Want to Transform Your Business? Consider Using a Purple Cow

What do Starbucks, Jet Blue, Krispy-Kreme, Dutch Boy and Hard Candy have that many other companies don't? How do they continue to achieve spectacular growth and confound critics?

According to marketing guru Seth Godin, the best-selling author of Permission Marketing, these companies are successful because they have found a way to break through the marketing clutter by presenting a "Purple Cow" to consumers. In his new book, Purple Cow-Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (Portfolio, 2003), Godin writes, "Cows, after you've seen them for awhile, are boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting. (For a while)." The premise of the book is that to impress today's consumers, marketers have to come up with something truly remarkable (i.e., a Purple Cow).

Godin writes, "I believe we've now reached the point where we can no longer market directly to the masses. We've created a world where most products are invisible. Over the past two decades, smart business writers have pointed out that the dynamic of marketing is changing. Marketers have read and talked about those ideas, and even used some of them, but have maintained the essence of their old marketing strategies. The traditional approaches are now obsolete, though. One hundred years of marketing thought are gone. Alternative approaches aren't a novelty--they are all we've got left."

For decades, a big company like Procter & Gamble could sell everyday products through creative advertising, especially on network television, which delivered enormous audiences. Whoever had the biggest marketing budget in any category came out on top. But, today, consumers are too busy and/or too jaded to pay attention to marketing messages.

Instead, people rely more than ever on great word of mouth—the mysterious force that drove big success stories like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the original Palm Pilot and digital cameras. Today's smartest companies recognize this reality, and focus on delighting a core group of passionate early adopters, who will then spread the word to the mass market.

Some of the companies Godin labels as "Purple Cow" organizations include:

• Jet Blue, which made air travel a pleasure at a great price, and rapidly became more profitable than all the major U.S. airlines combined.
• Google, which avoided the clutter of other Web portals, focused on being remarkably useful, spent zero on advertising and thrived during the dot-com crash.
• HBO, whose bosses realized that if they focused on a single night of outstanding original programming and gave their talent a long leash, they could cream the networks.
• Dutch Boy, which recognized that everyone hates traditional paint cans, and delighted customers with easy-to-pour, reclosable paint jugs.
• Krispy-Kreme, which focused on making not just a decent donut, but a donut so amazing that people would drive an hour for it and then tell all their friends about it.

Godin stresses that it's neither easy nor cheap to create Purple Cows. It's not a marketing shortcut, but rather a fundamental business strategy. As he writes, "The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You're just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often).... It isn't cheap, but it works."

To test his own ideas, Godin created a unique publishing strategy to turn his book Purple Cow into a Purple Cow. Before he even had a traditional publisher lined up, he wrote, edited, designed and typeset the book on his own, and printed a limited run of 10,000 paperback copies, packaged in outrageous purple milk cartons. He alerted his core audience through his Website, and through an excerpt in Fast Company magazine. That edition sold out completely in 19 days and generated hundreds of e-mails from early adopters, who then started spreading the word about a book that wouldn't be widely available for months.

If you would like to learn more about marketing, consider these AMA seminars:

• Competitive Strategy: How to Develop Winning Marketing Plans and Breakthrough Strategies
  
• The Management Course—Marketing
  
• Fundamentals of Marketing: Your Action Plan for Success
  

About Seth Godin: Seth Godin is a best-selling author and entrepreneur. His four previous books include Permission Marketing, which was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a full year and spent four months on the Business Week bestseller list. He is also the author of Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez and Survival is Not Enough. Godin was the founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998. To find out more about Purple Cow visit www.apurplecow.com