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Books : Customer and Sales
 Purple Cow- Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable - Seth Godin
Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
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Seth Godin
Publisher: Portfolio
ISBN: 159184021X
This is a synopsis only. RESULTS.com recommends you buy the original book.
The old rule of marketing:
“Create safe, ordinary products – then sell them with advertising”
The new rule of marketing:
“Create remarkable products that your target market will seek out and talk about”
The old ways of marketing are dead. Playing safe is now risky. Stop advertising and start innovating. Be a purple cow. A purple cow is remarkable – it gets noticed. It gets talked about
Customers are harder to reach these days because they ignore advertising
“Interruption marketing” – i.e. mass media advertising is dying (TV / print / radio ads).
Just because you can market to someone, doesn’t mean they want to hear from you. To cut through you need to be relevant
Flashing banner ads on Yahoo don’t work, yet targeted contextual ads on Google do
Satisfied customers are unlikely to advocate your product (“The plane landed safely”).
You need to be truly remarkable – you need to offer them something that is worth talking about (“The cabin crew were smiling and telling jokes and really made us feel special”)
Being better than the rest is not good enough. Very good is not even worth mentioning - you need to be remarkably different – you need to be a purple cow
If you are worth talking about – you will get talked about!
You must design a product / service that is remarkable enough to attract the early adopters, yet simple enough for them to easily spread the word to others. Make it easy for them to share your story with their friends.
A big mistake many companies make is to keep changing their marketing message (marketers feel they need to justify their position). This makes it harder for your early adopters to spread the word.
Be consistent!
Your marketing slogan / tagline needs to be:
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True
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Consistent
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Worth passing on
How do you create an idea that spreads? Don’t try to make a product for everybody, because that is a product for nobody.
Focus on your most profitable market segment, the one with the most growth potential, the one that is most influential. Don’t cater for the masses. Cater to your ideal customer
Define your target market first, then design a product / service that is remarkable to them
Understand your target market’s needs and provide the solution in a remarkable way
Get their permission to communicate with them directly to keep in touch with their needs, and offer them more remarkable products & services that are relevant to them (“Permission Marketing”)
Most people are scared of standing out from the crowd, of being criticised - and thus create bland inoffensive products – this is a recipe for mediocrity.
The greatest achievements are usually the ones that get criticised the most. Push the boundaries.
Be extreme and don’t water down your offering to appeal to the masses. If you are not annoying some people you are not operating close enough to the edge. The edge is where the money is.
Explore the limits – be the fastest, loudest, hottest, coldest, slowest, hardest, oldest, newest, friendliest, most hated, most efficient, biggest, smallest etc. Whatever everyone else is doing – do the opposite – and do it in a remarkable way
Make it safe for your staff to take risks and fail. Fail fast, fail cheap.
Measure everything, figure out what’s not working and stop it, figure out what works and do more of it.
Starbucks was remarkable a few years ago. Now they are boring, but that first burst of purple cow innovation allowed them to become one of the largest brands in the world.
Once you have created a purple cow you now have 2 simultaneous challenges:
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Milk the cow for all it’s worth while it remains remarkable
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Invent a new purple cow to replace the first one
Instead of spending more money on advertising, spend more money on designing your product or service to be remarkable
Don’t use focus groups to pick your winners. Not everyone has to like your product. Compromise is the kiss of death.
Focus groups hated the Southpark cartoons (too vulgar), the Hummer (too big). But what made these products successful is that they:
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targeted a specific niche market
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they were remarkable
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the people in that target market thought they were worth talking about to their friends
Where do remarkable products come from? Usually from passionate people who are making a remarkable product for people like themselves. Howard Schultz – Starbucks CEO loves coffee.
The Burton snowboard, the IPOD, the Lear Jet all come from people who live for what they do. Remarkable products & services come from people who deeply care!
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