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By Helene Goupil, Contributing Writer
Do you know what you need to have a sucessful product or service? How do you change a common thing into a remarkable one? Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable explains.
Think back to the new commercials shown during the Super Bowl this year, or think of any other show you had to watch--have you bought any of the products advertised? Do you even remember what commercials you saw?
Probably not. TV commercials—love them, hate them, or both—no longer seem to make a product or service a financial success.
Seth Godin (www.sethgodin.com), author and speaker, believes that spending time and money on advertising is no longer worth it. “Companies don’t measure, they don’t know what works, so they don’t know that advertising doesn’t work,” he explained during a recent phone interview.
The five “Ps” of marketing have guided the work of marketing teams for years. Once you had the product, pricing and promotion and you checked the positioning and packaging, you could assume that your new product or service was on its way to success.
Well, according to Godin, those days are over. In today’s economy you need to add a new “P” to the checklist and Seth Godin has found it. It’s “purple,” as in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, his latest book. In it, he calls all marketing and sales team to “stop advertising and start innovating.”
“Something remarkable is worth talking about. Worth noticing... Boring stuff is invisible. It’s a brown cow,” he explained.
Take Starbucks: A small coffee company opens in Seattle’s Pike Market Place in 1971. After a trip to Italy in 1984, the director of retail sales introduces the concept of coffee bars. Customers recommend the coffee and meet their friends at Starbucks, surfing the wave of café culture. The trend spreads and Starbucks opens 6,294 locations throughout the world.
“Safe is risky”, he insists. “The riskiest thing you can do is to be safe because if you’re safe, you’re just like the others in the crowd, you’re boring and you won’t get noticed.”
A group of “sneezers” as Godin calls them in his book, or early adopters as they’re often known, will take care of the promotion for you. You don’t need to see a great commercial to want to try a product. All you need is to hear about a great product from someone’s opinion you trust and most likely you’ll end up trying the product.
“Slapping a clever commercial onto a non-clever product is a waste of time and money,” he said. Innovation will make your product or service stand out from the crowd, it will make it a purple cow.
Deceptively simple, the lesson is, create a remarkable product and target a small audience of “sneezers” who will promote your product or service for you.
Sneezers are consumers with otaku, a Japanese term that Seth Godin uses to explain why some people will drive across town to try a ramen-noodle shop that got great reviews. If they have otaku for your product and they think it’s a great product, they will sneeze it to others.
It may seem like the purple cow theory doesn’t work if your company sells a product that doesn’t change but is still successful—Coca-Cola comes to mind. The answer is, you don’t have to change the can of Coke, you just introduce other products to enlarge the company’s customer base.
Coke fans like their Coke the way it is—just ask the intelligent and well-meaning professionals who dreamed up New Coke in 1985—a product that lasted all of 79 days.
“The company’s growth will come by inventing other remarkable products,” he said, adding that with new soft drinks each targeted to smaller audiences, Coca-Cola Company will increase its share of the market.
However, not all new products will catch on. Godin admitted that his office is full of products that he thought were remarkable but never caught on. If these products were remarkable then why weren’t they successful?
“If these products weren’t successful, it just means that they weren’t that remarkable,” he said, relating that he himself was a “sneezer” but the people he talked to didn’t feel inspired to spread the word-- the buzz stopped and the products disappeared.
“It’s not what you think is remarkable, it’s what the market thinks, the consumers get to pick,” he said.
Purple Cow is itself a great example of a purple cow. Practicing what he preaches, the book wasn’t advertised at all. It was sent for free to people who asked for it and it was packaged in a purple milk carton you couldn’t forget. The murmur caught on and the book is now a best-seller.
This coloful book—in more ways than one--is a great read for anyone in need of fresh ideas to increase sales or who is contemplating a product launch. Each chapter explains Seth’s theory, illustrates it with an example and then challenges you to apply it to your company.
Its entertaining stories of successes and failures will have you rethink your marketing strategies and refocus on the product or service itself.
The only addition this book needed was more fun examples of successes, which Seth Godin has included in the sequel, 99 Cows, available at www.amazon.com or free, courtesy of Fast Company, below. Psst, pass it on…
http://www.fastcompany.com/secret/99cows.pdf
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Purple Cow: Transform sYour Business by Being Remarkable, Seth Godin
ISBN 1591ss84021X, Portfolio, May 8 2003.
Helene Goupil is a style, travel and business writer based in San Francisco. Contact her at goupilh@yahoo.com
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