Marketing guru Seth Godin has built a career on devising innovative strategies, using new paradigms, and embracing cutting edge technology in an effort to improve the marketing efforts of his companies and others. In Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, he tackles the idea of how a business can stand out in a crowded marketplace. While this book isn’t necessarily new (it was released in 2009) it is worth examining from a slightly different angle.
Early in the book, Godin relates a story of a trip when he traveled through the French countryside. The hills were dotted with cattle and the peaceful bucolic scene amused the visitors. Within minutes, Godin started to ignore the cows. “Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring,” he writes. “They may be perfect cows, attractive cows, cows with great personalities, cows lit by beautiful light, but they’re still boring. A Purple Cow, though. Now that would be interesting.”
His point is that in the past, marketing could sell a mundane product. You inundated the airwaves with messages about your laundry detergent or your pain reliever and you made a mint. But today, with so many products, so many marketing messages, so much noise in everyone’s lives, marketing will not cut through the chatter. Instead, the product itself must be truly remarkable.
Godin points out the success of when Volkswagen re-introduced the Beetle. The car, “was a success because of the way it looked and the way it felt to drive… Every time the very round Beetle drove down a street filled with boxy SUVs, it was marketing itself.”
Purple Cow is undeniably written for a marketing audience. While it’s not hard to follow and it’s too heavy on industry jargon, you may flip through the pages and think this book isn’t for you. But if you extrapolate our Godin’s ideas, the fact is that many of them directly relate to improving your social lives.
Because, while he uses the word “remarkable” we use the term “exceptional.”
Godin argues that a product must be truly distinct to stand out. As you’ve learned in the Stylelife Academy and in this issue of the magazine, you must be truly distinct to stand out amongst other potential suitors when you interact with a woman.
That can be undeniably difficult. Godin acknowledges this challenge. If the purple cow strategy is so amazingly effective, why don’t more business people do it?
“The Cow is so rare because people are afraid,” Goding writes. “If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise – ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.”
This certainly seems applicable to any man who has nervously chosen an eye-catching garment or who hesitantly performed a magic illusion in a crowded club. Standing out invites criticism, no doubt. But if you want to be a success – in business or in the social arts – you simply must take that chance. And you must reframe your concept of what the risk truly is.
“The lesson is simple,” Godin writes. “Boring always leads to failure. Boring is always the most risky strategy.”
In his view, the risk is not criticism, the risk is that your business will fail. In our arena, the risk is not being laughed at or scorned, the risk is not attracting the women we desire and finding the partner that fulfills our needs.
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin is a tremendously insightful marketing book on how to make your business stand out and be noticed. It is also, if you apply the concepts to the social arts, a valuable tool for learning how to be the exception and improve your social life.
