What I learned from Seth’s Purple Cow
Recently I broke my own record in book reading: 2 books in 3 days! Lynchpin and Purple Cow authored by Seth Godin. I’m not a bookworm, so for me it was notable progress. But I give whole the credits to Seth Godin’s lucid writing style.
Seth is my favorite marketer. He is cool. He built his own brand. I love his blog, his writing style, and most importantly his unique ability to make the difficult to look simple. Above all, he is a person who practices what he preaches.
In this article, I’d like to share my notes from the Purple Cow.
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
“When my family and I were driving through France a few years ago, we were enchanted by the hundreds of storybook cows grazing on picturesque pastures right next to the highway. For dozens of kilometers, we all gazed out the window, marveling about how beautiful everything was. Then, within twenty minutes, we started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows, and what once was amazing was now common. Worse than common. It was boring. Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting. For a while.” — this is how Seth coins an idea of Purple Cow.
The book is all about “remarkable”, something is worth talking about. Worth noticing. Exceptional. New. Interesting. It’s a Purple Cow. Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow.
Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.
Before advertising, there was word of mouth. Products and services that could solve a problem got talked about and eventually got purchased. During advertising, the combination of endless consumer desire, and the power of TV led to a magic formula: if you advertise directly to consumer sales would go up. After advertising, we’re almost back where we started. But now the power of new networks allows remarkable ideas to diffuse through segments at rocket speed.
As marketers, we know the old stuff isn’t working. And we know why: because as consumers, we’re too busy to pay attention to advertising, but we’re desperate to find good stuff that solves our problems.
Most people can’t buy your product. Either they don’t have the money, they don’t have the time, or they don’t want it. If an audience doesn’t have the money to buy what you’re selling at the price you need to sell it for, you don’t have a market. If an audience doesn’t have the time to listen to and understand your pitch, you’ll be treated as if you were invisible. And if an audience takes the time to hear your pitch but decides they don’t want it . . . well, you’re not going to get very far.
Don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.
Differentiate your customers. Find the group that’s most profitable. Find the group that’s most likely to sneeze. Figure out how to develop either group. Ignore the rest. Your ads shouldn’t cater to the masses. Your ads should cater to the customers you’d choose if you could choose your customers.
In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.
If being a Purple Cow is such an effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn’t everyone do it? Because people are afraid. Some folks would like you to believe that there are too few great ideas. This, of course, is nonsense. If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable.
Being safe is risky
The old rule was “create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing”. The new rule is “create remarkable products that the right people seek out”.
Why do birds fly in formation? Because the birds that follow the leader have an easier flight. The leader breaks the wind resistance, and the following birds can fly far more efficiently. Without the triangle formation, Canadian geese would never have enough energy to make it to the end of their long migration. A lot of risk-averse businesspeople believe that they can follow a similar strategy. They think they can wait until a leader demonstrates a breakthrough idea, and then rush to copy it, enjoying the break in wind resistance from the leader. If you watch the flock closely, though, you’ll notice that the flock doesn’t really fly in formation. Every few minutes, one of the birds from the back of the flock will break away, fly to the front, and take over, giving the previous leader a chance to move to the back and take a break.
If they make a mistake and choose the wrong bird to follow, they lose. Companies have the same trouble. They follow an industry leader that stumbles. Or they launch a thousand imitations of their first breakthrough product — never realizing that the market is drying up.
Vanilla is a compromise ice cream flavor, while habanero pecan is not. While there may be just a few people who are unwilling to eat vanilla ice cream, there are legions of people who are allergic to nuts, sensitive to spicy food, or just plain uninterested in eating a challenging scoop of ice cream. The safe compromise choice for a kid’s birthday party is the vanilla. But vanilla is boring. You can’t build a fast-growing company around vanilla.
The opposite of “remarkable” is “very good”
Ideas that are remarkable are much more likely to spread than ideas that aren’t. Yet so few brave people make remarkable stuff. Why? Because they think that the opposite of “remarkable” is “bad” or “mediocre” or “poorly done.” Thus, if they make something very good, they confuse it with being virus-worthy.
If you travel on an airline and they get you there safely, you don’t tell anyone. That’s what’s supposed to happen. What makes it remarkable is if the service is so unexpected that you need to share it.
People don’t buy paint; they buy painted walls.
Find the market niche first, and then make the remarkable product — not the other way around. Smart businesses target markets where there’s already otaku. It’s not about being weird. It’s about being irresistible to a tiny group of easily reached sneezers with otaku. Irresistible isn’t the same as ridiculous. Irresistible for the right niche is just remarkable.
The Purple Cow is just part of the product life cycle. You can’t live it all the time. It is too risky, too expensive. But when you need to grow or need to introduce something new, it’s your best shot. Once you’ve managed to create something truly remarkable, the challenge is to do two things simultaneously:
- Milk the Cow for everything it’s worth. Figure out how to extend it and profit from it for as long as possible.
- Create an environment where you are likely to invent a new Purple Cow in time to replace the first one when its benefits inevitably trail off.
If someone in your organization is charged with creating a new Purple Cow, leave them alone! Don’t use internal reviews and usability testing to figure out if the new product is as good as what you’ve got now. Instead, pick the right maverick and get out of the way.
