Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable

This article caught my attention, and I wanted to share it with you.

It is written about transforming your business, but it has wider and more significant application in regard to websites. These, unlike a business, always go through continual transformation, and they need the Purple Cow thinking to be really effective.

For both your business long term, and your success on the Internet, I hope you enjoy this article.

Getting Started

In his book, Seth Godin tells the story about when his family left the city to drive through the countryside and were (initially) excited at the sight of grazing cows. After driving for a few hours however, looking at cows got boring: the only thing that would have been worth their attention, Godin says, would have been a purple cow.

This feeling can be translated to a commercial setting. While the inventors of aspirin, or the frozen pizza, built their fortunes by selling a new product, today customers’ needs are by and large met and already provided for in an increasingly competitive, saturated market. To succeed, one must market a “Purple Cow”, an iPod or a Frappuccino. While the original marketing mix included such “P”s as Price, Product, Position, Publicity, Promotion, Packaging and Permission, the mosti important “P” in the future may prove to be the “Purple Cow”.

Why Read It?

To excel, organisations need to distinguish themselves from the competition: in this book, marketing guru Seth Godin likens the art of being recognised and of leading a market to a cow in a field in the countryside that will only be noticed by a passing driver if it is coloured purple. His book is a manual for creating the remarkable and standing out from the crowd. With customers increasingly satisfied – even spoilt – organisations have to find ways of not just meeting their needs, but exceeding them and finding entirely new ways to deliver value.

Contribution

1. Death of a salesman

Godin’s first contribution is to challenge conventional marketing and public relations wisdom that ascribes success to “share of voice” in standard media streams such as newspaper and television advertising. He highlights that even Coca-Cola’s fantastically expensive adverts do little to sell more cans of soft drinks and argues that the end of what he calls the “TV-Industrial Complex” with the saturation of global communication, places more emphasis on being people’s first choice, rather than simply a close second.

2. Know your business and be passionate about it

By understanding exactly what your business or product is, you can target your marketing more exactly and prioritise tasks. Godin uses most of “Purple Cow” to explore practical examples of remarkable products and services. What they all had in common – from the maker of an internal combustion engine to a publicist for the plastic surgery industry – was a strategic focus on using their unique selling points to meet a previously unexplored market. A market for luxury iced coffees did not exist when Starbucks first marketed its Frappucino”, but by doing something different, they created a profitable product.

Knowing what makes your business and customers tick will allow you more opportunity for success than ever before.

3. Brainstorm and reinvent

Many marketers and salespeople understand the importance of being passionate about their product, but what about developing a product that compels people to make decisions with the same passion? Godin cites salt as an example. For years, it was a commodity manufactured in vast quantities with greater economies of scale but diminishing returns. Manufacturers are increasingly realising the benefits of selling handmade, luxury brands – for instance, those targeted at gourmet restaurants – that add value in new ways and for which they can charge a premium.

By developing radical, maverick products, or by re-inventing old products so that they meet new needs in creative ways, marketing is at its most effective.

Context

The importance of being passionate about your product and of creating remarkable marketing strategies has been discussed by management guru Tom Peters (“The Pursuit of Wow”), and the way ideas travel through populations has been studied by Malcolm Gladwell in “The Tipping Point”.

Godin, self-proclaimed ‘agent of change’, argues that most marketers treat these concepts as fads and fall back on tried and tested but boring channel marketing strategies and advertising, hoping that word of mouth will do the rest.

With consumers spoilt for choice in a global market place, learning how to create a “Purple Cow” is essential. In a trouble-beset global economy, the only way to create a truly winning product is to be revolutionary. With increasingly flat, globalised communication, customers reject otherwise decent products, seeking only the most extraordinary and unique.

Source: Business Essential, A&C Black Publishers, 2009.

Further Reading: Seth Godin: Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable. London: Penguin, 2005.