Perry, Raza, I believe the 17 Year Plague Model is applicable to any person attempting to dominate a niche. Just scale that prime number back to say “3″ then narrow your niche significantly but yet large enough for you to profit greatly and apply the money you have and the time you have to it. Because you have narrowed your niche significantly to a small “ecosystem”, the money you do have will be a TON within that niche(Remember a TON of money is always relative). In fact, I know of one niche within IT that is exploding technology Cicadas every 6 to 9 months! Just like the predators in that story, there is more than enough to eat during that “feast” period. There are many more like that also.
Plague model is very relevant to many mass market items. Someone brings a new product to market. It succeeds. The competition are all over them in no time, market saturates, dies. Nobody sells, or can sell that product for years. But things wear out. Come back to market at just the right time and people are ready to buy again. The competition does not come back, they are still licking their wounds from last time when they over-produced. Next year more have worn out, sales continue. When they eventually rise to the point where competition gets interested again, the market is already dominated.
Perry,
What a great article! Masterfully written, easy to ready, and the lessons all tied together seamlessly.
Really enjoyed this one!