Book summary-Purple cow by Seth Godin: 5 Great ways to transform your business by being remarkable

Purple cow by Seth Godin

    

      I started a business in the year 2018 and like most other businesses out there, I had tens of people to compete with. If you’ve been in the business world long enough you’ll know what the biggest problem of every business is; Competition.

      Competition competition, because it takes away the customers and cash. But wait! What if there’s a way to shoot your competitors in the head, kill them and be the king in market place?

      Don’t call me to be part of your murder case. But here is the point. You can actually kill the competition, just by being different. That’s what I did since 2019 and with every of my business ever since then.

      The first major lesson in the Purple Cow is; don’t fight with competition. Create remarkable product instead.

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      Let’s move to the second lesson. Ok but, what if you have all this money to spend on advertisement? What if you can interrupt everyone and put your product into their noses?

     What if all you could come up with is another average products, but with big marketing pulse? Such strategy worked so well in the last 50 years. With television as the only media and only few of the TV stations, an average consumer has very limited options.

     Today, with an average human seeing more than 144 advertisements every day and with his fingers on his Smartphone, and the ability to compare hundreds of products and prices. Your one million dollars marketing budget can’t make your product successful.

      Take a moment to think about mighty companies that have fallen in history. Think about Nokia. Think about Yahoo! Think about Kodak. They all had large marketing budget, but they failed.

      In today’s tough business environment, your average product won’t succeed, even with all of the money in the world to interrupt all of us.

      The second major lesson in the Purple Cow is; “the traditional advertisement has lost its power”.

      I recently started working on a new business project with one of my business partners. During one of our brainstorming sections, I suggested that we should design our service for women alone.

      Yes, I know what you may be thinking. That’s discriminatory? Maybe, but at least, feminists won’t be angry here. But wait a minute!

     We have another side of our business strategy which involves selling our unisex services to men only. Now, feminists would be angry.

      Anyway, one of the reasons why your business may fail is if you’re afraid of the feminists. Not necessarily feminists, but every other group or individual that may be angry about your business model.

     Seth Godin opinion is that you cannot build a meaningful company in this century. Except you’re remarkable. Unfortunately for most businesses, being remarkable would mean attracting criticism.

     The third major lesson in Purple Cow is; you must be willing to risk criticism to be remarkable.

     Wait a second! Let’s have a look at what traditional definition of marketing looks like via the Google. When I searched, here is what I got; “Marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”

     Somehow, traditional wisdom teaches that you need marketing after you’ve created a product. In fact, the word “marketing” is closely related to advertising.

     Seth Godin thinks differently. Instead of seeing marketing as what you do after you created a products, why don’t you start seeing marketing as what you build into your product.

     One of the best ways to do this in the modern age is to create products that force consumers to invite their friends to use them. Facebook is a good example here. Digital products like apple have also figured out how to build marketing into their product.

     In such a way that everyone who uses their product is proud of it enough to bring them out and talk about them with their friends and family.

     The fourth major lesson from the Purple Cow is; build marketing inside your products, not after it.

     Okey. I get it! Seth Godin means that advertisement is stupid and nobody should do it? You nearly missed the point, in fact, Seth himself does run advert for some of his products.

     What Godin is teaching here is simple; Before you even think about advertising budget, invest time and other resources in creating unusually great products or services. What I did in this regard is that, after I started receiving crazy testimonies about one of my books, I decided that it would be good to start giving it out free and then make more money by selling something else as premium offer and I needed a lot of advertisement to do this.

     What is the point here? Yes, you may still need advertising budget but that comes secondary to creating something unusually great. And one other important point Godin teaches about advertisement is; only advertise to people to whom you have permission (that should remind you of another books of Seth Godin, the Permission Marketing).

     Who are the people to whom you have permission? People who wants to listen to what you have to say or sell. Just imagine someone searching the Google for: “Kitchen Knives” and you have kitchen knives to sell.

     You can compare that to seeing a TV ad about kitchen knives when you even hate cooking. Now, you get the point.

     The fifth major lesson in the Purple Cow is; why advertisement may be needed, it’s secondary to creating remarkable product and it must be directed at people who want to listen.

     Now, let’s discuss what lessons do you think I missed in this book? What points would you like to add? Which other good books would you like our team to summarize next? We love to receive your comments.

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