1-Page Summary

While on a family vacation in France, Seth Godin and his family were delighted to see fields full of cows. Cows were a novelty to them, and seeing so many was exciting—briefly. It didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off, and then every cow looked much like the others. They’d seen enough of the same old brown cows that they’d become bored. But a purple cow, now that would be remarkable!

That same principle must be applied to product development and marketing. Making another brown cow like all the others won’t get you or your product noticed. You need a Purple Cow, something remarkable and exciting, in order to attract attention.

Mass Marketing Doesn’t Work Anymore

The traditional mass marketing strategies like TV commercials and newspaper ads just don’t work as well as they used to. People these days have less money, time, and attention that they’re willing to give you, so you need to create something that will really catch people’s interest.

While targeting as many people as possible may seem like the way to go (and is exactly what traditional mass marketing does), the unfortunate truth is that the majority will not listen to you. These people are looking for certainty and security, and they are far more likely to stick with what they know than take a gamble on a new product or service, even if it might be a little better. They have too many choices and too little time to sort through them as it is, and no guarantees that what you’re offering is what they want. No matter how clever your advertising is (or how much money you spend on it), to them, you’ll be nothing but more background noise.

To get attention for your product, target the right people. Your potential customers fit into a bell curve: On the left are the innovators and early adopters; the juicy center of the curve is made up of the early and late majority; and on the far side are the laggards, the ones who resist new products until the bitter end.

These days, the real value is in the innovators and early adopters. They will be the ones to market your product to the majority. Therefore, your Purple Cow must be both remarkable enough to attract the innovators and flexible or universal enough to appeal to the majority, once they finally hear about it from a source they’ll listen to.

Find Your Cow by Taking Risks

Finding your Purple Cow is a matter of looking for extremes. Take a look at your products, your advertisements, your image, even your pricing, and ask yourself: What are the absolute limits of possibility? For example, one limit of pricing would be giving your product away for free. It would certainly be remarkable, though it might not get the end results you want. A limit of design might be something so incredibly eye-catching that people are interested just from seeing your product, without any need for advertising.

You won’t necessarily be going to those limits, but you need to see where they are (and where your competitors are) in order to make a plan. Finding the right limit to go to is one of the most surefire ways to make a Purple Cow.

In today’s world of brown cows, playing it safe is risky. Making a middle-of-the-road product with broad appeal will all but guarantee that nobody notices it, and trying to copy someone else’s success is equally ill-fated. If your product is just playing follow-the-leader, then by definition it isn’t remarkable (unless you have some great new innovation building off of that other product). You need something that will stand out, something that’ll catch the attention of the innovators and early adopters who will pass it on to others.

Two examples of this idea are the Four Seasons and Motel 6. At first glance, it seems like they have nothing in common, yet both succeeded because they are both exceptional. Motel 6 is cheap and practical, while the Four Seasons is expensive and luxurious. They’re opposite extremes in the hotel industry, which means they both stand out.

What Remarkable Doesn’t Mean

There are several concepts that are not remarkability, but are commonly mistaken for it. Here are three of the biggest ones.

What’s Next?

Even if your product does everything right and catches everyone’s attention, you’re not done. Just making a single Purple Cow isn’t enough to run a business forever.

Your next step is to milk the Cow for all it’s worth. If you can, hand it off to another team who will be in charge of squeezing as much money as possible out of your Purple Cow as quickly as they can. Be aware that your window of opportunity won’t stay open forever.

Take the profits you earn and put them into developing your next big thing. Try to make it even better and more remarkable than the last. Know that you will fail, maybe a lot, before you hit upon your next big thing. It’s still better than trying to ride your one big win forever; you’ll eventually be overtaken by some new competitor with a new remarkable product. If you can keep this Purple Cow cycle going, your business could stay at the forefront of your industry for a very long time (and make a lot of money in the process).

However, don’t do something new just for the sake of doing it. Churning out mediocre products and ads is worse than doing nothing at all. Wait until you think you have your next Purple Cow before you try to catch people’s attention again. Remember, remarkability is the key to success, and playing it safe is the riskiest thing you can do.

The old days of safe products and mass marketing are over. The age of the Purple Cow is here.

Chapter 1: Why a Purple Cow?

Seth Godin and his family were taking a road trip through France. While driving through the countryside they were delighted to see fields full of cows. They hadn’t seen many cows before, so seeing entire herds was quite a novelty for them.

However, the novelty quickly wore off. Every cow looked much like the others, and it didn’t take long for these plain brown cows to become commonplace and boring. But if they were to see a purple cow, that would be remarkable—for a while, at least. You can apply that same concept to marketing, which is why this book is called Purple Cow.

The point of marketing is to catch people’s attention and to get them interested in your product. However, so much of marketing consists of regular old brown cows; the ads (and the products) all look the same. They’re not remarkable enough to pull people away from their busy lives and trusted products or services. That’s why you need a Purple Cow: something truly remarkable that will catch people’s interest.

As a case study, consider the Volkswagen Beetle. The original Beetle model did poorly until it got a huge boost from some clever advertising. That was the power of traditional mass marketing, which we will discuss in detail in the next chapter.

However, the newer Beetle model was remarkable. Its strange, rounded shape set it apart from all the big, boxy cars and SUVs on the road. The car advertised itself just by existing, and it was successful without much help from mass marketing. This is the power of the Purple Cow.

The Purple Cow Roadmap

Purple Cow covers a few different, though related, topics. First, the book explains how and why the traditional mass marketing strategies don’t work anymore. In short, people get bombarded with so many bland products, and the commercials that go with them, that it all fades to background noise. These products and their ads are vast fields of brown cows; in order to stand out, you have to be a Purple Cow.

The book then explains how ideas move through a population in a bell curve pattern, and how you can use that to your advantage. Traditional wisdom has you target the center of the curve, showing your ads to as many people as possible. However, the real value is in the small fraction of people who are ready and eager for your new product. They will be the ones to spread it to the masses.

With that background you’ll be ready to leverage the power of remarkability and create your own Purple Cow. There’s no foolproof system for it, but there are some general guidelines that will get you on your way to success.

However, just creating a Purple Cow isn’t the end of the process. You have to milk your Cow and, when the time comes, you have to breed it. The profits from one successful Purple Cow can fund many others and keep your business going; if you don’t do this, sooner or later you’ll get overtaken by a competitor with their own Purple Cow.

(Shortform note: Purple Cow contains 70 chapters, many of which repeat the author’s main themes and most of which are only a page or two long. For clarity and cohesiveness, we’ve reorganized the content into 6 chapters focused on key themes.)

Exercise: Picture a Purple Cow

Start thinking about how to make brown cows purple.

Chapter 2: The Downfall of Mass Marketing

(Shortform note: The failure of traditional marketing is the basis of Godin’s whole Purple Cow idea, and why he thinks it’s needed. Whether mass marketing is actually failing is a point of contention for many critics of Purple Cow.)

Traditional mass marketing runs on the “5 Ps”—there are actually a lot more than 5, but everyone has their 5 favorites.

Some of these Ps might include:

Whichever 5 you use, they’re meant to be a quick checklist to make sure that your marketing is effective and appropriate for what you’re selling. However, the 5 Ps aren’t enough anymore. To understand why, we need to take a quick look at the history of marketing and where we are today.

Before, During, and After the Age of Advertising

Before mass marketing, ideas (and therefore products) spread mostly by word of mouth. For example, if there was one vegetable seller in the market who had better produce than anyone else, that seller would get talked about in town and would get more business.

During the Age of Advertising, traditional mass marketing was king. The winning strategy was to put your ads in front of as many people as possible, and trust that they would want your product and be willing to pay for it. This used to be extremely effective, for a few reasons that don’t hold true anymore.

The main reason why mass marketing was so powerful was the TV-industrial complex. This term is a spin on the much-maligned military-industrial complex, and the system worked on the same kind of feedback loop: Companies would spend huge amounts of money purchasing ads. Those ads would then sell product, making profits for the companies, who then turned around and used the profits to buy more ads.

The companies with the best advertising made the most money and bought even more and better advertising. People came to believe that whatever they saw the most on TV had to be the best-quality products. If you’re doubting the power of advertising right now, think about cereal; every time you bought a box of brand-name cereal, you were paying extra money because of advertising.

However, the Age of Advertising is ending. Companies are spending millions of dollars trying to keep the loop going, and failing. One major problem is that traditional advertising is all about raising awareness for your product, but awareness isn’t enough anymore, as we’ll see.

According to marketing expert Sergio Zyman, two of Coke’s most popular commercials (“teach the world to sing” and “mean Joe Greene”) got tons of attention, but that attention didn’t translate to increased profits for Coke. Zyman had something similar to say about Kmart: Everyone knows about it, but that doesn’t mean they go there.

With the Age of Advertising coming to an end, we’re back to word of mouth advertising. However, that word of mouth is now hugely amplified by the internet and social media. The world is much more interconnected than it used to be, so ideas that catch on will spread much faster.

Why Mass Marketing Doesn’t Work Anymore

There are three major reasons why mass marketing is failing.

First of all, the obvious targets for mass marketing are gone. For example, think about Aspirin, the first major pain reliever on the market. It was cheap, was low risk, had obvious benefits, and almost everyone needed it sooner or later. Perhaps most importantly, it had no competition. It was a perfect candidate for mass marketing.

Now, though, there are dozens of painkillers out there. A new one would have a hard time finding traction in that crowded market, even if it is somehow a little better than the others. If you were trying to sell this new drug you’d have to find customers who need a painkiller, who are willing to try a new kind, and who have the time and energy to listen to your advertising. Even though almost everyone needs a painkiller at some point, the people interested in yours will only be a small fraction of the population.

Second, consumers will ignore you. This is a relatively new phenomenon; even twenty years ago consumers had more free time, more available money, and fewer choices in what to buy. There were fewer things to spend money on but, at the same time, people’s needs were mostly met. Therefore, business became about selling people what they want, and marketing got them to want more and more.

Today, the number of choices people have keeps increasing, but the time and money to sort through them all keep decreasing. (Shortform note: Consider the rising cost of rent and college tuition compared to just twenty years ago. Also think about expensive cell phone plans and all the online services billed every month, all draining would-be customers’ bank accounts.) As a result of this, people today are stingier with both their money and their attention. Especially now, people are most likely to stick with what they know or what their trusted friends suggest.

Mass marketing often runs afoul of the Law of Large Numbers: the idea that big numbers tend to come with big denominators. If you’re reaching millions of people, but only a tiny fraction of those people buy your product or click your ad, you’ve wasted time and money. (To avoid this problem, you need to figure out who’s likely to listen (more on that in Chapter 3) and target those people with the perfect message for them. Figure out the right combination of Ps to win them over.)

The third problem is that customers who are already satisfied aren’t likely to spread new ideas. Phrased another way, people who are happy with what they have aren’t looking for new products or services. To compound this problem, companies are constantly getting better at knowing what their customers want and delivering it, which makes it harder and harder for newcomers to get people’s attention.

A closely related problem is that it’s hard to spread new ideas through populations that are already cluttered with too much advertising and too much stuff. There’s so much advertising noise already; consumers are going to be reluctant to add to it. They won’t spread the word about a new product unless they’re certain the people they talk to will be excited about it.

Case Study: The Wall Street Journal

Many companies are not adapting to the changing times. They see new marketing techniques like the Purple Cow as fads, rather than proven strategies that should be embraced.

The Wall Street Journal provides the perfect example of this. A full-page ad in the Journal costs hundreds of thousands of dollars (Shortform note: Google puts the price at around $240,000), a price that many willingly pay to put their products in front of as many eyes as possible.

However, the ads don’t work. Godin once asked some people reading the Wall Street Journal if they could name even two of the companies who had full-page ads in the paper they’d just finished reading. They couldn’t. Also, they said that they had never—not once—looked for more information on a product after seeing an ad in the Journal.

The advertising clearly isn’t working, yet companies keep shelling out huge amounts of money for it. These companies don’t believe in the Purple Cow, and they don’t want to change their approach—they just want to do what works. However, this is exactly the point: The Purple Cow is needed because nothing else is working.

The Mass Product / Mass Marketing Loop

Mass marketing is used to push mass products; that is, products designed to appeal to everyone. However, mass products are boring. Companies trying to make products with broad appeal will take spicy foods and make them blander, sacrifice high quality in favor of low cost, and so forth. Products designed to appeal to everyone will not appeal to anyone.

Furthermore, mass marketing requires mass spending. Companies can spend tens of millions—if not hundreds of millions—of dollars on a nationwide product rollout. Frontloading that kind of expense demands fast and impressive results, which boring products are unlikely to get. It also has two side effects:

  1. You can’t launch as many new products because of the huge cost associated with each one.
  2. You have no time to reach the majority of the population (more about this in Chapter 3). You’ll have given up or, worse, gone bankrupt by the time the majority of the population becomes interested in your product.

Rather than spending all that money on advertising, you’re better off investing it into making something truly remarkable and letting the product speak for itself.

Consider Tide laundry detergent, made by Procter & Gamble. This is a product that’s continually improved and marketed based on old wisdom. P&G invests millions of dollars every year into making their product better—but not remarkable. Even with all the money they’re sinking into R&D, at this point, it’s not likely that they’ll come up with something so innovative and exciting that it attracts a lot of new buyers. This strategy is most likely left over from a time when people had the time and energy to seek out the best laundry detergent on the market. Now, however, most people simply don’t care. Their clothes get clean, and that’s good enough.

It’s not hard to see how Tide got locked into this cycle. In its early days, Tide was hugely successful, simply due to being a good product with good distribution and advertising. However, with the TV-industrial complex dying, ads are much less effective than they used to be. Right now, Tide’s distribution is the only thing keeping it afloat—Wal-Mart accounts for a full third of its sales, so if something happens to Wal-Mart or it stops carrying Tide detergent, the product is doomed no matter how much money goes into R&D.

This clearly is not a winning strategy. According to Purple Cow logic, Procter & Gamble should cut their losses, stop sinking so much money into a dying product, and instead use that money for exciting new innovations in other markets.

Chapter 3: How Products Spread Through a Population

To fully understand why the traditional strategies don’t work anymore, we need to understand how ideas (and therefore products) spread through a population. Geoff Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm proposes a model for how this works.

Moore’s Idea Diffusion Curve

purple-cow-curve.png

The X-axis (horizontal) of the graph shows different types of consumers, and the Y-axis (vertical) shows roughly how many of each type there are.

The center part of the curve seems like the ideal place to target, and in fact that’s exactly what traditional mass marketing does. Remember the TV-industrial complex: Ads generate profits, which generates more ads. However, the most valuable part of the curve is often the left side: The risk-taking innovators and early adopters who are actively looking for new and better products.

Not only will the risk-takers be more likely to adopt a new product, but they’ll also often be the ones to spend the most money on it. For example, a large bank noticed that only 10% of their customers were using their mobile app every day; however, those customers accounted for 70% of the bank’s deposits.

On top of that, innovators and early adopters will be the ones to spread a new idea to the rest of the curve. This is far more effective (and therefore much more valuable) than targeting the majority with ads that they’ll just ignore.

However, oftentimes innovators and early adopters won’t sell your product very well. They don’t know your product the way you do, and they aren’t trained on the messages you’d want to convey. That’s why a good slogan is key. In the days of mass marketing, a slogan was a way to get your entire message across in just a few seconds during a commercial or ad; nowadays it makes sure that people give their friends the right message about your product.

The early and late majority are usually looking for safety and certainty, and they won’t buy a new product until the risk-taking innovators and early adopters have tried it and vouched for it. Also, many of the early and late majority are the “satisfied customers” mentioned before, the ones who aren’t looking for something new. Not only do you have to convince them that their product is worthwhile, you have to convince them that it’s worth switching from whatever they’re using now.

This is why the leading brand in a market has a huge advantage. People who don’t have time to sort through all the different choices will often just assume that the most recognizable name is the best (or at least good enough for them).

(Shortform note: For more on how ideas and products spread from innovators and early adopters to the rest of the population, read our summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.)

Case Study: Digital Cameras

Digital cameras initially sold very poorly because they were difficult to use and the photo quality wasn’t great. Twenty years ago, the only people you’d see with digital cameras were the tech fanatics who wanted to stay on the cutting edge—that is to say, the innovators and early adopters.

Manufacturers noticed this, and made great strides in improving both the quality and ease of use of their products. With the major problems fixed, digital cameras are well on their way to taking the market away from film cameras. (Shortform note: Purple Cow was first published in 2002. By now, they've all but completely replaced film.)

This happened because digital cameras were able to successfully move through the curve. Cameras without film were remarkable enough to attract the innovators, and (once the issues were fixed) had distinct advantages over the older film cameras. For example, digital cameras are much more convenient than film since you don’t have to get the pictures developed, and are cheaper in the long run because you don’t have to keep buying new film. These advantages are clear and easily demonstrated, which makes digital cameras easy products for innovators to sell to their friends.

Exercise: Who Is Your Innovator?

Identify your ideal first customer.

Chapter 4: Finding Your Purple Cow

(Shortform note: In this book, Godin uses the word “otaku'' frequently, and somewhat incorrectly, to mean someone who has an interest that is more than a hobby but less than an obsession.

The more common definition of otaku is a person who is deeply interested in something, usually Japanese anime and/or manga, to the point that it interferes with his or her social life. The word often has a negative connotation and is offensive to some. We are substituting the word “passion,” which is more appropriate and closer to Godin’s meaning.)

This chapter discusses how to leverage passion, both your own and your audience’s, in order to create a Purple Cow. If you make something that you’re passionate about, it’s sure to be remarkable; if you create something that others are passionate about, it’s sure to have a market. Passion is key.

This chapter also provides the outline of a system for making your own Purple Cows. In short, the system is about pushing some aspect of your business to its absolute limit.

The Passion, Art, and Science of Purple Cows

Passion is at the very core of Purple Cow theory. The best products are made by people who are passionate about them. For example, Starbucks’s CEO is a huge coffee aficionado. Starbucks makes good coffee because their CEO had them make a product that he—someone passionate about coffee—would want.

Unfortunately, it’s likely—maybe inevitable—that at some point you’ll find yourself working on a project you’re not passionate about. In that case, you still need to project an air of passion, even if it’s not real. There are two ways to do this.

The first option is to try to understand people who are passionate about it, and make something that they’d want. You might call this the art of projecting. This is a great skill to have no matter what you’re working on. Master it, and you’ll be able to make Purple Cows out of anything, not just something that you personally love.

The second option is to rely on tracking and measuring your sales and feedback. You can learn what’s working and what isn’t as you keep launching new products. This could be called the science of projecting (more on this in the subsection “The Measure of Success”). While this is a method of faking passion, in practice it’s the exact opposite of passion. If you’re using the science of projection, you must accept the results without any biases or preformed opinions.

A Purple Cow Is a Leader

Birds fly in formation because the leader reduces the wind resistance, giving the others an easier flight. Many businesspeople think they can do the same, getting the benefits of a Purple Cow while letting the industry leader take the risks. However, there are a couple of things wrong with this approach.

First of all, birds actually switch off leaders frequently, but people using this strategy will never become leaders themselves. Most will be office drones their whole careers. Strangely enough, this also applies to following your own lead—trying to imitate a previous success, not realizing that the market for it is gone now.

A good example of companies trying to follow their own lead is yoga books. Yoga books were extremely popular for a while. By now, though, most people who want them already have them, and they aren’t necessarily looking for new ones. Publishers who keep cranking out more yoga books will probably find their sales dropping off sharply.

Second, following the wrong “bird” can get you fired, laid off, or caught up in a bad situation professionally or even legally. Working for a bad boss can mean more than a frustrating work environment—it can be a major setback for your career.

The bottom line is: Whether you’re using passion, art, or science, whatever you create must be your product. You can’t play follow-the-leader with products and services—the leaders only succeeded because they were the leaders, and once you follow them it’s no longer remarkable (which is to say, not a Purple Cow).

The big question, of course, is what should you create? You want to make something successful, but sometimes it seems hard to figure exactly why things succeed. After all, Four Seasons and Motel 6 both did very well, despite seeming like total opposites.

However, the key is what they have in common: They’re unusual. Four Seasons is expensive and luxurious, while Motel 6 is cheap and practical. They’re opposite extremes in the hotel industry, meaning that both are remarkable in very different ways.

Your product has to be remarkable enough to attract the left side of Moore’s curve, but flexible and accessible enough to appeal to the middle sections—unless you’re planning to target a niche market (see an example in the subsection “Sell Your Audience What They Want or Need”). Remember that digital cameras didn’t see widespread sales until manufacturers fixed the ease-of-use issues.

It’s not productive just to list all of the specific brainstorming and creativity techniques that companies all over the world use successfully. Instead, the following subsections give some big-picture concepts that you can use to start finding your own Purple Cows. You may find yourself using all of them, or only one.

Take a Different Approach

Instead of trying to make better technology for how people normally behave, see if you can encourage people to change how they use your product in a way that makes your product work better.

This is exactly how Schindler Elevator Corporation shot to the forefront of the elevator market. Elevators aren’t your average product. They’re extremely expensive and have a limited market. Elevator companies used to compete by establishing relationships with agents using dinners and golf outings, but Schindler Elevator Corporation created a Purple Cow for elevators by identifying a problem and coming up with a remarkable solution.

The problem was that elevators were inefficient. They would make many stops on their way up and down a building as people got on and off in a disorganized fashion, wasting time while people in the lobby grew more and more frustrated waiting for their own elevators. Schindler’s solution was to develop a pre-sorting system where everyone keys in their desired floors to a central control panel. A computer then figures out the most efficient way to get everyone where they’re going, and tells the passengers which elevator to take. Rather than improving the product itself, Schindler improved how people use it.

Because of their Purple Cow, Schindler is now known by practically all purchasing agents and will always have a leg up on their competitors no matter how much advertising those others do.

Sell Your Audience What They Want or Need

Something remarkable will attract the people who are passionate about it. Passionate customers are the most valuable ones; people who will not only buy your product, but will spread it to others with the same interests.

For example, the US has a subculture of people who are passionate about hot sauce, and always looking for hotter ones. There obviously isn’t a huge market for sauces too spicy for most people to handle, but that hasn’t stopped dozens of such sauces from coming out and turning profits.

Compare that to mustard, which many more people use, yet few companies only make mustard. They can’t sustain themselves on mustard because people aren’t passionate about it.

This second part seems obvious, but sell people what they are in the mood to buy. Whether they’re passionate about it or not, people will buy something they need. To use that fact to your advantage, first figure out who your customers are—who’s on the left side of the curve in your market? Figure out a problem those people have, then sell them something that solves it.

For example, Altoids realized that young people who weren’t smoking wanted something to do with their hands and mouths. Altoids advertised specifically to that market by targeting cities with chic slogans and imagery. Then, in a second stroke of brilliance, they designed their tins to encourage sharing: The wide open top and strong smell attracts new customers on its own. The product is the marketing. Thanks to expertly targeted ads and a Purple Cow of a container, Altoids were a huge success and turned major profits.

Not a Plan, but a System

The bad news is that there’s no foolproof plan to get a Purple Cow every time. The very nature of the Cow prevents that—something created using a predictable formula would, by definition, not be a remarkable Purple Cow. However, there is a system, and it’s all about pushing boundaries. There are only two steps:

1. Ask yourself and your team where the edges of possibility are. Go back to your 5 Ps of marketing (whichever 5 you like to use), and figure out what would happen if you took each P to its extreme. Also research what your competitors are doing, and how close to each edge they are.

For example, consider Price. Perhaps you could give away your product for free. That would certainly be extreme and remarkable, though probably not good for your profits. Note that you won’t necessarily go to these edges! This is just a brainstorming exercise.

2. Next, figure out which edge will give you the results you want. What will attract people’s attention and get them to purchase your product or service? Finding the right edge to go to is how you create a remarkable product.

Could you make your product’s design so exceptional that it markets itself, like the new model of the VW Beetle? Or could you somehow improve your production and shipping processes so that you can significantly undercut your competitors’ prices, like IKEA?

This two-step process is the way people create their Purple Cows, whether they use it accidentally or on purpose.

While it’s not technically part of the system, a helpful tip is to get marketing people involved in the design process. Marketers will bring valuable perspectives to your brainstorming sessions, and will naturally be familiar with the Ps of marketing. Plus, a remarkable product will market itself (remember the VW Beetle), and a good marketer on your design team can help turn the product into its own advertisement.

Exercise: Create a Cow

The first step of creating a Purple Cow is determining where the edges of possibility are.

Chapter 5: What Remarkable Doesn’t Mean

There are several concepts that are not remarkability, but are commonly mistaken for it. Here are three of the biggest ones.

First of all, good is the opposite of remarkable. “Good” products designed to have broad appeal actually have no appeal. They’re boring, and therefore much more likely to fail than exceptional products with smaller target audiences.

Nobody talks about an experience that was exactly what they expected it to be, like an airline that gets you where you’re going and doesn’t do much more than that. It will be the remarkable things, whether they’re exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, that get attention. If that airline served prime rib for dinner, that would get talked about; if the pilot did loop-de-loops and barrel rolls mid-flight, that would get talked about in a different way.

On a related note, compromises are almost guaranteed to result in unremarkable products. Compromise is about finding broader appeal, getting people onboard who wouldn’t be otherwise. It goes against the very nature of the Purple Cow.

For example, habanero pecan ice cream is an extreme flavor combination, while vanilla is a compromise that almost everyone can agree on. However, while habanero pecan ice cream will have a much smaller market than vanilla, vanilla’s already been done to death; your company won’t grow based on vanilla ice cream. Remember: In nearly every market, the boring thing with mass appeal already exists. Compromises will almost always take you closer to that boring, already-entrenched thing.

For this reason, if you’ve tasked other people with creating a Purple Cow, leave them alone. Let them create the remarkable thing you’ve asked them to, without watering it down with questions and compromises.

Second, ridiculous is not the same thing as remarkable. Running an upside-down commercial filled with fart jokes would be ridiculous, and it might even attract some attention, but probably not the kind you want. Remember, you don’t just need attention, you need people to want your product.

The exception to this is if the ridiculousness ties into your business somehow; South Park made it big on just this sort of advertising.

Third, cheap is not remarkable. True, everyone loves a good bargain, but don’t rely on cheap pricing to move your product. The problem with this approach is that you’ll inevitably end up in a price war with your competitors; if they’re bigger than you, you’ll lose.

Again, there is an exception to this: If you have some breakthrough in production or transport that will allow you to sell your product significantly cheaper than your competitors, then you can rely on pricing to get attention. In other words, you can win the price war with a different type of Purple Cow.

Playing It Safe Is Risky

You can’t know ahead of time which ideas will work and which will flop. Try them anyway. As has been shown again and again throughout this book, playing it safe is almost guaranteed to fail.

The losers in this new world of Purple Cows are the large, old, entrenched corporations. They are unwilling to risk a hit to their bottom line in order to create remarkable products. They grew on the power of the TV-industrial complex and are unwilling or unable to change their strategies now. They (and their shareholders) want to stick with the perceived “safe” methods, and they suffer for it.

The winners are small and mid-sized companies. They have little to lose and a lot to gain by taking risks, so they develop Purple Cows and find success while their larger competitors flounder.

Make Yourself a Purple Cow

Interestingly, you can use this same principle on yourself. It doesn’t just apply to running your own business; turning yourself into a Purple Cow is one of the best and surest ways to attract attention and find a job.

Don’t play it safe in your career. You can make yourself a Purple Cow by constantly taking on the biggest, most ambitious, and riskiest projects you can find. While succeeding at those projects would obviously be ideal, failing won’t hurt you; even a failure will help get your name out there and associated with high-profile work.

Also, don’t rely on the same boring old resume that everyone else is using; it won’t attract attention. Instead, rely on people who know you to spread the word about how remarkable you are.

“References available upon request” is a quick way to get your resume thrown in the trash with all the others. However, a long list of remarkable references practically demands a face-to-face meeting.

The time to become a Purple Cow is when you’re not looking for a new job. That way, when you do need a new job, you already are the Cow. You’ll be a remarkable employee and the right employer will be thrilled to have you.

Bovinophobia: Fear of Cows

People will give many excuses for why they can’t create—or become—a Purple Cow of their own. They will say that there are no great ideas left; or, there are great ideas out there, but they can’t come up with them; or, they do have a great idea, but their industry or company can’t support it.

These are excuses covering up the real problem: fear. People are afraid to stand out, to go against the grain, and to be remarkable. The reason is that remarkable people attract negative attention and criticism, which is something that we’re taught to avoid from a very young age.

In school (at least in the US) kids are organized into classes, sat down in rows, and told to follow the rules. If your behavior doesn’t follow the rules, you’re punished. If your work doesn’t follow the rules, you fail. The best way to get through school is to do as the adults say and not make yourself stand out. Whether intentionally or not, this ingrains the lie that criticism is the same thing as failure, and people fear failure.

Fear creates a logical paradox where it is never the right time to take risks. During bad times, people will be afraid to take risks because they’ll think they can’t risk the financial hit of a failure. However, if you can’t afford to do it right, can you really afford to do it over? On the other hand, during good times people will say there’s no need to take risks. They’ll be afraid to rock the boat and lose what they have.

However, in business, trying to avoid criticism will guarantee failure. If you’re not taking risks to get people’s attention, you’re doomed. For example, J. Peterman’s clothing catalog is wildly over-the-top: Every piece of clothing is accompanied not by a simple description, but by a whole short story involving the item. The catalog is so weird and silly that it was parodied in Seinfeld—which was great advertising, and led to more profits for Peterman.

Rather than face their fears and take the necessary risks, people look for safety and certainty. They try to eliminate risk from their businesses by playing it safe. As a result, fewer and fewer people try to make Purple Cows.

However, the market is fast-moving and constantly changing. Innovators and early adopters are constantly looking for better products and services. There are so many options these days that people can easily take their business elsewhere, and they frequently do. If you find something wrong with your bank, for instance, there’s sure to be another one just down the street that might be more to your liking.

Therefore, even though fewer people are doing it due to fear, the benefits of creating a Purple Cow are increasing! In exchange for the (perceived) risk of failure or criticism, Purple Cow creators can get huge rewards if their products move through Moore’s idea curve.

The good news about people’s fear of Purple Cows is that every person who’s afraid of failure and criticism makes it easier for you to be remarkable. Every time someone makes another brown cow, it’s a product that your Purple Cow doesn’t have to compete with.

Exercise: Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

Brainstorm ways to become a Purple Cow.

Chapter 6: You Have a Cow—Now What?

There are two goals once you have an established Purple Cow, and at first they might seem to contradict each other:

  1. Milk it. Try to get as much out of your Cow as you can for as long as possible. However, recognize that the Cow won’t last forever, and that’s where the second goal comes in.
  2. Work to create a new Purple Cow—or at least create a work environment where it’s likely that you’ll make another. This means investing in new projects and innovations, encouraging creativity, and resisting the urge to stifle creativity with compromises.

There is a four-step process to pursue both goals at once, and keep the Purple Cow cycle going:

  1. Once innovators and early adopters pick up your product, get permission from those new fans to let them know the next time you might have a new Purple Cow. Don’t spam them! Only contact them when you’ve got something that’s worth their time.
  2. Work with those innovators and early adopters to help them reach more people. Give them the tools and the slogans they need to spread the word about your Cow.
  3. Once your Purple Cow is established, hand it off to a different team to milk it. Squeeze everything you can out of your product or service, and do so quickly before it’s no longer remarkable.
  4. Reinvest your profits into making a new Purple Cow, bigger and better than the last one. Fail as many times as it takes. A new success will be worth the failures.

Keeping this cycle going is the key to keeping your business thriving.

Yahoo! and AOL are two companies that didn't continue the cycle. They had one major success each and tried to coast on it forever. Early successes got investors to buy into these companies. However, when they moved entirely into milking their Cows rather than trying to make new ones, it was only a matter of time before they were shoved aside by a competitor: Google.

With that said, you don’t need to be constantly innovating (though it helps). The rewards for one Purple Cow can keep you going for a long time. For example, consider Starbucks. When it started, Starbucks shook up the coffee industry by marketing itself as a luxury brand using everything from Italian names to increased prices; but it was a luxury good that almost anyone could afford. It was a huge success and, even though Starbucks seems commonplace now, that initial push let them open tens of thousands of locations all over the world.

Doing something great is, of course, better than doing nothing. However, doing nothing is better than doing something mediocre. Lackluster products or marketing will actively harm your reputation. On the other hand, if you sit back and do nothing until you’re ready for your next Purple Cow, your previous successes can keep advertising themselves and your company.

A good example of this is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Rather than crank out mediocre new types of ice cream just to keep the brand fresh, they wait until they have a real winner to add to their lineup. They’re now one of the most popular ice cream companies in the world thanks to their steady stream of remarkable products. The lesson here is: If you don’t have your next Purple Cow yet, don’t do something just for the sake of doing something.

To tie it all together: Milk your Cow as much and as quickly as you can, and invest the profits into creating a new Cow. However, don’t bring out a new product just for the sake of doing so. Your new thing must be just as remarkable as your old thing. And always remember, playing it safe is risky!

The Measure of Success

Measuring your results is key, and probably seems like an obvious step. You need to know what’s working so that you can do more of it.

Technology is making it easier to monitor which ideas and products are spreading, and how; in other words, what’s “going viral.” Successful companies will use that data to push effective strategies and products, and quickly kill ones that aren’t working.

A good example of this is Logitech, a company that makes computer peripherals like mice and webcams. The internal workings of their products don’t change very often, because they don’t need to. What they already have works well for most people’s purposes.

However, Logitech is constantly monitoring the user experience, taking feedback, and working to improve their products’ ergonomics, style, and ease of use. While the way the peripherals actually work doesn’t change much, Logitech’s focus on customer experience results in a lot of people who love the company and market them to their friends.

Traditional mass marketers do not want to do this. A company Godin used to work for once pitched a product to a large magazine publisher that would let them track who saw and responded to their ads. The publisher was horrified; he knew that kind of data would kill his business, because it would make it clear that the magazine ads weren’t working anymore. It would also make life more complicated for the publisher’s clients, who just wanted to stick with the old ways.

Mass marketing is based on feelings and craft, not science and evidence. That is to say, it makes sense that making an ad with broad appeal and sending it to as many people as possible is the best way to get sales. Mass marketers live by that idea and don’t want data that contradicts it.

However, the old days of safe products and mass marketing are over. The age of the Purple Cow is here.

Checklist: Is My Product a Purple Cow?

Before starting a new marketing venture, refer to the following checklist to make sure your product is following Purple Cow principles. Be brutally honest with yourself while working through the list.