Purple Cow
Seth Godin · 2003 · 10 ideas · 10 min
In a world saturated with ordinary products and ads people have learned to ignore, being remarkable — not better, but genuinely worth remarking on — is the only reliable growth strategy left.
Why this book
Godin's argument is that traditional mass-market advertising, built for an era of scarce media and captive attention, has stopped working, because consumers are now flooded with more messages than they could ever process and have simply learned to tune most of them out. The only way to break through, he claims, is to make something so distinctive — a Purple Cow amid a field of ordinary brown ones — that it earns attention and word-of-mouth on its own, rather than renting attention through ads.
The book matters as an early, blunt statement of a shift marketers are still catching up to: safe, competent, inoffensive products are invisible, and invisible is fatal. Remarkability has to be engineered into the product itself, not bolted on afterward through marketing.
Who should read it
Founders, product designers, and marketers stuck making incremental improvements to an already-crowded category, who need permission to make something genuinely different rather than just slightly better. It's less useful for businesses in categories where reliable, unremarkable service is actually the correct strategy.
About the author
Seth Godin is an American author and entrepreneur who founded Yoyodyne, an early internet marketing company acquired by Yahoo, and has since written dozens of books on marketing, leadership, and ideas that spread.