The Purple Cow Principle
Be remarkable or be invisible -- very good is the new mediocre
In a world where the TV-industrial complex is broken and consumers have too many choices and too little time, the only strategy that works is being remarkable -- literally worth making a remark about. Seth Godin argues that the old model of buying ads, interrupting people, getting distribution, and using profits to buy more ads is dead. Brand managers spend 100 million dollars trying to interrupt consumers who ignore every single message because they do not have the problem being solved. The alternative is to create something so remarkable that people voluntarily notice it and tell their friends. Being very good is one of the worst things you can do because very good is boring, average, invisible. The riskiest thing in modern marketing is playing it safe.
- In a world of abundant choices, being very good is functionally invisible because only the remarkable earns attention.
- Safe, average work is the riskiest strategy because it is guaranteed to be ignored.
- The goal of marketing is to be worth talking about, because peer recommendation is the only channel that reliably cuts through noise.
- Interrupting people with messages they did not ask for is increasingly ineffective as the number of interruptions grows.
- Remarkable ideas spread; adequate ideas do not, regardless of the budget behind them.
Godin uses the parable of the cow: driving down a road, you see cows and keep driving because cows are invisible and boring. But if the cow were purple, you would notice it. You would remark on it. That is the essence of where idea diffusion is heading. He traces the death of the old model through examples like a brand manager who spent 100 million dollars on interruption marketing for a pain reliever that Godin ignored because he already buys the yellow box. The sliced bread story reinforces it: Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread in 1910, but for 15 years nobody bought it because nobody knew about it. It only succeeded when Wonder Bread figured out how to spread the idea.