By Seth Godin
Nov 2, 2005, 10:42
Purple Cow, written by Seth Godin, is a fun, fast-read little book that challenges companies to be phenomenal, unforgettable and remarkable…..like a Purple Cow! Everyday customers come face-to-face with a lot of boring stuff – a lot of brown cows – but you can bet they won’t forget a Purple Cow. Here are some excerpts for this entertaining and informative book.
· In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible. Being safe today is risky.
· The “Purple Cow” is so rare because people are afraid – criticism comes to those who stand out.
· It’s people who have projects that are never criticized who ultimately fail.
· The lesson is simple – boring always leads to failure! Boring is always the most risky strategy.
· You will never catch up being the same, but you can catch up by being different.
· Very good is an everyday occurrence and hardly worth mentioning.
· Identify the 20% of customers that love what you do. What can you do to make these customers feel super special?
· Doing nothing is not as good as doing something (great) – but marketing just to keep busy is worse than doing nothing at all.
· Go for the Edges. Organizations that discover the fringes make products remarkable.
· “Instead of selling what we wanted to sell, we sold what people wanted us to sell, and figured out how to make money doing it”. (Brad Anderson – CEO of Best Buy)
· Remarkable isn’t always about changing the biggest machine in your factory. It can be the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand, or price a revision to your software.
· Get in the habit of doing the unsafe thing.
· Cheap is a lazy way out of the battle for the Purple Cows…a marketer who has run out of great ideas.
· The path to lifetime job security is to be remarkable
· Ask, “why not?” Almost everything you don’t do has no good reason for it. Almost everything you don’t do is the result of fear or inertia or a historical lack of someone asking, “why not?”
· Copy. Not from your industry, but from any other industry. Find an industry more dull than yours, discover who’s remarkable and do what they did.
· Find things that are “just not done” in your industry, and do them.
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