Book Review – Purple Cow

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Author: Seth Godin

Traditional Marketing is no longer as effective as it once was. So what is the solution? Stop advertising and start innovating. Build your business by having a remarkable product or service.

Be Remarkable

Marketing guru and Bestselling Authoer, Seth Godin has a simple message – Be Remarkable. In today’s environment of advertising, product and information clutter, the only way to cut through is to innovate and create something unique, new and remarkable. Imagine driving through the country looking at all these brown cows in the paddocks, and after some time you start to ignore the brown cows, taking less, notice. How much would you take notice if all of a sudden a Purple cow appeared in the paddock?

Successful brands such as IKEA, Krispy Kreme and Google built their success on remarkable products that people talk about.

The Summary

This inspirational self-help book for entrepreneurs and marketers offers a number of practical tips to ‘remarkabalising’ your brand through innovation. Below are some of the recommendations provided in Purple Cow.

1. Live your life in alignment with the ‘Be Remarkable’ mantra – Do one thing everyday worth talking about.
2. Make up what you customers wish list would be for your product service. What gaps are there between what you currently offer and what they want?
3. Products that go viral are a) Easy to try and buy, b) easy to recommend, c) made for a defined segment of the market and d) part of a trend (not a fad). How can you use these traits to make your product/service more infectious?
4. Imagine you gave your creative brief to the world’s more renowned Designer. What would they do differently?
5. Packaging can make a product and remarkable packaging can make the product remarkable. What can you do to your packaging to make it remkarkable?
6. Convenience is king – what could you do to make buying, using, consuming, or disposing easier?
7. List all the customer suggestions and customer complaints you’ve heard, what could you do to address them?
8. What changes to your product/service would make it worth talking about to others?
9. Explore the limits – what would you do to make your product/service the cheapest, most expensive, the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the slowest, the newest, the oldest?

This is a insightful and inspirational book for anyone that is in business for themselves, who wants to start a business, and for anyone that is involved in marketing and selling a product or service.

Where to purchase this book?

Amazon (US)	Fishpond (AUS)
Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable–Includes new bonus chapter	Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable