EXTRACTS FROM ‘PURPLE COW’ Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable Seth Godin

 

EXTRACTS FROM ‘PURPLE COW’

Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

Seth Godin

The author and his family were driving through France. They were enchanted by the hundreds of storybook cows grazing on picturesque pastures right next to the highway. For dozens of kilometers they gazed out the window, marveling about how beautiful everything was. Then, within twenty minutes, they started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows. What was amazing became common, worse than common and boring. The author perceives a Purple Cow if found grazing would be interesting for a while. He writes, the essence of the Purple Cow is that it must be Remarakable.

If you are remarkable, it is 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.

Where did you learn how to fail? You probably might have learned it in the first class. That’s when you started figuring out that the safe thing to do was to fit in.

We’ve been raised with a false belief. We mistakenly believe that criticism leads to failure. From the time we get to school, we’re taught that being noticed is almost always bad. It gets us sent the principal’s office, not to Harvard.

Some restaurants in New York are just plain dull in comparison with few amazing restaurants there. Why? Simple. After spending all that money and all that time opening a restaurant, the entrepreneur is in no mood to take yet another risk. A restaurant that’s boring won’t attract much criticism.

The problem with people who would avoid a remarkable career is that they never end up as the leader. They decide to work for a big company, intentionally functioning as an anonymous drone, staying way back to avoid risk and criticism.

However Safe is risky. Be exceptional.

Remarkable people are often recruited from jobs they love to jobs they love even more.

When Herman Miller introduced the $750 Aeron chair in 1994, it was a radical risk. But everyone who saw it wanted to sit in it., and everyone who sat in it wanted to talk about it. Sitting in the Aeron chair sent a message about what you did and who you were.

Mass marketing demands mass products. And mass products beg for mass marketing.

Ideas that spread, win. A brand (or a new product offering) is nothing more than an idea. Ideas that spread are more likely to succeed than those that don’t. The author calls ideas that spread, ideaviruses. Sneezers are the key spreading agents of an ideavirus. Sneezers launch and maintain ideaviruses. They are the experts who tell all their colleagues or friends or admirers about a new product or service on which they are a perceived authority.

You can no longer reach everyone at once. And if you don’t grab the attention and enthusiasm of the sneezers, your product withers.

Remarkable is the way you answer the phone, launch a new brand or price a revision to the software.

Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy says, “Instead of selling what we wanted to sell we sold what people wanted us to sell, and then figured out how to make money doing it. Every time we talked to our customers, they wanted us to follow the path that turned out to be the hardest possible path we could follow. And every time, that path was the right path.”

When a store is in the initial stages, if someone asks for a product, someone would walk him over. After a while what happens is nobody walks you over. Someone would point in a vague direction and say, “Over there.” It would mean a lost business opportunity.

The grocery business is pretty special in that once you stake out a location, you can profit from it for a very long time. There’s also not much chance that grocery stores are going to go out of style, so your ride on top is pretty long indeed.

“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department” David Packard