How To Create Your Purple Cows And Transform Your Business

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After having read Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable” I feel inspired to share my thoughts.

If you have never heard of the P’s of marketing; product, pricing, promotion, positioning, publicity, packaging, pass-along, permission, Seth argues that there is a new one and its “Purple Cow”. The essence of the “purple Cow” is that what you are offering to your potential and existing customers is remarkable and not merely very good. If your offering is merely very good, your customer is expecting that and is unlikely to remark or “sneeze” about your product or service to their friends and network. Most companies aim for very good and aim for the centre ground where most customers are.

But the “sneezers” are found on the edges of your market. These are the people who are likely to talk about you on Facebook and Twitter and do the promotion work for you.

Being remarkable is safer than being very good. Ideas that spread win. If your idea is only very good it won’t get picked up by the sneezers and be spread.

In a survey highlighted in the book ,of the top most valuable 100 brands in the world in 2002 6% of the companies used the ” obsolete strategy of constantly reminding us about their sort-of-ordinary product. Why do you believe this strategy will work for you?”  It will be interesting to see what the numbers are like now, for sure that percentage will be lower now.

So how do you go about creating your own “Purple Cow”?

Seth recommends you ask the following questions when thinking about creating your purple cow:

• Could you make a collectible version of your product?
• Make a list of all the remarkable products in your industry. Who made them? How did they happen? Model the behaviour (not the product) and you are more than half through making your own
• Could you hire a person that is consistently responsible for creating remarkable products?
• Can you create a culture of aggressively prototyping new products and services?
• Could you get in the habit of doing practises that are “unsafe” so you can see the results?
• Can you find things that are “just not done” in your industry and do them anyway?
• How small can you go in your market? Find out about them and then create a remarkable product that they will want
• Can you change your product or service to make it more remarkable for the smallest sector of your market?

Do you want to grow your business? If you want to maintain your business then carry on being very good, but to have healthy growth that lasts you need your own purple cows.

My final view is that the book provides an excellent starting point for businesses to brainstorm ways of creating their own purple cows. However there is nothing new in saying companies need remarkable products and that traditional outbound marketing is not working as well anymore. What is new is the  information and numerous case studies on how the internet is changing everything, even back in 2002 . More and more businesses are being drawn to inbound marketing techniques which all use the internet. In the present economic situation where all marketing monies need to be accounted for, the book reinforces the need for high quality content creation and using online tools like Hubspot for your “idea virus” to spread.

Go create your own Purple Cows, be it a product, service or web/blog content its the surest way to grow your business.

Seth has another highly recommended book called “Tribes”. You can read our thoughts on the book in our article “How to find a trible and lead it“.