Godin’s thesis is a single move disguised as a barnyard joke: stop bolting marketing onto ordinary products and instead build the remarkability into the product itself, because a boring thing is now invisible no matter how much you spend advertising it. The “Purple Cow” is his name for that remarkability, a new P of marketing that suddenly matters more than all the others.
The Purple Cow: remarkability is the new P
Godin opens with the old marketing checklist, the “five Ps” (Product, Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Publicity, and more), and argues they are no longer enough. The new P is the Purple Cow. The image comes from driving through France past field after field of cows: beautiful at first, then boring within twenty minutes because they are all the same. A purple cow would be worth stopping for. Remarkable literally means “worth making a remark about,” and its opposite is not “bad” but “very good,” which is invisible. A safe landing on an airline is not remarkable; it is what is supposed to happen. Factories that set quality targets and hit them are producing the un-remarkable by design. So the durable instruction is to build things worth noticing right into the offering rather than slapping on a message afterward, because if the offering itself is not remarkable, it is a brown cow and no one will pass the word.
The death of the TV-industrial complex
For half a century marketing ran on what Godin calls the TV-industrial complex: find a growing niche, build a factory, buy TV ads, use the resulting sales to buy more ads and more distribution, and spin a virtuous cycle into a dominant brand. It worked for Procter and Gamble’s wall of brands (Tide, Crest, Bounty, Pampers), for Revlon, and for Quaker, who commissioned the Cap’n Crunch commercial before they had even made the cereal. That system is now dying because we are “post-consumption consumers”: we have what we need, want very little, and above all lack time. There are too many choices and too little attention, so busy people ignore ads and rely on trusted suppliers or on smart friends instead. Godin skewers this with the Wall Street Journal, where a full-page ad costs more than a house in Buffalo yet readers cannot name a single advertiser, and with the BearingPoint (formerly KPMG Consulting) ad written and approved by committee that no one will remember. The old rule was to make safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing. The new rule is to make remarkable products that the right people seek out.
Ride the idea diffusion curve: sneezers, otaku, and the edges
Because you can no longer reach the masses directly, growth has to travel through Moore’s idea diffusion curve, from innovators and early adopters across to the majority and finally the laggards. The center of the curve, the huge majority, is very good at ignoring you and will not even listen to its own friends about most products. So a group’s value is tied to its influence, not its size, and the money is in the left edge. The key spreading agents are “sneezers,” experts whom others trust, who will infect the network with an “ideavirus.” Godin’s other borrowed word is otaku, the Japanese term for a passion stronger than a hobby but short of an obsession, the drive that makes someone cross town for a ramen shop or evangelize a hot sauce. Smart businesses target markets where the otaku already exists: hot-sauce lovers support dozens of brands (Dave’s Insanity, Blair’s After Death) while no one gets rich selling mustard, because mustard has no otaku. The way through is a niche, not a mass: Chip Conley turned a run-down San Francisco motel into a rock-and-roll hotel by ignoring everyone except a few dozen guests; Zespri sold golden kiwifruit to upscale Latino foodies; and Krispy Kreme deliberately courts the donut fanatics first so they drag their friends in, proving that you find the niche, then build the remarkable product, not the reverse.
Safe is risky: why “very good” fails and boring is fatal
The problem with the Cow, Godin says, is really the problem with fear. Being remarkable guarantees some people will not like you; criticism is the price of standing out, and we are trained from first grade to color inside the lines and fit in. But in a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing, and not standing out is the same as being invisible. Jon Spoelstra’s catch-22 captures it: in bad times your boss says you cannot afford to be remarkable, and in good times he says you do not need to be. Godin’s rallying phrase, repeated throughout, is “safe is risky.” He points to the boring Buick and Drugstore.com that draw no criticism and no love, and contrasts them with the criticized-but-selling Cadillac CTS, the mocked Apple Newton that taught the lessons for the Palm Pilot, the low-key My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Bob Dylan going electric, and Andrew Weil defying medical orthodoxy to build a fortune while his safe classmates burned out. The Aeron chair is the anchor case: Herman Miller launched a $750 desk chair that looked strange and cost a fortune, and by putting the marketing investment into the product rather than the media, they made a design classic; making a safe chair would have been the single riskiest thing they could do.
Market the P into the product: marketers are now designers
If the Purple Cow lives inside the product, marketing can no longer be the department that communicates a product’s virtues after Engineering and Manufacturing are done. Marketing becomes the act of inventing, designing, pricing, and building the thing itself, which is why JetBlue’s CEO put his head of marketing into product design and training on day one, and why 1-800-COLLECT and Poland Spring are marketing triumphs baked into the offering. Godin’s favorite proof is Dutch Boy, which simply changed the paint can into an easy-to-carry, easy-to-pour jug: sales and distribution rose because the marketer changed the product, not the ads. Otis Elevator invited users to change their behavior (keying in your floor in the lobby) to turn every elevator into an express, a remarkable win at low cost. A slogan, in this world, is a script the sneezer uses to pass the word: Tiffany’s blue box, the funky hipness of Apple’s industrial design, and the pure single message of the Leaning Tower of Pisa all carry themselves without an ad budget. Dr. Bronner’s grows through its dense, unmistakable packaging alone. And because the marketing is the product, you must measure relentlessly (as Zara and direct marketers do) and never sand off the edges through compromise, since “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” and vanilla, the safe compromise flavor, cannot build a fast-growing company.
The magic cycle of the Cow: milk it, then build the next one
A Purple Cow does not last. Godin’s own examples curdle: Starbucks was remarkable and is now ordinary, and Stew Leonard’s dairy store was once so extraordinary he bused employees to see it, but the son “dumbed it down” for the masses and Godin no longer bothers to go. The benefits of remarkability have a half-life, so the discipline is a four-step cycle. First, earn permission from the people you impressed, an asset you can start building today with a simple email list. Second, work with the sneezers in that audience, giving them the tools and the story to carry your idea across the chasm. Third, once you have crossed from remarkable to profitable, hand it to a different team to milk it hard and fast, productizing and spinning out a thousand variations as it slides toward commodity. Fourth, reinvest and do it again, assuming that what was remarkable last time will not be remarkable this time. The counsel is to leave the maverick alone (no internal reviews, no focus groups, which killed nothing and predicted South Park would flop), to prefer launching ten products at $10 million each over one at $100 million, and to accept that the very unpredictability of the outcome is what makes it work. Being safe is the one strategy guaranteed to fail.
Lessons worth keeping
- Build the remarkable into the product; if the thing itself is boring, no marketing budget can rescue it.
- “Very good” is invisible. The opposite of remarkable is not “bad,” it is unremarkable, and unremarkable is fatal in a crowded market.
- Safe is risky. Criticism is the toll for standing out, and the projects that are never criticized are the ones that ultimately fail.
- Design for the edges, not the center. Target a niche where sneezers and otaku already exist, then let the idea diffuse outward.
- A slogan is a script for word of mouth; make it true, consistent, and worth passing on.
- Measure everything and never compromise the edges to win committee buy-in.
- Milk a winning Cow hard because its benefits decay, but simultaneously invest in building the next one.
- The same logic applies to a career: be remarkable when you are not looking for a job, and let references and reputation do the work a resume cannot.
Sources
- Book: Purple Cow by Seth Godin