Seth Godin’s Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

I bought a copy of Seth Godin’s the Purple Cow two years ago before leaving on a trip to Kathmandu, Nepal. I was going for a two month stay because of a seminar and wanted to do some airplane reading because it was a long flight.

In my haste to leave, I forgot about the book and left it at home. By the time I went back home, I wasn’t really in the mood to read it and so left it on the bookshelf, where it got dusty.

Fast forward two years. Three weeks ago, I took out the book and flipped a few pages because I was bored. And gradually over the course of a few days, I finished the Purple Cow. I thought it’ll be good to finally do a short review of it.

The main reason why I bought the book in the first place was because it was light reading. There’s only 145 pages and from what I’ve sampled, it was written in an informal conversational style and it wasn’t like a business textbook, which is great.

The second reason was because I wanted to know why Godin meant by the word Purple Cow. It was intriguing and his reputation as a marketing guru helped as well. I was interested in knowing what this man had to say.

What is the Purple Cow?

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The concept of the Purple Cow is the core of the entire book and I’ll try to pull out some examples offered by Godin on what constitutes and defines the Purple Cow. This will give you a good idea of what the book is about.

Seth Godin first mentions the idea of the Purple Cow, when describing his trip to France and how he sat in a car while driving through pastures with grazing cows:

Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting. (For a while.)

The essence of the Purple Cow is that it must be remarkable. In fact, if “remarkable” started with a P, I could probably dispense with the cow subterfuge, but what can you do? This book is about the why, the what, and the how of remarkable.

On page 24, Seth Godin further defines the purpose of the book:

My goal in Purple Cow is to make it clear that it’s safer to be risky –to fortify your desire to do truly amazing things. Once you see that the old ways have nowhere to go but down, it becomes even more imperative to create things worth talking about.

After suggesting that it is useless to advertise to anyone except people with influence, Godin gave a short definition of the Purple Cow (page 37):

Products, services and techniques so useful, interesting, outrageous, and note-worthy that the market will want to listen to what you have to say. No, in fact, you must develop products, services, and techniques that the market will actually seek out.

Having demonstrated the value of the Purple Cow for all businesses, Godin then explains the obstacles to creating successful Purple Cows (pg 45):

If being a Purple Cow is such an easy, effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn’t everyone do it? Why is it so hard to be Purple? Some folks would like you to believe that there are too few great ideas or that their product or their industry or their company can’t support a great idea. This, of course, is nonsense.

The Cow is so rare because people are afraid. If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise– ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.

Putting the Purple Cow into practice isn’t something remarkably difficult. It needs to be implemented within a repeatable process (pg 59):

Well, creators of the Purple Cow must measure as well. Every product, every interaction, every policy is either working (persuading sneezers and spreading the word) or not. Companies that measure will quickly optimize their offerings and make them more virus-worthy.

As it becomes easier to monitor informal consumer networks, the winners will be companies that figure out what’s working fastest–and do it more (and figure out what’s not working–and kill it).

What happens after you’ve created a Purple Cow? Two main things to do (pg 64):

Once you’ve managed to create something truly remark-able, the challenge is to do two things simultaneously: 1) Milk the Cow for everything it’s worth. Figure out how to extend it and profit from it for as long as pos-sible. 2) Create an environment where you are likely to invent a new Purple Cow in time to replace the first one when its benefits inevitably trail off.

Of course, you need to realize that the Purple Cow is all about taking risks and going all out, especially when you are in a very competitive field (pg 77):

The lesson here is simple: The more intransigent your market, the more crowded the marketplace, the busier your customers, the more you need the Purple Cow. Half-measures will fail. Overhauling the product with dramatic improvements in things the right customers care about, on the other hand, can have a huge payoff.

Sooner or later, you’ll come to realize that The Purple Cow is unpredictable and it’s something you’ll have to develop through trial and error (pg 85)

So is there a foolproof way to create a Purple Cow everytime? Of course not.. Looking in our rear-view mirror, we can always say, “Of course that worked.” By definition, a genuine Purple Cow is some-thing that was remarkable in just the right way. When we take our eyes off the rear-view mirror, though, creating a Purple Cow suddenly gets a lot more difficult.

Godin tells the reader that he doesn’t have the answer but he offers a system:

The system is pretty simple: Go for the edges. Challenge yourself and your team to describe what those edges are (not that you’d actually go there), and then test which edge is most likely to deliver the marketing and financial results you seek.

By reviewing every other P – your pricing, your packag-ing, and so forth–you sketch out where your edges are. . . and where your competition is. Without understand-ing this landscape, you can’t go to the next step and figure out which innovation you can support.

It’s not the tactics or the plan that joins the Purple Cow products together. It’s the process organizations use to discover (intentionally or accidentally) the fringes that make their products remarkable.

Basically, that’s the Purple Cow and how it can help your business. What do I think of the book? I thought it was an interesting read, particularly because Godin used a lot of mini case-studies to highlight his theories.

Another thing I liked about it was that there were ‘takeaway points’, a short blurb after each case study for you to jot down and remember. This is useful when you want to take notes after reading but are too lazy to scan through the book.

How to Use the Purple Cow for Your Business

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The Purple Cow is really a strategy book. It doesn’t teach you exactly what to do but offers guidelines, examples and rough principles which make you realize what you should do to improve your business and make it remarkable.

Sometimes, books like this can be difficult to ‘use’. There’s a lot of ideas so what you really need to do is to extract the essence and apply it to a concrete problem. For example, after reading each chapter, I wrote down lines which I thought were interesting and then ‘converted’ them into actions or tasks to do.

This allows me to process what I’ve read and turn them into something I can immediately use to improve my websites. I know very well that if I just read the Purple Cow and then left it alone, I would certainly forget the principles or ideas within soon enough. The same thing happens to college courses, doesn’t it?

The ideas contained in the Purple Cow have been repeated by many thinkers, bloggers and marketers in different formats so some of what you read may seem familiar. However, this isn’t really a how-to or do-this book. It needs to be re-framed and contextualized to suit your situation/product/business.

All in all, the Purple Cow is a good read and if you do get it, enjoy the ideas and remember to put them into practice. A book like this waxes poetic on marketing ideologies but it’s useless if you don’t take that big step to create a Purple Cow.

For more information on the Purple Cow, check out the official website.

Weekend Media is a weekly editorial which showcases intriguing books, videos and films which are relevant to topics covered on Dosh Dosh. Published every Saturday or Sunday, these articles are designed to be easily digested and maximally useful.

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