cover image for Purple Cow

Purple Cow

Seth Godin

6/10
Recommended to me by my current employer Fearless it details how new marketing needs to rely on particulalry remarkable products over traditional things like TV advertising
  • We live in an era when most easy remarkable problems have been solved and people are no longer proactively looking for something genericly useful that everyone needs (like pain killers)
  • To differentiate yourself you need to be remarkable in some fashion
  • Being remarkable leads to the few people who use your product becoming 'sneezers' and thus spreading the product to all their friends
  • Remarkable is a very loose term and can range wildly from extremely niche like disgusting horror films, excessively cheap like while still solid quality like McDonalds or Ikea, process shifting like Amazon and the popularization of online shopping, extremely high end like the $2000 hand made silk scarves, outstanding service like people who will take hours and walk you through complex tasks or return policies that extend out decades and cover everything, extreme ease of use or simplicity like with touch screens
  • Related but not in the book is the concept of differentation in a variety of 6 categories Product (Features, Performance, Efficacy, Durability, Reliability), Service (Ordering Ease, Delivery, Installation, Customer Training), Channel (Coverage, Expertise, Performance), Relationship (Competency, Courtesy, Reliability, Responsiveness), Reputation, Price (cheap/expensive, payment model)
;