Name: Purple Cow
Rating: 4.3 (292 reviews)
Author: Seth Godin

What’s in it for me: find out why not being exceptional means death for a company.

If you look at a field of cows, guess what you’ll see? Probably, the view will be dominated by black and white, with perhaps a few splotches of brown thrown in if you’re lucky. But probably none of these will really grab your attention.

But now imagine that you spot, against all odds, a Purple Cow in the field! It’s safe to say you’d take notice, because a Purple Cow really is something remarkable!

There’s a lesson in there for all companies: if your products are like the conventional black and white or even brown cows, you can’t hope to attract anyone’s attention. Instead, you need to create something exceptional: a Purple Cow.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why your customers are your best marketers;
why the Leaning Tower of Pisa attracts over 100 times the amount of visitors than the Pantheon does; and
why being ridiculed can be a good thing.

Advertising is losing its power because it is so abundant.

You may have noticed that there is a tremendous change underway in the dynamics of marketing.

In the past, if you turned on the television or read a newspaper, you would probably only see a few products being advertised. This rarity made those products seem automatically trustworthy.

Today, however, countless products are being advertised in countless ways, so the consumer is overwhelmed with advertisements. This has made capturing the consumer's attention almost impossible.

This is due to the fact that people are simply too busy to recognize and focus on all the advertising around them. An illustrative anecdote of this is provided by the author: Once at a nice hotel, he asked a few people around him reading a newspaper to name two companies with full-page advertisements in the paper. No one could remember even two.

This obliviousness stems from the fact that consumers ignore marketing unless it meets their exact needs. After all, you wouldn’t really take notice of car ads unless you needed a new car.

This also means that traditional advertising in mass media is becoming less effective.

Say your company buys a television ad. A mass of people will see it, yes, but only a fraction of that mass actually wants your product. And only a fraction of those people is willing to actually pay attention to your advertisement. Finally, only a fraction of this last subset is actually willing to buy your product.

Imagine you’re launching a new brand of pain relief medication and want to advertise them. The trouble is, there’s already a multitude of pain relief brands available. This means you need to overcome three obstacles:

First, you need to find consumers who want a pain reliever. Second, from this group, you need to find those customers who aren’t happy with the current options. Finally, you need to find the people who will actually listen to what you’re saying and buy your product.

These trends make it increasingly challenging to really reach your target customers and market your products.

Today, taking risks is a safer strategy than avoiding risks altogether.

No doubt you’ve seen a lot of remarkable products and services out there, so you know there are many different potential ways to achieve this.

Most companies, though, are reluctant to explore ideas for becoming remarkable, because they are afraid of trying something new.

Market to the people who are looking for your solution to their problems, and measure the efficacy of that marketing.

As you’ve already no doubt surmised, the majority of advertisements today are ineffective: the people who see them either aren’t interested in the product or they’re not part of the early adopter segment who are open to new products and eager to spread the word about them

So you may well ask: What’s so special about the advertisements that do work? And how can you tell if yours do?

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