Purple cow by Seth Godin

Very good is bad.

Purple cow by Seth Godin is another excellent short book but one with a single, clear message (and that type of book tends to stick in my mind the most fervently): in business, you need to be absolutely outstanding or you won’t make it (big). In order to be memorable, you must have some form of totally unique characteristic that is ‘remarkable’. Godin uses the analogy of a purple cow, which if you saw you would probably comment to your friends about. He argues that the best products & organisations are those that employ such a schema.

Key points:

• Marketing through ‘traditional’ advertising is no longer as successful as it was (e.g. in the 80s-90s) due to a whole host of reasons.
• In order to stand out you must have a ‘remarkable’ product or company. This should not be a small, incremental difference but a substantial change that will cause people to stop and want to tell people about what you’re doing. For example:
  • Offer a customer service that no-one else can or will
  • Sell your product 33% cheaper than the nearest competitor
  • Have an outrageous design for your shop
• This is all centred around the product that is being sold, rather than the marketing. If you have a stand-out product (to include customer service, if you’re in the service industry) then that is what drives sales. Marketing alone is unable to compromise for a mediocre product.
• You have to take risks to not be boring
  • Don’t aim to just be ‘very good’

Whilst I am heavily on-board with the message, it (along with books like Zero to One) does risk making you feel like if you’re not the next Starbucks or 23andMe then you’re nothing. But in reality, the majority of contributions to society are from people who are working hard and doing a really good job. Seth Godin may consider them to be only regular bovines however they are the backbone of communities all over the country.

More books like this:

• Zero to one by Peter Thiel
• Made to stick by Chip & Dan Heath
• Start with why by Simon Sinek

Here are one, two, and three other summaries/reflections on this book.