Book Summary: Purple Cow by Seth Godin

If there was a one sentence summary of this book, it would be the subtitle: transform your business by being remarkable.

Seth Godin has made a career out of making statements that provoke people to new ways of thinking, and on the topic of marketing, this is his best.

He was inspired to write this book after driving through the French countryside on a family vacation.

At first, they were enchanted (his word, not mine) with the storybook cows grazing next to the highway in picturesque fields. And then, he realized later, they simply ignored them. They blended into the scenery, one cow the same as the next.

They were boring (I'm yawning as writing this).

But had they driven by a Purple Cow, that would have been interesting. It would have been a remarkable sight. It would have been worth noticing.

According to Godin, that's exactly what we need to build directly into our products or services if we want to succeed today - something worth noticing.

And so this book is about the why, the what, and the how of being remarkable.

Let's get started.

Why Do We Need To Be Remarkable?

‍

According to Godin, there were three phases of advertising - before, during, and after.

Before advertising, there was word of mouth.

If you had a product or service that could solve a problem for people, they talked about it, and then other people purchased it too. As he says, the best vegetable seller at the market had a reputation, and her booth was always crowded.

During advertising, some interesting things were happening.

Prosperity was on the rise, people seemed to have an unending desire for more stuff, and the invention of mass media (TV in particular) all led to a simple but powerful formula - if you advertise your product directly to the end consumer, sales would go up.

But we are in the age of after advertising now. Even more so than when Godin wrote this book, we are right back to where we started - in a word of mouth economy.

This is new for us because none of us were alive and buying products during the "before advertising" phase. But what's clear is that the old way isn't working.

For a while, it worked very well. So well, that sometimes companies would work on the commercials first, and then make the products to go with the commercial.

That's exactly what happened in 1962 when an ad agency went to their client with a commercial for Cap'n Crunch, which at the time did not exist. But Quaker knew that they had a hit commercial on their hands and that they could run enough ads to get in front of every kid in America.

THEN they made the cereal.

Godin notices something interesting about this approach. The entire purpose was to create a product that appealed to the entire marketplace - that was the only way you could make mass advertising work.

You needed everybody to buy your product if you were going to make a profit. And when you make products that need to appeal to everybody, you start sanding off the rough edges, making doubly sure not to offend anybody.

If we had to boil down the formula for success in the "during advertising" phase, it would be this:

Create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing.

As far as breakfast foods go, Cap'n Crunch is about as safe and ordinary as you can get. And the marketing was fantastic. 50 years ago you could take that formula to the bank, over and over again.

Today, things are different.

What Is Remarkable?

Here's the new rule for success:

Create remarkable products that the right people seek out.

As Godin says, when you look at the companies that are creating remarkable products, they have very few things in common. In fact, if you take a look at the remarkable products in a single category, they often look like opposites.

A great example is The Four Seasons and Motel 6 - two hotel chains that couldn't be any different.

What they have in common is that they have nothing in common. They are outliers. They are tilted toward the edges. Motel 6 is very cheap and very clean. The Four Seasons is expensive and has remarkable service.

Which presents a problem for people trying to find inspiration in the marketplace for what you should do: the leader in the marketplace is the leader because they did something remarkable.

But now that remarkable positioning is taken, and so it won't be remarkable if you do it.

As Godin points out, there are two positions that are almost certainly already taken in your market - cheap, and boring. Cheap and boring are already taken, so you need to find something else.

This leads us to...

How To Be Remarkable

Ideas that spread, win.

And the people who can help you spread your ideas are almost always early adopters - that's because they love uncovering new and cool things and being known for the ones who discovered them.

As a quick aside, I've found Seth's ideas to be almost always a few years ahead of their time. He was talking about permission marketing years before content marketing went mainstream.

He was talking about the death of mass advertising long before social media came and disrupted the whole thing.

When he wrote this book, he was probably a good ten years ahead of his time when it came to the idea of The Purple Cow hitting the mainstream. Today, with the maturing of social media, this strategy is now more important than ever.

Here are the ways you and your company can put it into action.

Focus on the people

‍

Just like in the advertising age, you need to pay attention to the distribution of the product. Finding the right people to spread the word is critical to your success.

Ask yourself the following questions as you are developing your product to ensure that the "virality" is built-in:

1. How smooth and easy is it to spread your idea?
2. How often will people pass it on to their friends?
3. How tightly knit is the group you're targeting - do they talk much?
4. How reputable are the people most likely to promote your idea?

Advertise to the sneezers

Godin gives us a big idea to chew on when it comes to advertising in our after-advertising reality:

It is useless to advertise to anyone. Except for interested sneezers with influence.

Now, we could argue that this statement is no longer as true as when he wrote it. Facebook has made targeting the right people who will actually buy your product or service infinitely easier than it was 10 years ago.

But it's worth considering anyway. If you are going to spend advertising dollars, it would be much more effective to target the people who will spread your product and service to their audience, because the value you'll get out of them is much more than just their purchase.

When you do this you are not only buying access to their wallet, you are buying access to their network.

Find ways to cheat

Most Purple Cows find a way to cheat. They create an unfair advantage baked into their product or business model that makes them remarkable.

A great is an example of this is Vanguard, a company that produces a low-cost index fund (compared to the high-cost funds your broker sells you) that makes it impossible for a full-service broker to compete (if you understand that your full-service broker cannot, under any circumstances, beat the market on a regular basis).

Differentiate your customers

You already know that you should be identifying your most profitable customers and finding ways to serve them better.

Godin suggests you extend this to the group most likely to be influencers for you.

Then, figure out how to advertise to or reward both groups.

Then, ignore everybody else.

Feel the fear and do it anyway

‍

The problem with the Purple Cow is that doing it to old way feels safe. And we, as human beings, like safe.

There is a universal law that those who stand out get criticized. It cannot be avoided. Today, fitting in is the same as being invisible. And being invisible is the same as being dead.

So ask yourself what you are doing today that involves following the leader. Then ask yourself what would happen if you abandoned those ways and carved a new path.

That's exactly what the team at Herman Miller did when they introduced the Aeron chair, which when it was introduced cost many times what a regular office chair cost.

Instead of making a boring and safe chair and spending the money on marketing, they spent their money on the product.

As Mark Schurman from Herman Miller says,

"The best design solves problems, but if you can weld to that the cool factor, then you have a home run."

Milking the cow

Starbucks is a great example of a Purple Cow evolution story.

First, they created a coffee experience that was so much better than what the alternatives were that they quickly became a worldwide phenomenon.

Then, they went into the "milking the cow" phase, trying to profit from their big win for as long and as quickly as they could. But, as we know the story goes, they were so busy milking that they forgot what made them remarkable in the first place.

And so Howard Schultz had to step back into the CEO role to reinvigorate the brand.

This brings us to Godin's advice on how to create a Purple Cow that lasts. He says we need to do two things simultaneously:

1. Milk the cow for everything it's worth.
2. Create an environment where you are likely to invent a new Purple Cow in time to replace the first when its benefits inevitably trail off.

We won't go down that rabbit hole right now because the problem for most people is to create one in the first place. But if you are lucky enough to get there, realize that this is your next step.

Stop making "very good" stuff

‍

It's easy to convince yourself that what you are doing is remarkable when it fact it is merely "very good."

As an example, an airline might convince themselves that being the airline with the best safety record or on-time arrivals makes it remarkable. Nobody is going to give you a gold star for those things.

Remember, what makes something remarkable is that people feel compelled to share it with everybody they know.

If you are making "very good" stuff, Godin asks us a difficult question:

How fast can you stop?

Case In Point: Dr. Bronner's

Dr. Bronner's was included as a case study in the book because it's pretty damn remarkable in what has to be one of the most commoditized markets on the planet - soap.

The company does no advertising at all. You could argue that the soap isn't much better than the competition. What makes it remarkable is the packaging.

And there are no pretty pictures designed by a creative director at an ad agency. No, because that would be boring and average. These soap bottles contain thousands of words. Some might call them crazy words.

Here's an example:

Balanced food for mind-body-spirit is our medicine.

Pure non-sense straight from the mind of Dr. Bronner himself. Just imagine yourself over at a friend's house washing your hands in their bathroom and reading those crazy words. Now imagine coming out of the bathroom and NOT asking your friend about it. Impossible, I say.

Sounds like a pretty bad idea, right?

Well, the original Dr. Bronner grew the company through word of mouth to $4 million in 1997. Since then his sons have taken over the company and have grown it to $100 million in revenue by the time this summary was written.

How? Not by advertising, but by doubling down on being remarkable. They became a Certified B corporation committed to fair trade and organic farming, supporting living-wage initiatives, immigration reform, and cannabis legalization.

All things none of their competitors would have the intestinal fortitude to do.

David Bronner - the Cosmic Engagement Officer (yes, you read that right) says that these things aren't something that the company does in lieu of marketing - it is the marketing.

Well played Bronner, family, well played.

Conclusion

The time for you to be a Purple Cow has come. It's no longer a decision you get to make - it's the only path to success.

If you are not remarkable, you will get crushed by the competition.

Better get started now.

‍