PDF Summary:Purple Cow, by Seth Godin

...

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...

...

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...

...

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...

...

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...

...

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...

...

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...