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Purple Cow explores how and why traditional mass marketing is failing in today’s market, and how your business can thrive without it. Your business needs to stand out, like a Purple Cow would stand out in a herd of brown cows.

Author Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and marketing expert who’s written nearly 20 books on business and marketing, including several bestsellers. In Purple Cow, he teaches you how to leverage the power of remarkability to succeed in a world already overrun with brown cows. In short, he teaches you how to create your own Purple Cow.

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You won’t necessarily be going to those limits, but you need to see where they are (and where your competitors are) in order to make a plan. Finding the right limit to go to is one of the most surefire ways to make a Purple Cow.

In today’s world of brown cows, playing it safe is risky. Making a middle-of-the-road product with broad appeal will all but guarantee that nobody notices it, and trying to copy someone else’s success is equally ill-fated. If your product is just playing follow-the-leader, then by definition it isn’t remarkable (unless you have some great new innovation building off of that other product). You need something that will stand out, something that’ll catch the attention of the innovators and early adopters who will pass it on to others.

Two examples of this idea are the Four Seasons and Motel 6. At first glance, it seems like they have nothing in common, yet both succeeded because they are both exceptional. Motel 6 is cheap and practical, while the Four Seasons is expensive and luxurious. They’re opposite extremes in the hotel industry, which means they both stand out.

What Remarkable Doesn’t Mean

There are several concepts that are not remarkability, but are commonly mistaken for it. Here are three of the biggest ones.

  • Good is the opposite of remarkable. “Good” products designed to have broad appeal actually have no appeal. They’re boring, and therefore much more likely to fail than exceptional products with smaller target audiences. Nobody talks about an experience that was exactly what they expected it to be, like an airline that gets you where you’re going and doesn’t do much more than that.
  • Ridiculous is not the same thing as remarkable. Running an upside-down commercial filled with fart jokes would be ridiculous, and it might even attract some attention, but probably not the kind you want. Remember, you don’t just need attention, you need people to want your product.
  • Cheap is not remarkable. True, everyone loves a good bargain, but don’t rely on cheap pricing to move your product. The problem with this approach is that you’ll inevitably end up in a price war with your competitors; if they’re bigger than you, you’ll lose.

What’s Next?

Even if your product does everything right and catches everyone’s attention, you’re not done. Just making a single Purple Cow isn’t enough to run a business forever.

Your next step is to milk the Cow for all it’s worth. If you can, hand it off to another team who will be in charge of squeezing as much money as possible out of your Purple Cow as quickly as they can. Be aware that your window of opportunity won’t stay open forever.

Take the profits you earn and put them into developing your next big thing. Try to make it even better and more remarkable than the last. Know that you will fail, maybe a lot, before you hit upon your next big thing. It’s still better than trying to ride your one big win forever; you’ll eventually be overtaken by some new competitor with a new remarkable product. If you can keep this Purple Cow cycle going, your business could stay at the forefront of your industry for a very long time (and make a lot of money in the process).

However, don’t do something new just for the sake of doing it. Churning out mediocre products and ads is worse than doing nothing at all. Wait until you think you have your next Purple Cow before you try to catch people’s attention again. Remember, remarkability is the key to success, and playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do.

The old days of safe products and mass marketing are over. The age of the Purple Cow is here.

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PDF Summary Chapter 1: Why a Purple Cow?

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The book then explains how ideas move through a population in a bell curve pattern, and how you can use that to your advantage. Traditional wisdom has you target the center of the curve, showing your ads to as many people as possible. However, the real value is in the small fraction of people who are ready and eager for your new product. They will be the ones to spread it to the masses.

With that background you’ll be ready to leverage the power of remarkability and create your own Purple Cow. There’s no foolproof system for it, but there are some general guidelines that will get you on your way to success.

However, just creating a Purple Cow isn’t the end of the process. You have to milk your Cow and, when the time comes, you have to breed it. The profits from one successful Purple Cow can fund many others and keep your business going; if you don’t do this, sooner or later you’ll get overtaken by a competitor with their own Purple Cow.

(Shortform note: Purple Cow contains 70 chapters, many of which repeat the author’s main themes and most of which are only a page or two long. For clarity and cohesiveness, we’ve reorganized the content into 6 chapters focused on...

PDF Summary Chapter 2: The Downfall of Mass Marketing

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The companies with the best advertising made the most money and bought even more and better advertising. People came to believe that whatever they saw the most on TV had to be the best-quality products. If you’re doubting the power of advertising right now, think about cereal; every time you bought a box of brand-name cereal, you were paying extra money because of advertising.

However, the Age of Advertising is ending. Companies are spending millions of dollars trying to keep the loop going, and failing. One major problem is that traditional advertising is all about raising awareness for your product, but awareness isn’t enough anymore, as we’ll see.

According to marketing expert Sergio Zyman, two of Coke’s most popular commercials (“teach the world to sing” and “mean Joe Greene”) got tons of attention, but that attention didn’t translate to increased profits for Coke. Zyman had something similar to say about Kmart: Everyone knows about it, but that doesn’t mean they go there.

With the Age of Advertising coming to an end, we’re back to word of mouth advertising. However, that word of mouth is now hugely amplified by the internet and social media. The world is much...

PDF Summary Chapter 3: How Products Spread Through a Population

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The early and late majority are usually looking for safety and certainty, and they won’t buy a new product until the risk-taking innovators and early adopters have tried it and vouched for it. Also, many of the early and late majority are the “satisfied customers” mentioned before, the ones who aren’t looking for something new. Not only do you have to convince them that their product is worthwhile, you have to convince them that it’s worth switching from whatever they’re using now.

This is why the leading brand in a market has a huge advantage. People who don’t have time to sort through all the different choices will often just assume that the most recognizable name is the best (or at least good enough for them).

(Shortform note: For more on how ideas and products spread from innovators and early adopters to the rest of the population, read our summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.)

Case Study: Digital Cameras

Digital cameras initially sold very poorly because they were difficult to use and the photo quality wasn’t great. Twenty years ago, the only people you’d see with digital cameras were the tech...

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PDF Summary Chapter 4: Finding Your Purple Cow

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The second option is to rely on tracking and measuring your sales and feedback. You can learn what’s working and what isn’t as you keep launching new products. This could be called the science of projecting (more on this in the subsection “The Measure of Success”). While this is a method of faking passion, in practice it’s the exact opposite of passion. If you’re using the science of projection, you must accept the results without any biases or preformed opinions.

A Purple Cow Is a Leader

Birds fly in formation because the leader reduces the wind resistance, giving the others an easier flight. Many businesspeople think they can do the same, getting the benefits of a Purple Cow while letting the industry leader take the risks. However, there are a couple of things wrong with this approach.

First of all, birds actually switch off leaders frequently, but people using this strategy will never become leaders themselves. Most will be office drones their whole careers. Strangely enough, this also applies to following your own lead—trying to imitate a previous success, not realizing that the market for it is gone now.

A good example of companies trying to follow their...

PDF Summary Chapter 5: What Remarkable Doesn’t Mean

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The exception to this is if the ridiculousness ties into your business somehow; South Park made it big on just this sort of advertising.

Third, cheap is not remarkable. True, everyone loves a good bargain, but don’t rely on cheap pricing to move your product. The problem with this approach is that you’ll inevitably end up in a price war with your competitors; if they’re bigger than you, you’ll lose.

Again, there is an exception to this: If you have some breakthrough in production or transport that will allow you to sell your product significantly cheaper than your competitors, then you can rely on pricing to get attention. In other words, you can win the price war with a different type of Purple Cow.

Playing It Safe Is Risky

You can’t know ahead of time which ideas will work and which will flop. Try them anyway. As has been shown again and again throughout this book, playing it safe is almost guaranteed to fail.

The losers in this new world of Purple Cows are the large, old, entrenched corporations. They are unwilling to risk a hit to their bottom line in order to create remarkable products. They grew on the power of the TV-industrial complex and are...

PDF Summary Chapter 6: You Have a Cow—Now What?

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With that said, you don’t need to be constantly innovating (though it helps). The rewards for one Purple Cow can keep you going for a long time. For example, consider Starbucks. When it started, Starbucks shook up the coffee industry by marketing itself as a luxury brand using everything from Italian names to increased prices; but it was a luxury good that almost anyone could afford. It was a huge success and, even though Starbucks seems commonplace now, that initial push let them open tens of thousands of locations all over the world.

Doing something great is, of course, better than doing nothing. However, doing nothing is better than doing something mediocre. Lackluster products or marketing will actively harm your reputation. On the other hand, if you sit back and do nothing until you’re ready for your next Purple Cow, your previous successes can keep advertising themselves and your company.

A good example of this is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Rather than crank out mediocre new types of ice cream just to keep the brand fresh, they wait until they have a real winner to add to their lineup. They’re now one of the most popular ice cream companies in the world thanks...

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