in our earlier book, Customers Rule! (Crown Business, 2001), shows that innovators are not usually the long-term winners in the market, whether in music or computers. People didnt accept rock and roll from first movers Carl Perkins, Lit- tle Richard, and Otis Redding because it was not relevant to their racial and cultural attitudes at the time. Elvis borrowed from first movers, however, and led the rock-and-roll revolution into mass cul- ture. Similarly, Dell dominates the PC market today, even though the first movers in PCs during the 1980s were Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne (not to be confused with the Osbournes!). Word processing and spreadsheets were key applications that caused businesses to put computers on every desktop, but the pioneer brands were VisiWord and VisiCalc, not Windows or Excel. And neither Apple nor Microsoft invented the mouse-driven graphical interfaces that dominate our culture today; the first mover was Xerox. It is similar to the process of emergence and eventual predominance within the world of mass retailing. The Kresge and Woolworth dime stores were first movers, but neither survived to be part of one of todays fastest-growing retail formats, dollar stores.     Gaining Cult ur al Acceptance for Inno vative Ne w Products   Introducing a new brand or product can be tricky, especially if it is unconventional-different from what has been accepted by the cul- ture to that point. It is difficult to get the attention of would-be buy- ers anytime, but getting them to try something new usually leaves the best marketers perplexed. The failure to understand the rate of adop- tion for new technology is one reason many telecom companies are bankrupt, leaving more unused fiber networks than abandoned gold mines. Its the reason people scratch their heads trying to calculate how fast customers will adopt wireless communications, personal video recorders (PVRs, such as TiVo), XML (protocol for exchanging data), Olestra (for reducing fat intake in foods), high definition tele- vision, and other innovations. The examples from first mover fail- ures previously described are enough to make anyone pessimistic about how to get a culture to adopt innovative new products. Now imagine you are a brand-new band, writing and playing a genre of music that is not only obscure but virtually undefined among most audiences. Branding and marketing problems exist not just for the bands brand but for the entire product category. Wel- come to the world of new-wave punk music circa 1976.